Animal Theme

You may not know this, but I really like science. When I told Justin what this week's theme was for the girls, he responded by asking, "Is animals all your going to teach them?" Well, I am an "expert" in this area! Not really, but it is what I know how to teach! Going through workbooks is not "fun" for me, so I choose to get our hands a little dirty instead (that's actually a funny statement because the girls hate to have their hands dirty!) I'll still incorporate letters and words and numbers and math, but it will just have to be from a science point of view. After all, science IS what I know. And, who knows if they'll actually get to learn science when they get into elementary, so I better get it in now!

So, the theme animals is very wide reaching and this is only the second day of the week. Yesterday, I pulled out all of our books on animals and got out our animal flash cards. I sat the girls down and we went through all the animal cards. We thanked God for creating such cool animals. (a little side note: Jordan asked the other day if God colored her or painted her when He made her. Oh, honey, he did a lot more than that! Probably a little young for the ins and outs of DNA, meiosis, and fertilization) I asked them questions about each animal. I asked Jordan about things like where they lived, what they ate, etc, and I asked Rylie what sounds they made. I have to incorporate a little bit of differentiated instruction when I've got a 2 and 4 year old together. Then we went outside and pretended to be different animals (gallop like a horse, waddle like a penguin, etc.) It was fun and silly to do the actions along with the girls. Later in the day, I read Jordan about half the books we own on animals. When Rylie woke up, we made lion puppets.

Today, we learned all about animal tracks. We went to the nature center and I was super excited to get to see SO MANY animal tracks in the mud! The water holes dried up and what is left is mud! Yay! We took the animal track/animal detective book with us that my sister-in-law just gave us. We used it to help identify some of the tracks we saw.
Hhmm, these tracks were pretty easy to identify...the animals even left behind their names:)
These, too...how cool to get to SEE tracks in the making!
By the way, I took a ton more pictures than this, but I won't bore you with them all.
When we got home, I made a copy of the page in the animal detective book to play a matching game; match the tracks on the left with the animal on the right. Yes, I'll incorporate reading in this game, like having Jordan write the names of each of the animals. We haven't gotten to this activity yet.

Then, I'm going have the girls sort the pictures of the tracks we took and make a little graph/table showing how many of each animal track we saw (yeah, math and science together!).
Still to come: getting ready for the zoo...