Listed below are the objectives I am focusing on for the themed weeks. I have revised our objectives to really hone in and focus on specific skills Carter will need to master before kindergarten and are appropriate to his age and development right now. I plan to continue to implement activities to practice and reinforce our previous objectives while putting more emphasis on our new objectives. Some of them won't necessarily be targeted with specific activities during our weeks, but I wanted to list them to help me remember to practice them continually. I'm also adding in a section for Elise now that she is a year old. I don't considers her bullet points objectives, they are experiences I want to make sure to expose her to frequently. Her experiences are listed below Carter as bullet points rather than numbers.
The highlighted objectives below are ones Carter received exposure to during our theme this week:
- Begin to organize and focus on writing. (Dictate stories, plan out a story, draw pictures and scribbles to create a book).
- Understand same and different.
- Accurately tell stories as well as retell the story from a book.
- Use age appropriate scissors. (I'm moving on to looking for a thumb and forefinger grasp with writing tools and holding scissors appropriately)
- Develop a better understanding of time (for example, be able to describe when things happen using morning, afternoon, night)
- Group objects based on a category (sort by defining feature).
- Count with one-to-one correspondence, begin to identify numerals, being to use ordinal numbers (first, second, last).
- Pretend play/Imitate the behaviors of others.
- Begin to identify and point at body parts. (Right now I just want to say body parts aloud to her frequently and point them out on myself)
- Group based on simple characteristics. (This is something I will do while talking aloud and allowing her to feel objects)
- Fill and empty containers.
- Begin to hold writing tools and scribble spontaneously.
- We spent a lot of time during this week playing in our baby swimming pool in the backyard. We should probably get a bigger one, but the kids still love this one. Elise likes to climb out and get back in over and over. Carter comes up with all kinds of fun games like pouring water from one container to another as seen in the photo below.
- One day as we were playing in the baby swimming pool I showed Carter how some things sink and others float. Then I'd show him something and ask him if he thought it would sink or float. He thought it was the coolest thing and played it with me throughout the week, even when we were at a friend's house in their swimming pool. I talked to Carter a little bit about how air helps things float. Then I showed him how our watering can floats until it get filled with water and then it sinks. He thought that was so cool!
Discovering that his dolphin floats. 
Discovering that his truck sinks. - We also played in water tables a lot. Carter used the time to try out whether things would sink or float. He also liked pouring water. Elise loves slapping her hands in water and dumping heavy things like rocks in and watching them sink.
Enjoying a water table at a friend's house. - Of course we also visited multiple different splash pads. One that is really close to our house is a great one because it shows so many different ways we can see water. We talked about waterfalls, gysers, rivers, and springs while we were there and saw water coming out in different ways. One area is raised off the ground and there is a current in the water. We talked about how natural bodies of water have currents which means the water travels in certain ways and sometimes the water can be extremely powerful.
Elise catching the water at the splash pad. 
They were actually playing together. Usually Elise doesn't want to be in the water!
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| Elise and her buddy. |
- We played a lot with ice. I think it helped that it was really hot, upper 90's and even into the 100's many days. Plus Elise is a straight BAMF. She would hold the ice and even sit sucking on it. She blew my mind. Elise got some practice pouring from one bucket to another. As we did it, we talked about how ice is hard and water is not. I used that talking point to let Carter know that ice is a solid while water is a liquid. We also dumped ice into water and talked about how they both changed. Carter was quick to point out that the water got colder. Later he noticed that the ice started to melt.
Playing with ice in a container of water. 
Carter also enjoyed pouring the ice cubes from one bowl to another. 
Crazy girl sucking on an ice cube.
- One of Carter's favorite activities was making colorful ice. He helped me add the food coloring to the ice cube trays. We talked about how long it would take to freeze. Carter made a prediction and then we checked on the ice cube trays to see if they were frozen yet. He had to adjust his guess multiple times. He would get so excited to check on the ice cubes and loved poking his finger into the top layer of ice to see if it would break through. We also watched the bubbles in the ice cubes. If we tilted the ice cube tray and the bubbles moved, we knew it wasn't frozen yet.
Making his first prediction, that the water would freeze in 1 minute. 
Pouring the colored water into the ice cube trays to make ice. - Once the ice was finally frozen, we played with it, talked about it, and described it using our senses. We talked about how it felt, tasted, looked, smelled, sounded. Carter was beyond thrilled to have colorful ice but we realized that the only difference in the colorful ice and regular ice was the color.
Playing with his colorful ice. 
Elise gnawing on a piece of ice. 
She pretty much just wanted to eat the ice at all times. - We then took our colored ice outside. We dumped it into the sensory bin just like we had the regular ice. As we played we talked about colors. Carter and I would both show Elise ice cubes and tell her what color they were. As the ice started to melt we talked about the colors and how they changed as they mixed.
- We did a fun little experiment with melting ice. We put one ice cube in the shade and one in sun. I had Carter guess which one would melt faster and then we checked on them periodically as we played. He realized the ice cube in the sun melted faster. He decided it was because it is hotter in the sun.
Checking on the ice cubes to see which one was melting faster. - Both kids helped me out by watering our plants. Elise did great at first but then stuck her hands down into the soil and started pulling fist fulls out so after that I had to make sure to water the plants when she wasn't looking. When Carter watered plants we talked about how all living things need water and how water is so helpful to us. It keeps us cool and hydrated and we also use it in the form of ice to keep our drinks cool and our food cool in coolers and freezers. I also told him some plants and animals can live with very little water because their habitat is the desert.
- Throughout the week we talked about the water cycle. To show the cycle in a way he could see a bit better I used a sponge as a cloud and two different bowls. He would use the sponge to soak up the water (evaporation) from the bowl (ground) and then squeeze it into the other bowl (precipitation). He had so much fun moving the water from one bowl to the other. Really we should have just used one bowl to show the earth, but he had so much fun moving the water from one bowl to the other. Plus this is just an introduction. I don't expect him to truly understand the water cycle, I just want to expose him to the concept.
Letting the cloud rain. 
That face says it all! 
He loved squeezing the water out!
- When we talked about the water cycle we discussed a little bit about how some water is absorbed into the ground when it rains. We didn't really talk about it too much. It was still really neat when we were out at the art museum and they had some people set up from a nearby creek talking about pollution of the creek. They had different materials we see on the ground, different kinds of concrete and dirt. They were putting water into each one and showing how much was absorbed and how much ranoff. It was cool to relate it back to what we had learned. The people working the booth probably thought I was nuts talking about the water cycle with a 3 year old, but who cares? Not me!
Watching water runoff different. - Carter got a water slide for his birthday. This was the perfect time to pull it out and play with it. At first I set it up on the hill but we didn't have enough room to run and get up to speed so I moved it down into the yard. Carter had a blast and Elise even enjoyed it quite a bit!
Setting the slide up on the hill. 
Trying it out before I realized downhill wasn't going to work. 
He really got into it once it was down in the yard. 
He kept yelling, "Watch out, Elise!" - To practice with body parts, I put an ice cube on different parts of Elise's body and named them. I'd say, "I put ice on your head!" I wasn't sure what she'd think of it at first, but she loved it and would laugh as she grabbed the ice off. Carter picked up on the game and started putting ice on himself when he heard me talking to Elise. So I started telling him to put ice on different body parts and he would. Elise liked watching him do it.
There's ice on your head! 
Carter putting ice on his head. - We used ice to practice writing. Carter wrote his name with ice cubes. The ice would melt as he wrote so the letters would show up. He thought it was pretty cool he could write a message and then it would disappear. He also practiced making some other letters. He was very proud to write dad to surprise Ty when he got home. I also wrote with sidewalk chalk and had him copy over it with his ice cube, or as he liked to say, erased it with his ice cube.
Writing with ice. 
Super focused on his writing. - Carter counted ice cubes. We've been practicing more with numerals, both recognizing them and using them to represent numbers of objects. I used the numerals 1-3 and counted out ice cubes to represent the number. We also counted all spots in an ice cube tray. Carter is getting much better with one-to-one correspondence. He does perfectly when I'm pointing and knows not to get ahead of me. But sometimes when he's counting on his own, he starts counting faster than he moves his finger or points too quickly. I remind him that he wants to say one number for one object and he'll start over and try to keep his voice with his finger. I've been impressed with how much he's improved with it recently.
Looking at the numbers after counting the slots of the ice cube tray. 
Using numbers to represent sets of ice cubes.
- After all the ice cube play, Carter wrote a book about how to melt ice. We sat down and I had him decide what he wanted to write about related to ice. He said he wanted to write about how to melt it. Then we went through one page at a time and planned out our story. I definitely led him by asking what you would do first, next, and last to melt an ice cube. I was very pleased with his thoughtful work.
- Carter enjoyed adding water to his watercolor paints. He then painted a picture for Ty. He enjoyed watching the paint go from a solid to a liquid as the water was added.
- Carter absolutely loved his special treat with this learning theme, a sno cone! We talked about how it is shaved ice so they are little tiny chunks of ice. Then we talked about how sno cone ice melts faster than ice cubes because they are smaller pieces of ice.
Enjoying a sno cone. 
One happy boy!
- We read the book Splish, Splash Zooborns and then pretended to be each of the animals in the book. Carter's favorite was pretending to be an otter so that became one of his new favorite games to play. He would get the matryoshka dolls, pretending they were a mussel and crack them open on a toy or a ball like otters do on rocks. We would lay on our backs and pretend we were floating in water. His favorite was typically laying on my stomach while we both floated together.
Eating a mussel. - We did lots of pretend play when we played with water and ice. Carter liked to pretend the ice cubes were fish. He would collect them in a container, even fishing them out with a spoon. He also pretended to make soup. Elise imitated Carter and stirred for first time when we were pretending to make soup. It was adorable!
Catching ice "fish". 
Making some yummy soup!
- We listened to Dr. Jean's The Water Cycle song. I have the Kiss Your Brain cd and it is song #18.
- One of our friends invited us over to play in their pool. We had so much fun playing in a large body of water. Carter got to see how Elise's raft floats because it has air in it and his buddy was wearing floaties on his arms that were filled with air.
Elise floating in the pool. 
Carter loved pointing out that Elise was floating.
- We had a lot of rain toward the end of this learning theme. I took Carter outside to play in puddles. We talked about where the rain came from and why it made puddles on the ground, talking about how some of the water was absorbed into the ground. As it rained I referred to the rain as a form of precipitation to continually expose Carter to that word.
He loves to splash in puddles! 
He's always happy in a puddle!
- Water by Dr. John Hutton
- Do They Sink? by Jeanne Barrett Hargett (in our Hello magazine)
- Water by Daniel Nunn
- Water by Trevor Day
- Water by Frank Asch
- A Drop of Water by Gordon Morrison
- The Drop Goes Plop: A First Look at the Water Cycle by Sam Godwin
- Soy el Agua by Jean Marzollo
- All the Water in the World by George Ella Lyon
- Splash! by Ann Jonas
- Splash! by Maria van Lieshout
- Splash, Splash by Jeff Sheppard
- Turtle Splash: Countdown at the Pond by Cathryn Falwell
- Click, Clack, Splish, Splash: A Counting Adventure by Doreen Cronin
- Spish, Splash, ZooBorns! by Andrew Bleiman
- Spish, Splash, Splat! by Rob Scotton
- Splish-splash by Nicola Smee
- Does it Sink or Float by Susan Hughes
- The Snowflake: A Water Cycle Story by Neil Waldman
- A Cool Drink of Water by Barbara Kerley
- Scuba Bunnies by Christine Loomis
- Water Dance by Thomas Locker
I wanted to get a pool yesterday, but Dad told me should wait and get one in Tulsa. :) Then they'll have a little more room to play, but it won't be so big that Elise can't get in and out.
ReplyDeleteWe have so much fun with our little baby pool, haha!
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