The Life of a Running Momma: Weekly Learning Theme: Boats and Bodies of Water

I had a boats and bodies of water learning theme planned out for a while. I originally thought we'd do it around Columbus Day and talk a little bit about Christopher Columbus. I ended up pushing it back so we could learn about other things that interested Carter which worked out perfectly because the Children's Museum got a traveling exhibit called "RiverWorks" in and Carter was obsessed with it, wanting to go to the Children's Museum any day we didn't already have plans. He actually even asked me if we could learn about rivers so we started our work on this learning theme and had so much fun with it!

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 have added working on his name as his teachers at school have asked us to work on it at home and I want to remember to include working on it in some form during each of our learning themes. 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).
Recognize letters in name, arrange them to spell name, begin to write name.

Experiences Elise was exposed to during our theme this week are highlighted below:

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.

Identify sounds around her. (Point out sounds and ask her what is making the sound).

Activities/Movement:

I wrote the words boat and bodies of water on separate sentence strips. I set them on the table and before I could even say anything Carter started pointing out letters he knew, telling me their names and their sounds. Then he started trying to segment and blend the word boat. After working on boat he moved on to something else and I just quickly showed him Bodies of Water written out and asked him to point out certain letters in the words.

Pointing out the w on the sentence strip.
I found some boat alphabet cards here. They were perfect for multiple different activities. The first thing we did was identify letters. I had them all mixed up and showed them to Carter one at a time. He told me the letter name and the sound if he knew it. He added in his own part to the activity, telling me a word that started with that letter. Then I put the cards in alphabetical order and we sang the ABC's together. I printed two copies of the letters so we could spell out Carter's name using them and so we could play memory with his letters of the month for school. Each month at school they work on 4 different letters. The letters for November are T, K, G, and Q. I laid out the extras I had printed and had Carter identify them. I told him they were his letters for the month at school and then asked him to find the letter in his alphabet that matched the letter I had just laid down. He found all 4 and then we played memory with the cards. When we were done playing I had him look through the letters and find the ones that make his name. Then we put them in order to spell out his name.

Carter identifying the letter G.

Finding the second G in our alphabet.

Identifying his letters of the month for school and finding the matching one in our pile of letters.

Playing memory with his letters of the month.

Spelling out his name by finding the letters in our alphabet lines.
I also found some boat cards with pictures on them here. We looked at the pictures and discussed how the boats looked the same and how they looked different. Then we talked about how they have different jobs they do. When we were done looking at the boats I had Carter determine what the first letter of each boat's name was and then sort the cards by first letter of their name. Once they were all sorted we sang the ABCs and put the cards in alphabetical order

Carter pushing the cards back into a pile after we put them in alphabetical order.
To practice with listening to sounds and identifying what made the sound, I pulled up the sound of water rushing down a river and played it for Elise. When I asked her what was making that sound she immediately yelled, "wawa!" and wanted to look at my phone. She was quite pleased when she saw the picture on my screen, proving that she had heard water.

My mom sent the kids a big box of seashells along with a board book about seashells right before we started this learning theme. It worked out perfectly to use them for a sensory bin with this theme. Carter and I read the book and sorted the shells based on what kind we felt they were from reading the book. Later Elise and I played together. We sorted them by size, determining which were small, medium, and big. Elise loved feeling the shells and we talked a lot about texture while we were touching them. I left the bin with shells and the book out the entire week and I was always finding shells strewn about the house because Elise loved walking around the house while carrying them.

Sorting based on size.
I found an awesome emergent reader about boats here. It was called Boat Colors and had a different colored boat on each page with very predictable text, I see a _____ boat. There was a space to write your name on the cover so I wrote Carter's name and had him trace it with marker. Then I read the book to Elise, talking about the colors in the pictures. When I was finished Carter wanted to read the book to me and read it perfectly, just calling the last boat a colorful boat instead of a rainbow boat.

Carter tracing his name on the cover of the book.

Carter reading me the book.

Elise listening to the book.

We read books about rivers and oceans. As we read we discussed the kinds of animals that live in the ocean and the kind that live in rivers. The books we had were from the same series so they both had animal food chains drawn out in the back which Carter found fascinating.

With a boat and bodies of water theme you have to have a special bath time, right?! I let each child choose what color bath tablet they wanted. Elise picked yellow and Carter picked blue. Then Elise asked for blue so we ended up with turquoise. I found all the boats we own and put them in the bath tub. We talked about how they all float and the purpose of boats is so we can travel on water. We talked about how you can use a boat in all kinds of bodies of water, the ocean, rivers, and lakes. Elise also enjoyed practicing pouring by using the boats to pour water into the tub.

I found pictures of each kind of body of water I wanted to talk with Carter about. Then I made a Ziploc bag book about bodies of water. Carter loved the book but when he was done said, "Those are all the bodies of water you want me to learn about?" I guess he felt like I should have added more pages to the book! As Carter read we talked about how the bodies of water looked the same and how they looked different. I also made him a Ziploc bag book about different kinds of boats. As we read it we compared the different boats and discussed how they were the same.
I pulled out a National Geographic Explorer poster I had called Water Ways. It showed the water cycle which was good to talk about a little bit. We also used it to see how rivers flow into the ocean or into lakes. We discussed how some bodies of water are connected to each other and how some stand alone like ponds and puddles. We also read a few Scholastic News magazines about Columbus. One was called At Sea with Columbus and had a map on the back. Another was Columbus the Explorer with a chart on the back. The last was It's Time to Pack, Columbus with another map on the back. They were great for discussing how boats have changed over time while also discussing how some features have remained the same. We talked about how explorers navigated back then and how we navigate now.
One day when we were playing Play Doh I made a river and asked Carter what body of water I had made. Then I made a lake and he figured that out as well. He was quite excited to make a river and lake of his own once he had seen mine.

Uncle Paul made a boat out of duct tape for a special competition and won. I showed Carter pictures and videos Aunt Amanda had sent us and then asked him if he wanted to make a boat out of duct tape. We looked at pictures of Paul's boat to get ideas and then worked to make our boat. As we worked Carter had lots of questions about how to make the boat so I wrote them down. Then when we were done we tried out our boat in a container of water and I let the kids play in it. We made another boat out of aluminum foil and we compared the two boats, talking about which one worked better, which held more weight, and why. Carter still had some questions for Paul so he and Elise wrote down their questions. It was so cute to see Carter writing out letters and trying to think about what to write. Elise sat and scribbled on paper while Carter worked. When they were finished we interviewed Paul and got the answers to our questions. It was so much fun!

Elise played with masking tape while Carter and I made our duct tape boat.

Trying it out to see how much we could put in it and have it still float.

Elise put her sippy cup in it and that made it start sinking.

Writing down his questions for Uncle Paul.

Writing down her questions for Uncle Paul.

Craft:

I had planned for each kid to make a paper plate sailboat. I cut a paper plate in half for them to each color and use as the boat. Then I had a triangle for a sail and used a popsicle stick to attach the sail. Elise colored her boat but Carter never wanted to so he didn't complete the craft.

Elise working on her sailboat.
I drew a sailboat for Elise to color. I described the shapes I used to make the boat. I also named them: semi-circle or half circle, triangle, and line. I labeled them on her paper and then she colored her boat. When she was finished I showed off her boat to Carter and had him name the shapes he saw in the picture.

Elise coloring her sailboat.

Elise's finished sail boat picture.

Special Snack:

Our special snack was a hard boiled egg cut in half. I taped a triangle to a toothpick to make the egg into a sailboat. Carter wanted to see if his boat would float so I gave him a little container with some water in it to check. He was delighted that it did float!

The kids with their egg sailboats.

Make Believe:

I planned to pretend we were on a boat while playing on our bed one day. Then I needed to take the sheets off the futon from my mom staying with us over the weekend. The minute the blankets hit the floor Carter and Elise were on them playing. They pretended the blankets were a nest and we were birds. Then we pretended it was a ship and we were traveling on the ocean. Carter would yell at Elise to get back on the boat anytime she got up and warned her of the sharks in the ocean. They even wanted to eat their snack on the boat.

Harper checking out our boat.

Songs:

We sang the obvious, Row, Row, Row Your Boat. We also changed the lyrics to make up songs about other boats like Sail, sail, sail your ship and tug, tug, tug the boat. Carter for some reason was particularly interested in tugboats.

Technology:

I downloaded a boat coloring app and one called Row Your Boat. I was impressed with how many activities there were on the app since it was free. I kind of figured it would just be the song or something, but there was a lot more to it and Carter really enjoyed it. They did have the song but there were also puzzles, mazes, paint, memory, hidden objects, counting, and peekaboo. Since I didn't pay for anything he could only do a few of the puzzles and mazes but still loved it. His favorite was the peekaboo game where a starfish would hide behind boats and peek out and you had to figure out which boat it was hiding behind. He played that over and over.

Field Trip/Interactive Experience:

We went on a bodies of water walk where we searched for different bodies of water. We saw the river at Riverside which Carter described as a big river. Then we saw a smaller body of water which he felt was a stream. He was quite excited to find a waterfall as well, even though it was synthetic made.

Pointing out a waterfall.

Carter's stream.
Of course, we visited the Children's Museum to check out the RiverWorks Discovery exhibit. It was so much fun doing all the activities again after learning so much about boats and bodies of water. Carter loved putting the slats in different parts of the water exhibit to see how it changed the direction and flow of he water. He also got really into the boat puzzles they had which were magnetic. He talked about what kind of boat it was and we talked about different features of the boats. He was really proud to make some of the pieces into a letter T for towboat when he made that puzzle. It was so cute!

Putting together the magnetic pieces of the towboat.

Playing a game where he was a fish swimming through the river.