PeeWees: Clifford Goes to Washington

From PeeWee mom Lisa...

 The book was Clifford Goes to Washington. Clifford’s dog friend Riley is brave and pushes a boy out of the way of a car. Riley’s picture is in the paper and on television. The White House asks Riley to come to Washington, DC to receive a medal. Clifford goes to see his friend get his medal. While in Washington, Clifford stops by many of the monuments. Finally, Clifford jumps the fence at The White House to watch Riley get a medal – he’s tackled by the Secret Service but then let go – and he sees Riley get his medal.

 Open Play - “Toss a Penny” into a Big Red Basket (parallel to Clifford the Big Red Dog). We talked about the penny and that President Abraham Lincoln’s picture is on one side of the penny and the Lincoln memorial is on the other side of the penny. Originally, they all knew the coin was “money” but no one knew it was called a penny. The tossing went well, they took turns and we moved the tossing line back each turn to make it harder – they loved this and could have done it for a while.

Circle Time – Stand up song, ABC’s while marching, we counted 20 flags, and read the book.

Snack Time – We had star shaped jell-o gigglers and a Washington Monument shaped peanut butter sandwich with water in red, white, and blue cups.

Craft Time – We made “patriotic” pinwheels – though Bodie’s, of course, was colored all black. Everyone else colored the paper and we hooked the pin wheels together.

Activity 1 – We played Monument Bingo. The concept of Bingo was new so I had pictures of each monument to show them. The first few were a little tough but then they really got the hang of it and we ended up playing it twice. We used pennies to mark the monuments as we called them out. (if you make a colored copy of the bingo card I sent home, you can cut it up and let them do matching to the bingo card with the cut up pieces)

Closing time – We recapped what we did and re-read the book. (I just realized I forgot the so long king kong song, whoops!)

Activity 2 – “Find the monuments” in the yard. There were nine monuments staked into the ground around the yard. I would call out an action to a particular monument like, “Walk like Frankenstein to the Capitol.” We did this several times and they definitely love to run around but also knew at least half of the monuments – I was impressed.

 While grasping the whole concept of memorials and monuments is a bit beyond their years, picture association and names of the monuments was not. The repetition was helpful and there was definitely measured improvement by the end of the two hours. The ultimate goal was to get them more familiar with the cool  city we live in and have some connection to the monuments – I think a seed was planted.