PeeWees: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (week 2)

From PeeWee mom Julia...

So today we started with making bread. I'd picked a simple recipe with
6 ingredients so that each child could have 2 turns adding one. I did
it in my bread maker on dough cycle so they could add ingredients and
watch it knead without too much initial mess. 1.5 hours later we
rolled out the dough and put it in our pans, which they thoroughly
enjoyed!

Then we built a long track with our alphabet letters. They remembered
trying to walk on it earlier in the year and did so again, with
greater success! Their coordination and balance have really improved.
Then we undid the track and re-did it with the letters in order.
Jackson is really good at finding the letters! Following this we sang
our alphabet song and pointed to the letters. This was not intuitive
for any of them but it got better.

 We then sat down for circle time, where we sang "Stand Up" and counted our letters (26!), they needed help with this but followed along really well. They were all familiar with these numbers. We read through Peter Rabbit and they all knew it realy well, especially that
he was a naughty bunny. :)

Next was snack time: bunny food first (carrots and cucumbers), followed by bunny crackers. They ate lots of bunny crackers! We went straight into art time, where they "planted" a garden on green paper.
They made little "plots" of glue and I passed out seeds to put on them. Your gardens have: broccoli, cucumber, squash, cantaloupe, pole beans, and purple beans. Then they each wrote their initial on the
paper.

 

Then it was time for an exciting game of "pin the tail on the rabbit." I'd drawn the back of a rabbit, blindfolded them and told them to stick it on the rabbit picture. They ended up needing to be pointed in the right direction because they weren't able to figure out where they were in the room by feeling (each of them thought the door or the bookshelf was the picture). Just shows how much they will learn about using their tactile sense over the next few years!

We then headed out to do our gross motor: jumping and balancing! They headed right back to the hopscotch and had a great time trying to actually jump onto one foot and then back to two feet. Each of them got the concept really well and worked hard on getting it "right." We also did plenty of balancing on one foot (stand on one food and count to 10! Then the other foot to 10!-- have them show you this) and just plain hopping on one foot. Then we tried to "walk a tightrope"-- staying on a crack on the driveway the whole time (I had a starting mark and an ending mark). None of them could go the whole way but in a few months I bet they all will be able to. During this time they discovered a dying worm inside the crack, which became much more interesting than anything I did or said ever after.

 

 

However, we did try "Jump the River"-- a two-footed jump over a crack-- which they all did really well. Then we tried "side-to-side" over cracks and although this was trickier they all eventually got it
much better than I'd anticipated, which was great. And finally I tied their legs together and had them jump up and down the sidewalk!

At this point we headed back inside to roll out our bread dough, sing our goodbye song, and play "find the carrot".  It was a great day!