Open Play - We continued our shape theme, starting with stacking circles and building with rectangular blocks and square blocks. This went really well. They took turns with the various toys I'd brought out and actually stacked pretty high a few times. Right before clean up time I actually set up the Jenga blocks to play and they tried a couple of rounds. They don't quite have the cause/effect thing down yet for figuring out which blocks would be good to try to pull. But they each did it successfully a couple times.
Circle Time - Then we did circle time, singing our welcome song, the alphabet, and counting to 20. I had them each try to count by themselves with the others listening. The teens continue to be a stumbling block! But they have come a long way. We re-read the book, which they all remembered and pointed out various things on the pages. I happened to have gum in my mouth and they thought it was funny when I blew a bubble on the gum page.
Activity 1 - Then we played a shape matching game. I had made cards with shapes on them and cut them in half. I scattered the pieces all over the rug and they had to find the matching halves and put them together again. They caught on quickly and liked this.
Snack - We had round banana slices, crescent apple slices, oval peanuts, and square AND rectangle graham crackers (I showed them how they come in rectangles, but when broken in half they are squares and then in half again they are smaller rectangles). They were hungry! Jackson and Poppy had been asking for snack since arrival and everyone ate a lot.
ART: I then traced everyone's feet and hands and they painted them in. This was an attempt at making a book connection (their own shapes), but I think that was a little over their heads. But they enjoyed painting anyway.
Activity 2 - At this point we needed some wiggle time, so we went into my playroom where I have a rug with shapes on the border. We played a version of "musical shapes" in which I would sing a song. They had to walk around on the shapes (not off the rug or in the middle). When I stopped singing, they had to shout out what shape they were standing on. This was a little tricky because the rug has shapes that weren't quite so common: trapezoids, hexagons, octagons, pentagons. But they did fine.
Activity 3 - Then before sitting down we did "shape exercises." When I called out "Triangle!" they had to march in place. When I called out "Circle!" they had to jump up and down. When I called out "Rectangle!" They had to do jumping jacks, and when I called out "Oval!" they had to stop.
Activity 4 - After just a couple minutes of this they were tired (both their bodies and their brains) and were ready for our final game of the day: shape bingo. I'd made some shape boards and cut out some shapes to fit into the outlines of the shapes on the boards. I called out a shape, they had to find it on their board AND find a cutout to put on it. These two steps were challenging but not too difficult to master. We were playing this when all the moms arrived and it sort of unraveled from there.
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