There Was an Old Lady that Swallowed a Fly...

Baa!  Moo!  Cock a Doodle Doo!  It's farm week in our house, and it is off to a rather slow start.  The boys had a few late nights in a row, due to friends and family coming over.  This lead to some very tired kiddos that could not focus very well.  However, we did get a little bit of school done yesterday, and I have a surprise for when they wake up from their nap today.  :)

We started off by reading There Was an Old Lady that Swallowed a Fly.  That has always been one of my favorite books, and since there is such a variety of animals in it, I counted it as farm reading material.  I had found pattern pieces online that I cut out and laminated, then backed with magnets, so we could recreate the story as we went.  It was rather fun, and of course the boys loved the interactive story.  We also talked about how there were food farms (wheat, produce, etc.), and animal farms (and yes, Pierce pointed out that animals give us food too).  We then went on to make our own farm, by gluing together a barn, and then putting stickers on to make a scene.  For the first time ever, Carter was able to peel his own sticker backs off!  I was so proud of him!  This was the end result of that project:

Whenever Carter finishes a project with stickers, he loves to rip all of the stickers off again, and then rip the paper.  Hence the picture above...

I then attempted to challenge the boys.  I had found this pack with counting cards where you had to match up the number to however many items were on the card.  I purposely did not put the numbers or cards in numerical order, just so it would be a larger challenge.  I also did not expect Carter to want to help, but he did!  And he apparently knows what the number 3 is.  

You can see the magnet board from our story in the background...

The final activity before I blew the whistle on school time was actually created by Pierce.  I had made a magnetic board of letters, and had them all randomly on the board.  I figured I could start to work with Pierce on spelling basic words during the evening, since he is all about spelling lately (I would like to thank Super Why for that).  He sat with Carter and helped Carter put the letters in alphabetical order.  And he chose to do the lowercase ones.  Of course he had a little problem with p and q, b and d, but that is to be expected.  

We had story time yesterday morning as well, and then played in the the box for the majority of the afternoon.  This morning we attended a new playgroup at Plymouth Center School, and it was fantastic.  It was structured just enough to provide a routine, but it also encouraged all the kiddos to work together.  I loved it!  And the boys did as well.

Once we came home, I fed them lunch and had them nap.  They should be waking up soon, and when they do, they will find this:  

It started out as a plain shoe box, and I went back and forth about making a barn out of it or doing something like this.  I am not an artistic person, so I am quite happy that this came out the way it did.  The little figures are the Toob Farm Babies, and you can find them on Amazon, for about $12.  I love that there is such a wide variety of animals included.  The reason that I did not do a barn, is that I can now save this for when we do our geography unit.  To make the "pond", I mixed blue glitter in with the paint.  I also mixed green glitter into the grass.  Then I used cotton balls to paint the sky and mountain.  It literally took about 5 minutes total.  I cannot wait to see what the boys think up for story lines later!

Hope you guys are all having a great week!