Going to the Zoo part 1

Monday we spent the day taking down our massive collection of ocean/beach stuff. I have a basket of scraps for crafts. It has scraps of everything fabric, paper, ribbon. It sits on a chair by the kitchen table. The kids can use anything in there. Moe has yet to make use of it. Cole on the other hand is always digging in there. She has made a very large collection of jellyfish from scraps and hung them everywhere. I still found some yesterday that I had missed.

Anyway we are moving onto- going to the zoo. I spent most of Monday searching for anything to do with zoo animals. This is very hard to do because all our stuff is packed away while we are working on the house. So I had to search the boxes in the basement and the attic. It took all day to find the one book I was really looking for, Dr Seuss -Put me in the zoo. I knew I had it and I was not going to buy. They didn't have it at our library. In fact they hardly ever have a book I am looking for. To go with the book Put me in the zoo, I want the kids to make up their own animal to put in the zoo. I am very curious to see what they create. I also spent most of the day on Monday rotating their toys.

OK this is what you will find on our table right now;

A few library booksA couple trays with crafts. I leave these trays out with some foam piece that I just free cut. They can put them together when ever they want. These are a couple of stick puppets.I pulled out another set of animal puzzle cards. If the kids want they can pull out the magnets again to spell the animal names. We also have a tray of lacing cards.In their sensory pin I changed the sand and shells to beans and put their plastic animals in there. Moe with his ever present train is delivering food to the zoo animals. I printed out a few pages and left them on the table. I don't make them do them. I just leave them there and if they want to they can do them. As soon as Cole saw them she said "Cool, printouts!"



I usually don't print any work sheets out. I was very lucky to be given a huge collection of workbooks. Between books my mother sent me and my sister in laws neighbor I'm set.

I have a bunch of plastic top loading sheet that I put the workbook pages into. So they can use them over and over again. These were left over from my working days when I had to build my own product catalogs. I just had to buy some dry erase markers. I don't make the kids do any of them I just leave them out and I let them use them at anytime they want. I find these easier for Moe. I don't know if it's because he is left handed or not but he has a hard time using crayons. He just looks uncomfortable holding them but when he uses the dry erase markers it smoother and slides better for him. I want to help him yet I don't want to scare him away so I have yet to correct the way he holds is pen. Every once in a while he will hold it correctly so I sure he just needs time.