If You Give a Moose a Muffin- book+activities



This week we read the book, If You Give a Moose a Muffin  by Laura Numeroff. It was a book we read last year for the letter/sound M and I was debating reading it again, then I saw it was the recommended book from Readinglessons.com.  This moose keeps the little boy just as busy as the mouse keeps the boy in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and the pig keeps the girl in If You Give a Pig a Pancake.  Have a mentioned I love these books? 

Earlier in the week we made muffins. 

Then today I had another spur of the moment project/activity idea.

Why not make sock puppets like the moose did in the book.

So I cut out the needed parts and found my pair of holey socks.

We glued a piece of cardboard inside the sock so that when we

glued on the other parts the glue wouldn't go through.

The girls glued their ear parts together:

For the rest of the parts we used white glue.

We glued on the ears and eyes.

Then the nose and whiskers:

Just as an FYI, the white glue wasn't holding the whiskers on, so

Steven hot glued them on later.

Then we made the props for our puppet show/play. 

The reason we made a mouse instead of the moose is because I didn't have any

brown socks.  The moose in the book also made a mouse.

So we made the mice in anticipation of doing a puppet show of

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Here we are making the props.

Cookie:

(brown paper circle with black hole punch dot chocolate chips)

Mirror:

(Foil wrapped cardboard.  We glued it on, shinier side out)

(an index card and crayon to represent the paper and crayon

the mouse asks for to draw a picture)

Here are the props all ready to go, attached to straws.

(cookie, milk, napkin, mirror, broom, book (made from small piece of cardboard folded over with a piece of paper folded inside.  The two page book reads, "If you give a mouse...a cookie"), and the piece of paper with a crayon taped on.)

Our love seat turned stage:

Getting ready to put on the play:

Sorry these are so dark, not sure why.  The girls had such a good time putting on the plays for their daddy and then again for big brother and sister.



School Time: Week 4 (Pp concluded)

As I mentioned last week, we continued the letter P this week.  One of our word cards is "penguin" and we have been waddling like penguins to go hang up our pictures.  We played a follow the leader type game acting out different penguin actions as we walked around the living room and dining room.  That reminded me of our little booklet about penguins in our lapbook, so we pulled the penguin lapbooks out of the box and used the "Parts of a Penguin" cards in addition to reading the booklet and looking at our shape hunt.  For complete details of the penguin lapbook head on over to my post from earlier in the year.

 We put our P collages together.  I have decided to do all the cutting for it because the girls have found it too tiring.  I guess a little cutting is okay, but I was having them do too much.

 Amelia has started layering everything:

 We also made our P Pig craft.  You can find the details here.

Because I could NOT come up with a p craft myself I took some time looking at the crafts linked up at The Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection.  I really liked the pig, but hubby liked the idea of the piano.  So, instead of a tactile P we made another letter shaped craft.

I had the girls trace over dotted lines for the piano keys

 Amelia wanted to trace her own lines in addition to the ones above

 After she glued her keyboard to the P Tabitha pretended to play the piano.

 I thought it was neat that Amelia made her own pattern

I was familiar with the following idea from working at the Montessori, but I couldn't figure out how to implement it at home.  Then I remembered I had an extra container available so I filled it with a thin layer of salt so the girls could practice writing their letters.

 Finishing up our Pa state page

 Tabitha's tracing is improving a great deal

 This morning I let Amelia get on her Starfall (alphabet as she calls it).  Tabitha helped her move and click the mouse.  Then they wanted to type, so I opened up our Microsoft Works program and let her type away, occasionally giving her a specific word to spell.  This was how she spelled pepper, "pepr."  She getting there.

 Then they pulled out their farm.

 All ready for lesson time.  Hannah in the Bumbo doesn't last too long, so I enjoy it while I can.  

My left arm really appreciates it.

 A simple popcorn counting game.  I just cut out a strip from an egg carton and wrote the numerals 0-5.

I used popcorn kernels, but I won't do that again, too hard to get out.  So I let the girls use the popped popcorn.  

 Stay tuned to see what we make with these materials.  

We are almost done, but decided to do some baking instead.

We decided to make something special for the bake sale (we had already made some for ourselves last night).  Can you guess what we made to go with our letter P

adding baking powder to the flour and baking soda

 and some cinnamon

 after adding the nutmeg we stirred together the dry ingredients

 Getting ready to cream sugar and margarine

 Amelia thought it was loud.  

So do you know what we made for the bake sale?  If you think you know just leave me a comment.

 Some special Tiny Tot/Mommy Time

Hannah is learning to sit!!

I did catch her right after taking the picture because she started to fall, but she is getting there.

 Just one little helping hand is all it takes to keep her steady

 Couldn't resist this expression:

Our Bible verse these last couple of weeks has been, "Praise ye the Lord for it is good to sing praises unto our God." Psalms 147:1

To see what others are doing with their toddlers and preschoolers head on over to 1+1+1=1, Homeschool Creations  Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers 

Gonna link up our piano to 

  

Already linked up the pig.