Over the past several days Peter has done Olympic activities during learning time.
He illustrated a book about the Olympics:
He and Doug made an Olympic torch:
He cut out paper doll athletes and gave them sticker medals (numbered 1-20 to practice those teen numbers):
He has also done Olympic mazes and puzzles and matching games and enjoyed watching many different Olympic sports - he insists the tennis players keep getting home runs.
I don't know if there will be an Olympics Part 2 post or not. We are preparing for our road trip to South Carolina and Tennessee and things are pretty hectic around here. Peter, being Peter, gets very unsettled by even the slightest disturbances to our routine, and starts acting out. Our days become less about walks and books and learning time and more about tantrums and time outs and clinginess. We'll have to see if we fit in more Olympic activities this week.
I asked Peter if he could come up with a name for his horse that started with H, and he announced it was Harry the Horse or maybe that was Hairy the Horse...I don't really know.
Elliot has been spending more and more of learning time with us now that his morning nap is getting a bit shorter. This morning he was hanging out enjoying talking about horses until the microwave dinged and he had to answer on his hand phone. It was a lengthy discussion that involved a lot of vigorous head shaking.
The master bathroom toilet started running last night and so first thing this morning the boys and I made a trip to Home Depot to get a new gasket.
Doug, I know you are going to whine that we should have gone to Lowes where we have gift cards, but they don't have race car carts at Lowes. Since you're out of town and don't get a vote, the motion to go to the store with race car carts carried unanimously.
While at Home Depot we got to watch a woman getting boxes down off the high shelf with a fork lift. We sat there enthralled by the whole process for half an hour.
Our final learning time activity was fixing the toilet.
We added food coloring to the tank ostensibly to see if the new gasket was sealing well, but in actuality we just wanted to flush through different colors and see them move from the tank to the bowl. It is never too early to learn how a toilet works.
After lunch we went to the mall play area.
While I sat there keeping an eye on Elliot, two kids came to an impasse on the sausage link bridge. They stood there face to face with neither able to get around the other. One of the kids was a little 3 year old spitfire and the other was a slightly older boy. Completely unprovoked, the little girl started into a tirade about how the boy better not push her because pushing people wasn't nice. She finished with, "Do you understand? Say, "Yes, Katie."" The boy looked a little baffled (there was no evidence that he had even been thinking about pushing her) and responded, "Katie? But, my name's usually Colin."
To continue our experiments with food coloring, we went in search of some queen anne's lace. We finally found some in a field and we brought four home. We will be checking in on them often throughout the day.
Normally the boys and I go for a walk in the morning trying to get outside before it gets too hot. The last few weeks, however, the days have started off too hot and only gotten hotter as the hours passed. Many days we have found ourselves playing with water inside during "outside time."
Sometimes we manage to run an errand during outside time which at least gets us outside our house, but there really aren't many places open at that time in the morning. I always wish that we could go to the library or mall or pet store, but all of those places open at 9:30 or 10 am. By 9:30 it feels like our day is already half over - the adults have exercised, everyone is fed and dressed, teeth are brushed, most of the day's chores are done, the boys have had outside time - and now it is time to slow down. At 9:30 Elliot goes down for his morning nap, Peter has some down time playing alone in his room and I sit down to blog and pay bills and plan what Peter will do during learning time. Hopefully soon the weather will cool down a bit (today it was 88 degrees at 8:30 am) and we will be able to start taking more walks. For the time being, though, we will continue to hunker down and get ourselves gleefully wet in the kitchen.
We are doing a Five in a Row (preschool) lesson based on the book How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. It is about a girl who has to procure the ingredients for a pie the hard way because the market is closed. She goes to Jamaica for sugar cane, Sri Lanka for cinnamon, Vermont for apples, etc.
After we read the book (which we own and have read many times before) Peter did a 1-20 dot-to-dot that made an airplane - just right for traveling the world. His dot-to-dot skills leave a lot of room for improvement, but he is getting better at recognizing the teen numbers.
Next we talked about measuring ingredients to make a pie and Peter sorted measuring cups and spoons biggest to smallest.
For the grand finale, we got out "ocean water" and food coloring. In the book the girl scoops up a jar of ocean water and evaporates it to get the salt she needs. Peter tasted the ocean water that I had made the night before and agreed that it tasted salty even though he could not see any salt. We added food coloring, because that made things more interesting, and then set out our water to evaporate in the sun.
The evaporation took longer than I thought it would in the hot, dry weather we are currently experiencing. I expected that we would see salt by afternoon, but even that evening there were only a few crystals forming. We left them out over the night, and this morning two tubs are almost dry, two tubs are a mix of crystals and water, and one tub is still all water.
I tried to get Peter to taste a salt crystal, but he wanted no part of it. Instead I let Elliot taste it and he LOVED it. After letting him lick the neon colored saltiness off my finger many times I finally had to hide the tub before his blood pressure started to spike.
Matching Presidents...in our New Pocket Chart I was astonished when Peter spontaneously identified George Washington by name as soon as he saw that card - this was the first time he had ever seen these flashcards!!
Pointing out Our Current President Peter than practiced saying President Obama a few times and we talked in general terms about voting and the upcoming election.
My kids both like black liquorice. What is up with that?!?
That right there is one of the only pictures we have of our Fourth of July adventures. We were just too busy (and wet) to pull out the camera. The boys and I spent the entire week of the Fourth up at the cottage. It was very, very hot. The boys spent much of their time playing with tubs of water on the deck or frolicking in the paddle boat which was in the middle of the lawn filled with water.
Doug was there with us for the first part of the week. On Monday a group of us went to a Tiger's game where my Dad "caught" a foul ball. Okay, it ricocheted off several people and chairs and finally landed at his feet where he scooped it up. Still, a much better outcome than a few swings later when a line drive foul ball hit a guy a section over from us. It hit him on the side of the head which resulted in a lot of blood and paramedics, but he gave a smile and a wave 20 minutes later when the medics finally carried him off looking like an extra from The Mummy.
On the Friday after the Fourth, all of us made our way to Grand Rapids. Our first order of business was to get our air conditioning working; that was right in the middle of a two week stretch of 100ish degree temperatures.
We had planned to go on a train ride on Saturday, however the temp was a bit over 100 degrees and they canceled the ride. Instead we went to the Meijer Gardens and explored the kids' garden and went on a trolley ride to see many of the sculptures.
On Sunday, we went and cheered on our local Grand Rapids White Caps baseball team. It is a nice ball park for families. We got cheap lawn seats so the kids could stretch their legs, the food was reasonably prices (plus it was kids eat free day), and they have a play ground with a large bounce house that Peter loved. Unfortunately, the White Caps lost.
