All about Camping: Day 3

In yesterday's post we had a lot S'MORE fun than we intended!  Today our Schylling Mega Tentcame from Amazon and boy did we have two excited kids on our hands.   Oh, who are we kidding, I was excited, too!  Probably for different reasons than the kids, though.  I'm excited to have a tent that we can use for multiple purposes and themes, but that is easy to take down and store.  I thought a perfect book for our tent day would be Maisy Goes Camping and the kids, my three-year-old specifically, loved it.  This, of course, prompted all of those stuffed animals that seem to keep multiplying in my kids' closet to make their way out to the living room.  I decided to tie in a quick math activity today.  Of course we counted all of the animals that they put in their tent, and even worked in a little addition and subtraction for my six-year-old (side note:  this was a great way to clean up--If we have 16 animals in the tent, and Mom makes you return 6 to the closet, how many are left?  Answer, in case you were wondering, is;  too many!)  I made an Animal Shape Match activity and both of the kids actually enjoyed doing it.  I had Wyatt work on the color version with velcro dots, matching up the shapes, and then they both did the color and cut version.  I cut the shapes for Wyatt and he glued them on.  Then I pulled out this measurement activity for Ava (and Wyatt enjoyed playing with the blocks) to play around with measurement.  These Learning Resources Snap Cubes are one of the most versatile learning products that I've bought.  I purchased these nearly four years ago and we use them all the time when we do school at home.  Plus the kids just have fun building with them.  I originally planned to also have the kids use their Learning Resources Play Tape Measure but I forgot that they had broken it and we had thrown it out.  So instead Ava used our snap cubes to measure how many units long each animal was, and then she also sorted the version with the snap cubes printed on them by number.  She had fun and it got us talking a little bit about measurement and units of measurement.  We finished with Steve Jenkin's book called Actual Size to see how big some animals were in real life, compared to how I represented them in my cards.  We also got silly talking about which of these animals we might see when we were camping (Note:  we better NOT see the world's largest spider)!