Library Scavenger Hunt

If you read my post about summer reading, you may remember me mentioning our library scavenger hunt cards.  I created these cards to use with my six year old this summer to help encourage her to spend time selecting books at the library before she plays.  I also want to begin to teach her about how things are organized in our library, including the Dewey Decimal System.  She has a lot of fun with these cards.  I have a huge pile of them that I printed on card stock and laminated.  She picks one from the pile on our weekly library trip.  We use a dry erase marker to check off what she finds. You can find the cards available here in my TeachersPayTeachers store.   As I mentioned in my previous post, I love that we have such play-centered libraries at our disposal, but I wanted to make sure that we were also slowing down a little bit to appreciate all of the books available to us as well.  I created around thirty cards that cover different Dewey numbers, as well as topics without their Dewey number.  I also created a "cheat sheet" bookmark with the Dewey categories on it for us to use as we're learning.

Before I introduced the cards for the first time, we read the book Do You Know Dewey?: Exploring the Dewey Decimal System to learn a little about the types of non-fiction and how they are organized in the public library.  For good measure, we also talked a little bit about how we should treat books, especially those that we're borrowing.  So far it's been a hit and she asks for the scavenger hunt card if I forget to mention it.  Our summer reading is going great and we're checking out lots of new and interesting books we might never have found before!

Play is the work of childhood

I'm not sure if I'm learning from my kids, or they're learning from me, but I think it's probably a little bit of both.  I'm always organizing activities for my kids, but today, they came up with something on their own and I was thoroughly impressed.  Ava was reading one of her library books Curious George Subway Train Adventure.  George gets to ride a subway train for the first time and, of course, accidentally leaves the man in the yellow hat behind.  Adventure ensues, as is expected, but so does learning about maps and direction.  When she was done reading Ava said "I'm going to make my own subway map" and then several hours of imaginative play followed.  She and her brother both made maps of an imaginary subway in our hometown and listed all of the places they would want the subway train to stop.

They used our glider as the train car and  played together (without fighting!) for hours.  They frequently checked their maps, visited all kinds of fun places, and pretended to get lost, miss the train, and other things that required some creative problem solving.  I had to smile because this is the exact kind of activity that I would offer as an extension of a book, and she came up with it all on her own.  Now part of her ingenuity might be because our playroom has been off limits for the past two weeks.  After it got so messy that you could no longer see the floor, my husband and I thought everyone needed a break from the playroom and the overwhelming amount of items inside of it.  While we go through and purge and organize, it has been locked up during the day.  We have noticed that the kids are getting much more creative in their play and are turning towards art and coloring more frequently.  I don't plan to get rid of all of their toys, but it has sure been a nice break.

Today's adventures reminded me of a quote from Mr. Rogers and I will leave you with that:

"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.  But for children play is serious learning.  Play is really the work of childhood."

Summer Reading!

One of the items on our Summer Bucket List is to sign up for the library's summer reading program and visit the library weekly.  My kids love books, and they love the library, but sometimes they have trouble wanting to look for books when we get to the library.  We are blessed with excellent, forward-thinking, kid-friendly public libraries in our area, and as they should, they all have lots of opportunities to learn through play.  The toys are amazing.  And we always take time to play when we're there.  But I wanted to find a way to encourage my kids to really spend some time selecting good books while we were there, too.  The Library Scavenger Hunt was born.  I will share more about it and how to get it in a later blog post, but here's a sneak peek.

Today we went to sign up for the summer reading program.  A little incentive for tracking your summer reading never hurt anyone and my kids were excited to sign up and get started. In addition to our library's summer program, I created my own for Ava to track her reading goals this summer.  I call it the "Summer Reading 100 Book Challenge."  When I was in first grade I loved to read.  To challenge me, my teacher gave me pages that had a caterpillar with boxes to write in the book titles that I read.  I was so proud of myself when I got to 100, and I still have that print-out somewhere today.  It's fun today to look back and see what books I chose to read nearly 35 years ago.  I wanted to offer something similar for Ava where she can write down the books that she reads this summer.  We've been enjoyed the sweet treats this summer so I went with an ice cream theme.  You can find the challenge printable to use yourself here.  If you have younger kids, you could skip writing the book title and just have them color a scoop for every book that is read to them this summer.  Make it work for you!

Added bonus:  This also helps to reinforce counting by 5s  :)

Summer Treats: Sensory play, crafts, and read-alouds

We've done math, cooking, and imaginative play--what's left?  Sensory play, crafts, and chapter books!  Whenever we are doing a theme week, I like to have chapter books that I can read aloud to the kids.  Sometimes we do this outside, but this particular week it was hot so we stayed inside.  We read a Boxcar Children book (I loved these as a kid!). The Ice Cream Mystery was perfect for this week and the kids loved it!  When I saw this fine motor skills craft idea on the blog A Dab of Glue Will Do, I knew it would be perfect for an activity at read-aloud time during our Sweet Treats week.  Both kids really loved it.  Ava enjoyed creating a pattern on hers while Wyatt just liked sticking down the tissue paper.  And they were so impressed with their final product.  Even better was that I already had all of the supplies on hand!

Kinetic sand really is amazing.  We don't bring it out every day but when we do, the kids will literally sit and be entertained by it for a few hours.  I thought it would be another good activity for them during read-aloud time.  I made a basket with some ice cream themed items, plus our sweet treats erasers, and put it out with their kinetic sand bins.  We store their sand in these Sterilite Clip Boxes.
When they're done we just put the lids on and store them away in the cabinet until the next time.  My kids love hiding things in the sand and then hunting to find it, so the little erasers were a big hit for that.  They also made sand sundaes and scooped extra large ice cream cones.  The mess was minimal, and again, I had everything on hand already.

We're finishing up the last few chapters of our book and I think we'll do that from beach towels on the living room floor.  Maybe their pretend play ice cream truck will make an appearance to help cool us all off.  :)

Ice Cream Truck: Invitation to Play

This is how we do an "Invitation to Play" in our house.  If you read Monday's post, you know that we were having fun with math and ice cream.   As we near the end of our "Sweet Treats" week, I thought it would be fun to let the kids have some imaginative play time.  We read the book The Little Ice Cream Truck (Little Vehicles), which Wyatt especially loved.  I asked if they wanted to make their own pretend ice cream truck and, of course, they did.  I gave them a basket of random play food and DUPLO ice cream toys, the play cash register, and let them have at it!  They decided to use their play table and chairs rearranged to be the truck.  Ava made the sign for their truck and then came up with a menu.  We all spent a lot of time being customers (too bad they weren't serving real ice cream)!  They did fight over the cash register a little bit.  We got ours at the thrift store a year or so ago, but you can find them on amazon, too.  It is the Learning Resources Pretend & Play Teaching Cash Register, and if we hadn't found it at the thrift store, it definitely would have gone on our kids' holiday wish lists!

They had a blast and it it was so fun to listen to them play.  Ava got to practice some math with the cash register, too.  I love the picture of Ava explaining the menu to my husband.  And Wyatt was pretty pleased with his purchase from the truck, as well.  They took turns being the customer, the cashier, and the "ice cream maker."  This entertained them for several days and it reminded me that I need to do these "Invitation to Play" days with them more often!  This cost us zero money because we used things we already had on hand, and took very little time to throw together.  Total winner in my busy-working-mom book.

And in the "real life" category:  Check out the impressive amount of fingerprints on our TV screen.

Sweet Summer Treats: Ice Cream

We read lots of fun ice cream stories this week, including Ice Cream Summer by Peter Sis and Gorilla Loves Vanilla by Chae Strathie.  Gorilla Loves Vanilla was especially funny, while Ice Cream Summer showed us all kinds of learning that can be done with ice cream, which was perfect for the activities that we had planned.

The Learning Resources Smart Scoops Math Activity might be my new favorite Learning Resources product.  It is so much fun and there is so much you can do with it.  You know I've said before that I like it when things have multiple uses across multiple ages, and this one fits the bill!  Ava can practice patterning and addition/subtraction with it, while Wyatt can practice sorting and counting.  And they can both have a ton of fun with imaginative play.  We had an ice cream shop going for a a few days in our living room!

We got a ton of play out of some packs of ice cream, popsicle, and fruit shaped erasers from the Dollar Spot at Target.  Ava used them to addition and subtraction, and Wyatt used them to practice counting.  I don't know about your kids, but my kids love little bits and bobs and they keep them entertained forever.  Even when they weren't doing math with the erasers, they were having a ton of pretend play fun with them.  

Don't worry, we didn't forget to end our day with ice cream!  We made a trip for milkshakes and added in some family playground time to round it out.

Sweet Summer Treats: Popsicles

Today was all about popsicles!  We pulled out our Learning Resources Smart Snacks Alpha Popsfor Wyatt to match up uppercase and lowercase letters.  These were another purchase that I've found multiple uses for over the years, as we've owned them for about five years now, I think.  You could also use them in this beginning sounds activity that I made.  But we used these foam letters on popsicle sticks this time around instead.  Wyatt pulled a card from the pile I selected, determined the beginning sound, and then found the corresponding letter popsicle stick.  He's better at it than I thought he'd be!  (note to self:  stop underestimating my kids!)

I used my beginning sounds activity for Ava, too, and added foam letters on popsicle sticks and had her sort the cards by number of syllables per word.

The day wouldn't be complete without having some popsicles to eat.  We decided to make our own!  We had some leftover Honest Kids juice pouches from a soccer game and a container of strawberries.  Ava used her Curious Chef Knife Set to safely cut the strawberries.  This set comes with three knives made out of a nylon material and her using them didn't make me nervous at all.  She LOVED being able to do this "big person" task!  We tossed everything in the blender and after it was mixed up we poured it into IKEA ice pop sleeves that I bought forever ago and hadn't yet used.  It was hard to wait for them to freeze, but totally worth it!  Our popsicles turned out great and we thoroughly enjoyed our first Sweet Treat day!