Happy Valentine’s Day! We’re going to spend the day making something sweet for Hubby and enjoying each other’s company while having a lot of fun together. Then when Hubby gets home we’ll shower him with love!
This past week we spent time on the Bible story Jonah and the whale and the letter M, for Mommy, Mirror, Me, My, Mine, Mouth, Museum, Moo. I had wanted to spend the week doing an all about me sort of theme, but the kids were still pretty cranky from being sick and didn’t seem to want to go in that direction so I didn’t push it. I want this to be fun learning for them. We did manage to make it to Strong National Museum of Play, though! (We had to make it to a place that started with an M! You can read other posts about this great place here and here!)
Science – The kids seemed fascinated by Jonah being swallowed up by a big fish. We talked a lot about this story through the week, wondering what he felt like in the whale’s belly, what else was in there with him, what it might have smelled or felt like, whether it was light or dark, if other things in there were Moving around like he might have been. I tried to get the boys to think about it in relation to all of our senses. It was pretty entertaining trying to see this story from a child’s perspective!
We enjoyed fun snack bags containing fish crackers, raisins (we pretended they were sea urchins), letter pretzels (which, according to Cutie Pie, were “some other things found in the water”) and then added a picture of Jonah to the bag. We used a twist tie and twisted the bag shut to make it look like a fish. When it was snack time they opened them up and let Jonah out through the whale’s Mouth! I wasn’t sure the boys would enjoy or appreciate this, but they loved it!
Experiment – We also prepared an extra snack bag and added lemon juice to it, to imitate the stomach juices, and after 3 days looked at it to see how the food had changed. Cutie Pie really liked this experiment! (more science)
Language arts: We read The Cow Who Clucked
Math and Science – The kiddos enjoyed sorting M&Ms, items on the table, pieces of clothing from laundry to fold pile. I briefly introduced the idea of believers and non-believers to them as the story of Jonah leant itself to talking a bit about this topic.
Most often, we pretended the Thomas indoor play tent was a whale and the couch was the boat we were on. Cutie Pie insisted we had to crawl into the tent really fast and move around in there a lot and pretend it was dark, but, according to him, it was dry in there because bellies aren’t wet on the inside. After a while we were ‘spit out’ Thomas’s door and suddenly we were sunbathing and playing with dump trucks in the sand! It wasn’t exactly how the story is told in the Bible, but I think from the other conversations we had throughout the week, that Cutie Pie knows the story!
And on Friday we made our Valentines for family. Just something simple that Cutie Pie could make on his own, although Sweet Pea did help do a little stamping! We went to an Orkidstra concert on Sunday and were able to see the boys’ cousins, so it was really important to Cutie Pie to make actual Valentines this year to give to them!
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