Happy Friday! We will see you on Tuesday.
Today at our Safari Party we wore so many “hats!” First, we were authors and illustrators. We wrote and illustrated stories about a day in the Safari. I am not sure if creating the picture or dictating to me was more exciting to them. It is funny how children and writing stories goes. The first person that makes the story up sets the pace for the rest of the stories. But it is the words of each of them (with a few question/prompts – but it is what they want it to say) and they absolutely LOVE to hear it being read back to them. They are super proud of what they created.
We had to learn how each of the animals really acted and sounded like so we could play a game later. So we watched a little bit of our African Safari movie before the action began. We had to OBSERVE what each animal did, how it acted, how it moved, what it sounded like, even behaviors like if it was protective or attacking. They all have their favorite animal they wanted to observe. The favorite turned out to be the fast cheetah! There was a single mommy Cheetah who had to protect her little ones from preditors. She did a wonderful job! Don’t mess with a Momma and her babies! lol I loved this Disney nature movie because there was enough action to let them know what happens in nature but not enough to scare them or bring too many questions that I didn’t want to handle. (gore) It was a great find from Mr. Seth!
After the movie, we played a little game where they each took turns with the animal spinner to see what animal they got to pretend to be. Then I took our binoculars out and the animal spinner to see what animal I would look for. They loved it and we took several turns doing it, changing animals each time. Great fun!
Then for the final game we played we had to make sure everyone knew the rules for the ‘baby animals’ in the room. The Babies were the cheetah babies who needed to be protected. The big kids could be whatever animal they wanted but they had to make sure they were ‘protecting’ the babies by being careful around them as they were playing on the floor. Cheetahs’, lions, giraffes, rhinos, zebras, and even a few bears! There was lots of ACTION! But they all did a wonderful job of watching out for the “Littles”.
Then as we needed to settle down to get ready for lunch, I put the video back on for a few minutes to see if they could see anything different that they hadn’t seen before.
For lunch, I usually don’t like hotdogs but they made great ‘building material’. So we created animals out of the hotdog pieces and toothpicks.
Joyful Kidz 