Drama, love notes and things that glow in the dark!

Well, where I left you last we were deep in paper puppets. So the next day we tried a puppet show, which worked fine while I was there to make up the story and they could follow along, but when it was their turn they had a hard time coming up with a story. So we did a quick run through of the parts of a story (intro, conclusion, characters, setting etc.) and that seemed to jump start them so they spent a good part of the day doing puppet shows with the baby in her excersaucer for an audience. Then for some reason they built a duplo mailbox and started putting small squares of paper in it that were "letters." They all said puppy. So I wrote each of them a little note that said "I love you, from mom." That set off another chain reaction and now I have about 20 little love notes from Jacob. They all say "I love Mom To Mom." He had to ask how to spell it for the first few times but then he could do it by himself. He also cut them all out so they're all sort of odd shapes and he'd invariable cut something off that he didn't mean to and had to tape them back together!

Yesterday we went to Chuck E Cheese and Noelle got a little lizard for a prize. Just this morning we discovered that it glows in the dark, so then they had to get all their other little plastic animals and see if they glow in the dark. They don't, so we then looked up why things glow in the dark, and why you have to hold them up to a light first.

Paper puppets

I recently got Noelle a book about how to draw baby animals. After a bit of frustration with not being able to do it perfectly, I showed her how she could just trace the finished product. I suppose it's cheating but it gives her practice with pencil control at least. So after drawing many many animals, mostly cats, last night she started cutting them out. So I suggested glueing them on popsicle sticks. So we did, and we now have about 15 paper puppets with more on the way. To cut down on the puppet population, I suggested that she give each puppet a name and write it on the back. She got out the paper she got with her last Puppy in my Pocket purchase that has little pictures of all the puppies and kitties and all their names, and copied names from there onto all her puppets. But that only took so long so now she's back to drawing and cutting more puppets. She is cutting very well, right on the lines! I'm going to try to get them to do a puppet show later.
So what did we get out of this activity?
-drawing and tracing
-coloring
-cutting
-gluing
-writing
-drama and storytelling

This morning we were sorting the laundry with a few complaints, when I realized that I had never told them why we sort the laundry! So I told them about fabric and dye and what might happen if we mixed the laundry, reminding them about the time Jacob peed his pants and I left his red underwear and blue pants in a bucket of water for 2 days and the water turned purple, and what would happen if we put Daddies white t-shirt in the water? So I'm not sure what subject that would count for at school, art? Home-ec? But I'm sure they learned something!