Beach Theme

We've started back into our school rhythm....which means we eat breakfast (in no hurry), clean up (Q is in charge of spraying/wiping table and chairs and vacuuming up the dust piles after I sweep), and then the "baby lesson."  That involves some songs and music, a read-aloud in the reading tent and then some type of activity if time allows and he is still interested.

We will do a beach trip for Quinn's birthday, so I decided we'll focus on beachy-ness for a few weeks leading up to that.  Yesterday I scoured my bookshelves for beachy books and put them out in the playroom.  I put a couple non-fiction "referency-type" books on our expanding shelf we keep on our kitchen table for our reference library.  Next week we'll do a library trip to check out a few more titles, but I want to start slow and take our time soaking up our learning! 

Today we read a board book about beach animals.  Then we fingerpainted an ocean.  We used two colors of blue paint.  Fingerpaint is a great art medium because it's a hit with any age!  Even older kiddos love it, and it's pretty low maintnance to set up/clean up--just wipe up paint! 

Sidenote, little man painted for all of 2 minutes before signing "all done" and trying to crawl away.  This could be frustrating, but I am remembering that this early "art training" will pay off down the road, as evidenced by Quinn at 3 years of age.  So I will hang in there with the super-fast art experiences, I'll encourage him to try some new things (today I showed him how to "pat-pat" on the paper with his painty hand) to get him to stay with the activity just a little longer, and I'll remember that early art experiences are about the process and not the product.  He learned quite a bit, even in 2 short minutes, about the process of painting and concepts of paint and color.  And definitely how it tastes! 

After little man got a sinkbath and went down for morning nap, Q and I added sea creatures to her paper.  She chose animals, asked me to draw them, and then she cut them out (she only wanted to draw their eyes today) and we glued them onto her ocean.  Then we labeled them (talking about the sounds in each word briefly) and she wrote the word Ocean by watching me write it.  We put our titles next to our finished artwork on our little clothesline in the window of the breakfast nook for all to see!  More ocean exploration planned tomorrow.