This Week: Camping!

So this week I have decided that our theme will be camping. Fun right? Big Monkey already knows what camping is, but I still thought it would be a fun theme to do for the week. We'll be taking a few weeks off at the end of this week to get our new curriculum ready and organized as well as take care of some other stuff, so I wanted something fun.

Of course, with all that said, Big Monkey was having what I like to call an "unmotivated" day today. Everything is either "I don't know" or "I can't, will you do it?" Not exactly my favorite type of day, but we're working with it.

We started the day reading "Curious George Goes Camping." Big Monkey proceeded to tell me at the start of story, "No, not that one. I like Birthday Surprise better." Somehow I still managed to talk him into letting me read Goes Camping.

While I read, Big Monkey traced circles that I had drawn on a paper for him. Baby Monkey beat the wood toy pans on the tile and tried to eat the play food.

 

Then we tried some worksheets. He really liked matching up the camping items. I had to run to the school room to get some other supplies, and before I could even get back I heard him saying "I did it!" 

We tried tracing some lines for prewriting practice. He wasn't into it. You might be able to see that all his lines are straight. He kept looking off at other things and out the window while he "traced." 

He did really well with the "find the letter" worksheet though. I told him the name of each item on the page and sounded out the first letter of the word. Then he circled the letter. He got them all right. I was impressed by his skills, and also impressed that it held his attention that long since nothing else had. 

We moved on to motor skill development, and he did better with those items (mostly). We transferred pom poms from one container to another, moved wood eggs on big spoons into a bucket, hammered pegs, and (Big Monkey's creation), picked up wood eggs with little tweezers and put them into scoops for Mama Monkey to "eat." We ended skill development time when Big Monkey had a meltdown because I wouldn't give him "a lot of tongs and scoops" (he already had all we owned on his tray. 

I think moving the eggs into the bucket with big spoons was Big Monkey's favorite activity. I had him match the colored egg to the same color spoon before we started moving eggs. 

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.