Ocean Commotion!!

I think it's a great first day of "Ocean Commotion" when your teachers handbook ends up wet!!

We are a few days behind starting Aprils curriculum. This occurred for two reasons. One: April started on a Wednesday. Who else has a hard time starting anything on a Wednesday? Hands up! I know I do! So I committed to start on Monday....until I realized we had a four day weekend because of Easter and we were going to Croatia. But hey! What's a better place to start a month all about the ocean than at the ocean! WOOT WOOT! So many amazing things happened on this trip like Illi going sea urchin hunting with daddy, playing on the beach, going to an aquarium and getting to see such a beautiful country! 

Well all that aside, I decided I would start on Tuesday, after we got back from our trip....then we ran errands all Tuesday and here we are, back to  starting the curriculum on a Wednesday! Well it was a good theory while it lasted! 

During nap time I opened up our mother goose time box and got everything set up as I do every month. (That will be another blogpost on another day.) Once everyone woke up, we popped in the monthly cd and did some dancing! My daughter loves the monthly cd and we listen to them daily....multiple times a day. While this is great I am always thankful to throw the previous cd aside have some new songs to have stuck in my head ;) 

Next, I set up the water activity. This activity showed the kids the difference between sweet and salty water as well as the water we drink every day. At first Illianna was only sticking her fingers in the water and tasting it but once she warmed up to the activity, she was taking drinks!! Leave it to my kid to actually prefer the salt water!! We talked about the differences of the water and that the salt water is just like the oceans water!! 

Because we have a older toddler and a very young toddler, activities tend to go astray or are modified. We welcome it all as it meets different needs for both kids! This activity progressed from tasting the water to dumping it on the tray and splashing in it! Illi pulled out manipulative blocks from our MGT a few months ago and we built a boat!! This further progressed into illi taking this months manipulative shells(I still can't get over the manipulative we get each month!! They are always so cool!) and exploring with them in the water! 

After about twenty minutes of play, I had an itch to clean up the water all over my floor so we cleaned up, dried off and headed outside! 

I think it was a very successful first day! I am very very excited for this month as we LOVE the ocean and all things to do with it! Stay tuned to see what we get to discover this month with Ocean Commotion!!

An ocean floor in our back yard!

What a crazy few days it has been!! It has been 5 days since we have been home for a solid day. 5 days since we have gotten to much of anything besides sleep and eat at home. Finally, here we are at Monday and ready to rock and roll! Today, we are on day 2(yes we are behind....lol) of our Mother Goose Time cirriculum which is all about the ocean floor! 

It is such a beautiful day here that I decided to take our lesson outside and modify it some. I decided to recreate the ocean floor in our back yard! To do this, I took a bucket of water, some sand, rocks and our shells! Illianna loved forming the ocean floor and talking about the different things we could find there! 

First the water! 

 Then we added the sand! 

In hindsight, I probably should have added the sand last as it made the water too cloudy to see. Hey, we live and learn, right? :) 

We practiced saying each item(water, sand, rocks, shells) as we made our ocean floor because we are still working on language development. 

In went our rocks! 

And lastly, our shells!!

Here is a side view of our ocean floor! 

We dug the wet sand through our hands like we would do if we were on the beach and combed for the shells! Illi had fun with this part. We went on a shell hunt!! She would take the cup, scoop it through the water and then slowly pour the water out(if I had thought far enough ahead, I would have grabbed a strainer to sift with) to see what we had "found!" 

We had so much fun building our ocean floor! Later today, we will explore the letter "O" when we make an octopus and make an oyster shell!!