Ancient Voices of Children

So, the week before last Dangerboy and Cookie-Nut were banned from being around any other children because of what I've come to call "the spots." But they didn't feel sick, so I was left wondering what we should do for a week. I decided to start my summer-home-preschool experiment early.

I had a wonderful mission companion whose mother home-schooled all of her siblings in a way that sounded amazingly fun--each year had a theme, and involved lots of field trips and applied learning. I'm not sure I'm up to quite that level of commitment, but I wanted to try some of the ideas, so I've figured out some field trips that are feasible for us to take, and planned home activities to keep us busy based on them. When the kids were sick, we did dinosaurs and the ice age.

Almost every day, we opened with some music (some familiar ones, but DB is also learning his address and phone number based on a little ditty I threw together). Then we danced to "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" (frogs, dinos--they seemed to go together somehow) and sometimes a few others. We did "research" online and in library books on the topic of the day--dinosaurs and their skin, dinosaur eggs, volcanoes, the ice age, and tar pits. I read to DB, he read to me, he read some topical rhyming words (tar, far, car, etc.), DB did some writing in his journal or on a letter worksheet, and we did an activity. Oh, and had a themed (more or less) snack. Then, when the kids were better, we visited the La Brea Tar pits, which they really liked. Especially the tar. (Well, CN just liked running around.)

Here were some of our activities and snacks:

We made dinosaur cookies one day, and made them into ice cream sandwiches the next--super yummy.
We decorated "dinosaur eggs" and went on a dinosaur egg hunt. We learned that some dinos laid eggs in a line, or just on the ground, or in holes, or maybe in trees. So we hid them in places like that.We"exploded" the volcano DB and PDaniel made a while back.
We made "fossil pops" with fruit (the fossils) in frozen juice, just like fossils are found in ice.
We made a big bowl of chocolate pudding in which I hid various animals and plastic dinosaur bones. It was our "tar pit."And we went on our field trip. It was fun--it cost us about $20 for all four of us, including parking. We saw lots of cool bones and a real excavation site. As a bonus, LACMA next door was having its free day, so we had a quick look in there too. It didn't turn out to be a terribly kid-friendly experience for us, but DB was actually interested in a lot of the art.

This week we're doing space. It's been kind of a busy week, and we haven't done as much as I'd have liked before our trip tomorrow (to the observatory) but I'll let you know how it turns out.