With a three day week for school, we have a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time! Since our 'out and about' trip to the grocery store is Wednesday, we are concentrating on vegetables and fruits today and tomorrow.
To start the day, we found some new songs on 'youtube' to help us practice our months of the year and the sounds for the different letters of the alphabet. If you would like to sing the songs with your child, go to 'kids123tv' on 'youktube' and type in 'months of the year' and 'sounds of the letters song'. Not only will you find these fun songs, but a whole lot more! We ended up finding a song about the seasons, which worked out well because we read a book about seasons this morning. We made a picture chart to depict things that happen in the Fall, which we will review each morning.
The kids were excited to explore the box of vegetables that I brought in today. For our 'hello' song, we sing a greeting to each child and then one person asks, "What do you have?". We named all of the vegetables and told something about the one we each had. I must be rubbing off on the kids because when Beau told us that he had the cabbage, Tucker didn't miss a beat and said, "Tell me something about your cabbage."! The kids are learning to make eye contact and face the person of whom they are asking the question. Tying the theme into our 'hello' song is a fun way to start out the day. Plus, the kids are working on formulating questions, responding in complete sentences, and social communication.
As we read our book, "Growing Vegetable Soup", by Lois Ehlert, the kids found pictures that corresponded to the vegetables in the book and paired them with the real vegetables. Some new vegetable vocabulary included cabbage and zucchini. The carrots, potatoes, green pepper, corn, onions, peas and beans were old hat to the kids. We clapped out each syllable while saying the vegetable words to help us hear each part of the word and all of the sounds. To work on categorization skills, you might have your child label which foods are vegetables at your dinner table and then say the name of the vegetable.
The kids loved making vegetable soup today with some of the vegetables that we held and smelled and looked at this morning. The tasting part didn't go over as well! We used a simple recipe that is called, "The Counting Soup". Six different kinds of chopped vegetables were put into bowls with a number in front of the bowl to indicate how many spoonfuls of vegetable each child should put into the pot. (We sneaked the skills of number identification and one-to-one correspondence into our soup making!) After adding the beef broth and some star noodles, Ms. Carol cooked the soup. The aroma of the soup simmering (OK...that is an exaggeration as the soup cooked for 6 minutes) had church staff coming to see what was cooking! The kids'
responses ranged from 'no way', to 'I'll try the noodle', to 'Mmmm, this is good!".
To work on sequencing and formulation of complete sentences, we used a chart with pictures of the different steps to put in order. And, then our day was done!
Vegetables are fun, but let's see what happens with the fruit tomorrow!
