The Zoo day is finally here!

After a whole week of preparation we finally made it to the Zoo on Saturday!!

We got their early in the morning to see the tigers and they did not disappoint us! Ro kept saying tiger roaaaaaar!

They has a picture of their paw print so I had to get a picture of that. Here is our foot print comparisons.

Tiger-

The Hogle Zoo just got a new Polar bear and he kept doing flips over and over in the water.It was sooooo cute.

Bear!Bear!

Here are my cubs!

We also saw seals and Dari the elephant.She is the oldest elephant in the North America.

He is not ready to leave the nest yet thank goodness!

There were Eagles,lemurs,Gorillas and so much more!

The day did not end there.We went to a free Super hero Lego shield event at Toys r us where the kids got to build their own shields.They could choose Batman and Superman. Most kids these days don't know who Superman is! That is sad and really dates me too, I think.

Today we reviewed what we saw at the Zoo thanks to some fun worksheets from abcteach.com.We also had a spelling  test for Corb.

zoo puppet and a theater

 I found these cute puppets for the kids to do at dltk-kids.com. We did a paper bag tiger .


Here are puppets we did with Popsicle sticks.

Next, I had the idea to do a theater.I took a big cardboard box.Then I cut the desired pattern. At first I wanted it to look like curtains but  then I took a real curtain and stapled it on. Really that is it! Soooo easy.

Value of the week-accepting the feeling of Anger but not hurting others.



This is what they really look like when they blow their top.

This is how we want them to be

There is something about Summer that makes kids fight.Do you all agree? I remember my Mom's rule that I still use today.Never hurt anyone on the inside or the outside. What do we as parents do when we get angry? Do we yell or get physical with our children? Whatever our coping mechanism is for Anger your kids will follow your example. So if we want to change something in our kids we should always look at ourselves first!

We read the book When I feel Angry


I printed our a piece of paper that says "I feel_______when______.This helps the kids if Mom has to step in and supervise the problem solving process. I will only use it until they get the hang of it. A quick note to parents.Don't step in too quick unless someone is going to get hurt.

We talked about what we can do to calm down.A lot of the suggestions were in the book mentioned above. We can take a time out, do something that calms us down, or count to 10. It never works to yell at our kids it just makes them want to battle.It is like the saying "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit! I try to tell the kids to ignore the other person but they usually blow it by saying "I am ignoring you". So of course the other person is egged on.It is a little backwards but such is the mind of our little ones.

Another tip of your kids keep fighting maybe they are tired or hungry or need your attention or for you to step in a play with the younger sibling who is driving them nuts without even realizing it.

I found these awesome sling shots at the dollar store and saw this idea on brassyapple.blogspot.com to make angry birds by painting rocks to resemble the birds. I didn't have that much times so we just used rocks and we knocked boxes down.I told the kids that when we get Angry and fight we are destructive and can really cause damage whether it is physical or emotional. They can always ask an adult for help if they feel too out of control or the other person might not be cooperating. Needless to say they have been running to me for everything so I guess now we work on tattling ha ha ha.






How do you like to calm down when you get angry?

I took a break from the Zoo for you, Dad!

This week we have been gone more away from the house so we have been playing at the park and going to the Library, while we wait for my daughters dance camp to get over. Here the boys are taking a break to play in the water puddles left by the sprinklers.

The pod activities continue to impress me and give me ideas. I have too much floating in this head of mine and not enough time to blog about it. This pod is about dinosaurs and they had cross word puzzles.This cardboard display was dino's and their shadows.They were velcrowed on so the kids could do it over again and again;which children love!

This week is so full of activities! We have our Zoo trip coming up and Fathers day. I found these cute cards on first-school.ws. Here is the finished product. 

I loved that I could teach shapes, like circles, rectangles and hearts to my youngest.

I added more to my pocket chart. I also had the kids practice writing Z's and the number 2 which we are working on. This is what we are working on this summer so far.

Lex-Trace and write Z

Corb-Write counting by twos.I also introduced the oo sound in ew, and ow.Not too exciting to blog about but important.

I found these cute zoo stickers at the dollar store.They have the animal and them some of them had just the faces. So I took foam paper and put stickers on cards and wrote a number on each for Ro and Lex to practice their numbers.

They can also match colors for the one that have the faces.

Here are some of the fun books that we read for Fathers Day.

What are you doing for Fathers Day?

Letter of the week Z for zoo

Sometimes I feel like I live in a zoo. My kids are my wild monkeys.I let the kids pick from different Zoo animals to carry around with them the whole day. They wrote in their journals about it.So here is what they did.

Rowen's choice

First they read there bed time stories to them and tucked them in.

Corb and Lex chose frogs

The next day we had a picnic with animal crackers.The kids separated the crackers into categories and Corb graphed them. We had our picnic at the library so we went inside..

 Our libraries are involved in early voting so their programs like the magic show aren't happening this month but they do have what they call a pod activity.It consists of a theme,  and some activities to do. I think this is so creative!

Make your own puppet show

There was 3 different ones.We took the frog robot puppet home and made it.I thought it was fitting because both my oldest kids picked frogs for their animals.We talked about frogs and specifically Dart frogs that are at the Hoggle Zoo we will be visiting at the end of this week.

When we got home we read this cute book called Zoozical. It is winter in the Zoo and all the animals are down in the dumps until they join some other animals dancing and they figure out that each animal had something to offer.

The crocodiles led the alphabet song

We sang the songs from the book which were based on real tunes.

Elephants sang do your ears hang low?

Its a tall world after all to the tune of "It's a small world after all. The gorillas sang"For he's a jolly good fellow"

Then we had our won Zoozical. The kids had a blast with it!

My kids have really attacked the craft area of my kid's room.More specifically the pipe cleaners.Corb made his frog a wand.What imaginations they have and I am glad that they can have a place to explore.What do your kids like to do to explore and create?