Homeschool: Let's go to the Zoo!

These past two weeks have been slightly chaotic.  I could blame NaNo. (btw, I'm 23,000 words or so from the 50,000 goal)
 Or hospital trips for all THREE kids. (ear infection, foot fungus thing, and feeding tube removal...and I still have two more visits in the next two weeks...*pathetic sigh* don't get me started...(=  )
Or the fact that EVERY weekend is booked with some huge family event....does anyone else out there feel that train speeding up out of control yet?
Anyhoo....last weekend some friends came to visit and we took them to the zoo. So, Matthea and I looked at some zoo animals and made some crafts.  She made two of each so we could revisit Noah's Ark...

I traced a giraffe from an online coloring page. Matthea cut brown pieces of paper and glued them on.

We dipped the side of a pop-cycle stick into black paint and printed the strips.
Got the idea from Kids Craft Weekly, even the zebra drawing!  

The Ark now with two sets of animals...we may add more throughout the year.

Cognitive:  We've been working on matching lowercase to uppercase letters...still on a-d.  With numbers we are recognizing 1-5 and now I'm adding #6.  Also focusing on the concept of two.  The other is learning "inside" and "outside" concepts. I had big plans for the last two concepts, but will use them next week and take some pics of how I did it then.

Social: We are working on taking turns in playing simple games. We do this during family time with her siblings, but mainly with me. We've played a few fun games and she is learning.  Right now her favorite game is a bead threading game from Germany called Fadelraupe or in English it's Thread Caterpillar.  It's a great game for color learning, taking turns, and threading beads.

Fine Motor:  Scissor cutting, which we did for the giraffe; using the fingertips to hold and grab...she had to do that with the printing zebra activity.  And we continue to drawing circles and lines. This week our hot water heater started leaking, so we got a new one (one thing I love about being a renter...not having to pay for the new heater) and I let her draw all over the box.

Getting started with her drawing.

Gross Motor:  We are working on stairs, using one hand on the rail going up and both coming down.  Also, lots of jumping going on in our apartment. Thankfully, our downstairs neighbors our out of town for a bit, and are very gracious when they are home.

Then we used the box for a tunnel.

She crawled round and round in it for about fifteen minutes only because...

this was more fun!

Until the box gave out completely. =)

Speech:  We met with a ST last week and have changed Matthea's speaking cards to more simple words....words with a vowel ending.  She still struggles with some blends like "moo" and "boo", but she really tries hard. It'll come.  And her favorite speech activity is horn therapy. We switched to a horn that has a windmill that spins if you blow on it correctly. That is always fun.

 Hope everyone has a great weekend....I'm packing for an overnight camp out with the Cub Scouts and my family.  Praying it doesn't rain...