Mother Goose Time: Getting Started

September is our first month using Mother Goose Time curriculum for young children. 

Being the self-described queen of eclectic homeschooling, I'll admit that I was nervous about using a "boxed curriculum." But Mother Goose Time has a lot to offer and I'm so glad we decided to use it for our youngest two learners this year!
Before I start telling you what we love about it, let me share (in the interest of full disclosure) that we do currently receive Mother Goose Time and the Little Goose companion free of charge in exchange for sharing our honest opinions and experiences on the blog.

Mother Goose Time sends an entire month of curriculum, organized and ready-to-use, in a giant yellow school bus box each month. When our box arrived, my daughter Ada Grace was the first to discover and unbox all the cool stuff. I was really excited about the way it is all organized. Each day's curriculum is packaged with all the activities in individual bags.
(It's a lot of plastic bags, but we have been able to reuse them for lots of other things around the house and eventually they make their way to our recycling bin, so I don't feel too guilty about it.)

Each month has a theme and this month the theme is all about the body. I ordered enough supplies for my oldest because he loves learning about the human body, but he has only been interested in participating in about 1/2 the activities with the two year old girls.
For our first week, we focused on body parts: head, arms, legs, hands and feet. Ada Grace and Elly are inseparable best friends, but they have very different personalities. Therefore, they both enjoyed different activities each day. In the end, there were some activities that all the kids just loved!

5 Favorites from this week:

1.     The Head to Toe CD - They loved dancing, playing freeze dance, and singing along with the songs on the disc. Not even my oldest could resist wiggling and giggling with the little ones as they danced around the living room!
2.     My Puppet Activity - All the children had fun making puppets from paper bags and construction paper. (I liked that I only had to provide glue and crayons.) After they finished building their puppets, my oldest organized an imaginative puppet show for me in the living room. Elly, my niece, enjoyed hugging and caring for her puppet for the remainder of the day. 
3.     X Ray - This was Noah's favorite activity! He even asked if he could keep the x ray pictures Mother Goose Time sent as a visual to display in his room. In this activity, the children explored bones in the body by creating skeletons with some neat punch out "bones," black construction paper, and chalk. Noah was focused on making his skeleton anatomically correct, while the girls just enjoyed pasting "bones" all over their papers and having too much fun with our glue sticks.
4.     Big Blue Pocket - Each child made a pocket with construction paper, yarn, crayons, and pom poms. Ada Grace insisted on coloring her pocket purple (her favorite) and Noah enjoyed gluing extra pom poms to his pocket. My favorite part? Having the children practice threading with the yarn in the pockets is a great way to build fine motor skills in preparation pencil grip and early writing.
5.     Head to Toe by Eric Carle - All of the children love the book! This story is great for teaching them about the way their bodies can move and the way different animals use their bodies. Not to mention, they all loved acting out the different animal movements. Can you wave your arms like a monkey or arch your back like a cat? They definitely thought it was a lot of fun to try! 

...stay tuned to learn more about Mother Goose Time and next weeks lessons about the five senses.