Today's Camp Mommy was geared around construction and tools. Bug loves using his play hammer and the like; he called himself the "Fixer Kid" today. He has a play tool belt and hat set, as well as some construction play vehicles which worked perfect for this activity today. The items we used were some floral Styrofoam from Michaels ($5.99 for a pack of 5), some golf tees from Dollarama (they were our nails), some chalk (we already had that on stock), 2 small wooden blocks from Michaels that we already had which were our alphabet dice, and of course rocks (FREE!). Since Bug already had the construction play items, this activity cost us $7.00!
To prep for our outdoor Mommy and Bug time today, I took one of the Styrofoam pieces and wrote the alphabet from A through F sporadically in capital letters, 3 times with a black marker. Then I got Bug dressed in his pretend play equipment and we set to work to earn his name "Fixer Kid". I used the corresponding die with capital letters written on it from A through F. Bug proceeded to roll the die, and each letter he landed on, I got him to correctly identify it. Then I got him to find the matching letter on the Styrofoam block. There were three of each letter on the block, so once he identified one, we placed the tip of one of the golf tees directly on top of it. With the next step, Bug got to use his trusty hammer and bang the tee into the Styrofoam. The floral Styrofoam was bought instead of the regular white one for two reasons: a) it was cheaper; but b) it's actually softer so the golf tees went in quite nicely with the flimsy play hammer Bug owns. I got Bug to keep rolling the die and hammering away until we had a nailed in tee on each letter. If the letter rolled on the die no longer had a corresponding letter on the Styrofoam, we still identified it for letter recognition and then carried on. Here's a
video of Bug in action. He enjoyed this quite a bit...he loves his tools!
After the hammer fun, we moved on to his dump truck. I got him to fill the truck bed with rocks from our backyard while I wrote the numbers 1 through 6 on our cement pad. Under each number, I drew empty circles where the quantity matched the number above it. After Bug filled up his truck, he came over and unloaded the rocks in our "construction site". Then I randomly asked Bug to identity a number, just by asking him to show me the number I said. Once he correctly did that, he then filled each individual circle with one rock, counting while he did it until there were the right amount of rocks under each number. When that was done, he wanted to use another one of his tools and decided to saw through the Styrofoam block.
At this point, I'm pretty sure I had donated about 1/4 of my blood to the mosquitos, and I was thinking our Camp Mommy activity was done. Bug was not quite ready to put an end to our fun, and seeing as I love my son a lot more than my worry for anemia and scratching my skin raw, I thought of one more activity. I had a second die with me, lettered A through F but in lowercase. I made a rectangle with the chalk, dividing it into 6 sections; writing one letter in each. Then I gave Bug 10 rocks and the die, telling him each letter he rolled, he had to place one rock in the corresponding section on the ground. When we got to the last 4 rocks, we had 3 letters that did not have any rocks piled in the square; and Bug became quite worried. Once all the rocks were used, the letter B was the only one that didn't have a rock in it's section, and Bug was sad about that. I got him to go through each letter and count how many rocks accumulated for each one. He got a bit fixated with the zero rocks in the B section, and insisted we needed to get more rocks. I'm hoping when he's in school, he will take this behaviour towards kids and socializing; making sure no one is left out! Check out the fun Bug had doing the last portion of our Camp Mommy in this
video.
PS. I realize in the second video, I was using the plural form for die while talking about a singular one...I never indicated I had a degree in English! haha.
Word Document Link for Post
No comments:
Post a Comment