Tot School: Goats & Bridges

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Hey! I've kinda not been in the mood for school stuff for a while, and Mom's kinda not been keeping up with blogging, but we are finally back to share our adventures with the book The Three Billy Goats Gruff by Paul Galdone.  This is one of my absolute favorite books of all time!  I could read it over and over and over and over and over.

A couple of other books we read:

• Give a Goat by Jan West Schrock.  The cover and pictures of this book had me very intrigued.  The story itself was a little beyond me, but Mom loved the concept (a 5th-grade class decides to raise money to buy a goat for a girl in Uganda).
• The Goat Lady by Jane Bregoli.  Another book with great illustrations and a story that was a little beyond me right now.  It's about looking beyond a rundown barnyard and mismatched clothes to see a beautiful, caring person.

On to the activities (mostly from The Itty-Bitty Bookworm)...  First we made a goat.  Mom cut out the oval head, horn, and ears.  I drew a mouth and glued it all together, including google eyes and cotton balls for the "goatee."



I had to put markers on all the small, then medium, then large goats in this sizing exercise.


I played a goat folder game with Mom!  Flame wanted to play, too.  We drew number cards from a pile and had to go that number of spaces with our marker.  If we landed on a goat, then we got a goat card from a pile in the middle.  When the pile of goat cards is gone, whoever has the most goat cards wins!

(Mom's note - we are starting to introduce and do more board games now, which is good practice for counting and other skills.  Esmé's concentration typically doesn't last through a whole game, but that's okay for now.  For this game, we just reduced the number of goat cards in the middle to three to make for a fairly short game.)


We talked about goats - where they live, what they eat, what they look like, and what they do.  I got a little silly on the "look like" part.


Then Mom asked me to come up with words that rhyme with "goat."  I came up with several of these all by myself.  Like "wrote" - that was a good one!


Speaking of "wrote,"  I wanted to write my own chart.  So this is what I "wrote."


OK, enough goats.  Let's move on to the bridge stuff you can do with this book...  Here is my personal Bridge book.  I wrote "Swiper" on the front.  Yep, that totally says "Swiper."


Mom showed me how you "really" write "Swiper."  Then I drew a picture of his mommy - that's the big shape with the tail at the bottom.  The other shapes are highways.  The highway with lots of objects in the middle - those are hawks.  Big hawks and little hawks.  Yep.  Totally.


We made a play bridge with blue foam, brown ribbon for the bridge, green crepe streamers (Mom cut them up) for grass, and flower stickers for the meadow.  I trip-trapped my little goats across the bridge.


We also tried to make a bridge from craft sticks on another day.  That didn't go so well, even with Mom's help.  But I did make a nice scene by gluing green raffia grass, drawing a blue river, and gluing yellow pompoms on for flowers.


We also made a bridge from blocks.  This was tough - it was very easy to knock over.


Then we practiced positional statements.  Mom would say "The goat is UNDER the bridge," and I would put the goat UNDER the bridge, etc.


We couldn't do a study on bridges without making a food bridge, of course!  This is the material Mom gave me to work with.


She gave me an idea of how to put it together, and here I am starting to eat it up!  (Except for the celery sticks.  I don't eat celery sticks.)


We made a teeny tiny stick bridge to walk from the carpet in the living room to the kitchen floor.  I trip-trapped across that thing!  (We walked on bridges outside, too, when it wasn't raining.)


Moving on from bridges...  Now, there were flowers in that meadow the goats went to.  So I practiced some flower patterning in a floral foam rectangle.


And I did some flower painting - literally.


Speaking of painting, I also did some milk painting.  Since goats make milk, you know.  It was very tasty!  (Milk combined with food coloring.)


The end result was really quite bright and pretty.  Kind of like a bright watercolor.


We couldn't finish of this topic without some troll mischief!  Mom made a troll by clipping a troll cutout onto a big empty yogurt container.  Then we had to butt the troll off the "bridge" table by using our heads.  Except I didn't want to knock my head around, so I got Frog, aka Princess Fiona, to act as my stunt double.


And we did some journalling.  Here's what I've got to say:

"If I saw a troll, I would tell the troll, 'No!  No getting onto the bridge and eating up the billy goats - the three billy goats gruff!'  I would put this [princess wand] on the top of my head and I would KNOCK him into the rushing river when I am a billy goat.  If I was a troll, I would want to have goggles and flippers and a wappa? on my head.

"My favorite part of the story is the third billy goat.  The medium one - that's the second one.  I like the second goat.  I like to pet it and it won't move away when I see one at the zoo."

We did some letter review.  Here I am matching up pictures to the correct letters.


I glued my "X" collage together.


I went solo-riding on my 4-wheeler for the first time!  (There's video footage of this at the beginning of my Mother's Day video clip.)


I helped Pappa make smoothies...


I worked on stringing this star together.  It's WAY complicated!


And here's a snake that was actually made during my Wildlife Safari adventure, but I wanted to show it to you now, anyways.  Pipe cleaner, construction-paper circles with slits in them, and an oval construction-paper head.  Very cool!