Important Sensory Work

Most of the time, at the age we have, the process is way more important than the product.  Kids are learning how to color, how to glue, use scissors, figure out how things are put together, and what they like.  Now that school is back in session and we're doing curriculum again, we try to do crafts at least a few times a week.  There are days when a paper looks like the idea I had in my head, but honestly those are few and far between.  SO many times I send home a paper that looks like the kid did nothing, but there's almost always a back story.  Today I caught it on video.  Mater's woolly sheep is not so woolly, but there's a reason, and he learned a lot about the concept of "sticky" today!

See, here are the finished products.  You can see that Tigger took this activity to heart.  (top right.)  He glued, he pulled cotton, he stuck with wild abandon.  There's enough wool for a whole flock of sheep on that paper.  (And now I'm wondering about the collective noun for sheep because flock seems wrong.  Herd?  Hmmm.... Kindle?  Murder?  Oh hey!  Look what google says!)

Answer:

The collective noun is a flock of sheep.

His father has a large flock of sheep.

Other collective nouns for sheep are a drift, a down, a drove, a fold, a folk, a trip, a mob, a hurtle, or a herd.

A group of sheep is called a flock. A larger group can be called a band or mob.

And you know, this is how our days go on a regular basis.  We start out to do one thing, and all of a sudden we're googling answers to their questions and watching you tube videos of sheep getting shorn.  Anyway.  Back to the art!

So Mater's is on the bottom left, and looks like he was napping through the whole craft time.  Not the case!  There is a lot of dried glue on there, since he had a good time working with the glue stick.  Then he tried the cotton balls, and madness ensued.

Oh PLEASE upload, Mr. Video!

It's the best minute and twenty of my morning.  He goes to grab the cotton, but his fingers are so gluey that he can't wipe it off onto the paper and there's a lot of flailing and grunting in the attempt to remove wool from fingers.  Then he tries to wipe it on Lady's paper with no success, and then tries to eat the glue stick, and then throws the glue stick and gets angry.  At that point I stopped filming to help him wash.  :)  

So that's why I send home papers for the littles even when it looks like they didn't do anything.  Learning is always happening.

We're doing Big Red Barn for the next few weeks or till they're tired of it.  We've used this curriculum before, back when Hercules and Tigger were our littlest ones.  I think they were seven and ten months old and none of our other kids were born or here yet.  It's fun to go back and do it again with a different bunch of kids.  They're all loving it just as much.