FIAR Make Way for Ducklings

As it's spring and new life is appearing everywhere I thought we'd row Make Way for Ducklings. We saw lots of ducklings at the Wetlands Centre on Tuesday which was a great introduction to this book. I'll write under the photos later - I'm off to buy Blu Tack and elastic bands right now, (I know, the excitement of the purchase is just killing me!!!). I don't think the photos have appeared in the order I wanted them to, but nevermind, I'm sure they give you the general idea!!!

MATHS. We grouped snails, ladybirds and peanuts together under pictures of the 8 ducklings to figure out how much food Mr and Mrs Mallard had to find for their babies. This was great. Sylvie really got into it and seemed to enjoy the visual aspect of the project. I added some plus signs so that she could see she'd done a huge big sum! Sylvie was really proud of what she'd done which was nice to see. We faffed around doing some sums using pictures of the mini beasts eaten by the ducklings and some plus and equals signs. It took a while for Sylvie to grasp what was going on - she seems to guess the answers instead of looking at what's in front of her which drives me crackas and leads to, suprise suprise, the wrong answers!!! She does this with most things - paticularly when she's reading, however, she's just starting so it's hardly a big deal it just frustrates me a bit. Annabelle loved the tiddlywinks and Sylvie couldn't really work with them because the little one was stealing them all the time. I felt a bit sorry for Bea. She wanted to join in but she just didn't grasp what we were doing at all. In the end she went outside to play and found a dead pigeon under the garden bench. Er, yes.... that's another story, (bloomin' cat!).

The resources we used for the days activities.

Bea looking for America on the globe. After doing this we looked for America in our atlas then we tried to find Boston. Everyone can join in with this and they seem to love looking at maps. There's so much to discover! I've not photographed us drawing a map from our house to the shops! It's a dead easy route so it didn't take long and wasn't too taxing. We used the North, South, East, West legend and also had a good talk about left and right, (Sylvie grasps this, Bea's clueless!). I now know that given the opportunity, Sylvie will be able to find her way to the shops!!!!

Before taking this photo we used tiddlywinks to figure out how many weeks it takes for a duck egg to hatch. We decided that it takes 30 days then we discussed how many days there are in a week... Sylvie counted out four sets of 7 days, (Monday through Sunday) with two left over then wrote how many days and how many weeks it takes for a duck egg to hatch in her little folded book. I think Bea was off colouring in at this point.

We had a selection of duck eggs and hen eggs in the kitchen which was a great opportunity to compare the two! How do they look? How do they feel? The girls decided that the duck egg was much bigger then the hen egg with a bigger yolk, (more for the developing chick to feed on) and that the egg white was runnier in the hen's egg than in the duck's egg. Annabelle had a right old splodge in the hens egg - urgh!

The girls cut up a waterlife magazing to make a collage... Bea loved the flamingos....

Then we found this fab picture of the inside of a duck egg!!!

We ended our row by labelling a Mallard duck. All good! After this our friend Emma came over so we headed to the garden centre for a play then we came home and did a little bit of the Moffat's Girls, 'Ready to Read' which Sylvie really enjoyed. Bea was happily playing with her toys at this point. The girls had an early tea then went out in the street to play for a bit before having a bath then bed. I think we all enjoyed today. It was quite stressful at first because Sylvie wasn't engaging at all, Bea was trying to do everything but sturggling and Annabelle was climbinb all over the table, standing on everything and basically being a bit of a pain but I stuck with it and things eventually settled down. We covered quite a lot of ground but it didn't take that long and it wasn't that intense. Today, if the rain holds off, we're going to head to the Wetlands Centre for an hour to check out the chicks! This will be a kind of field trip.