bugs, beads, bugs, beads

Two things ended up on our agenda today: bugs and beads.

• Lightening Bug Articles: Today’s Kids Post had a really interesting focus–lightening bugs.

Maddy and Owen were totally psyched about it because they caught–okay, and inadvertently smashed–tons of these little guys on July 4th and had a serious blast. If I weren’t so darn tired by 9 o’clock every night, I’d have them do it more often, but I just can’t keep these eyes open much later. . .

So our paper-reading today stretched far past breakfast time; we read parts into the afternoon. We particularly loved the article about the families who are counting lightening bugs for a program through the National Children’s Museum, the firefly facts, and the awesome Fireflies for Kids site on the NCM website. The game was tough for Maddy, but I think she’ll be up for trying it again. It’s totally worth checking out.

I’m hoping to head on over to the NCM sometime soon. My friend Jessica just told me about how cool it was when I saw her on Sunday.
(Thanks Washingtonpost.com for the photo above.)

• Beads: Maddy and Owen wanted to play with beads today. So before rest time, I brought out one of our bead boxes.

I’ve always found that when we string beads, Maddy and Owen talk non-stop. It’s a great time for me to work on my own listening skills and to help them work on theirs. I also try to model for them how to ask meaningful foll0w-up questions instead of just trying to talk over each other (like almost every young kiddo wants to do).

So we just strung beads, relaxed, and talked about fireflies, swim team, jewels, Madagascar, and anything else that came to mind.

Bead stringing is not only super-beneficial for working on fine motor skills, but beads of all types are awesome for talking about patterns, shapes, colors, and numbers.

One of our bead boxes.

That’s it for today–super-sneaky learning via the newspaper and some beading. Cheers!