Keeping My Little Butterfly Busy

While all my US friends are enjoying an extended 'Summer Break' from school, here in Australia, we are about to mark our half-way point through the school year with a two week Winter term break. It is chilly, raining and some of us have that half-way-through-the-year depletion of mojo and motivation. 

My daughter's school has a three week break. What joy! Apparently, at the final assembly for the term, she was the  only child in the school to be on the verge of depression at the impending 'holidays'. We love school you see. So being a good mother, I promised her that I would play schools with her. And it was the ONLY way I could get her to stop crying when leaving school on Friday. 

True to form, 8.15am Monday morning, she reminded me. Out came the easel. We dusted her off (she has been packed away for two years after I packed up my real classroom - sniff sniff)... Dear daughter was insistent that we have 'real' school stuff.

A little bit of handwriting got this tired mother off and into the swing of our 'play'. The letter 'c' was decided on. Hey, this is pretend school, we can make the curriculum as we go. The 'c' page featured a very pretty Cinderella - that was reason enough for us. It also led us to read a caterpillar beginning-reader. 

See - I told you - 8.15 am - still in PJs!

'Teacher" was quickly back into her groove and decided we needed to consult some 'fact' books and find out about these caterpillars. These books helped and we also talked about features of non-fiction texts. 

We then drew some pictures to represent the life cycle of the caterpillar we had read about. 

And after consulting the ever-wonderful Pinterest, made a paper plate life cycle.

I devised a quick caterpillar game (hey, I had only had one cup of tea). With two dice, We rolled, added and drew! 

Keeping track of which numbers we had already played (only needing to draw them once). 

It was a very busy morning, and with no classroom management to deal with, I have to say, we got a LOT covered. Although I have to hand it to the home-school mothers out there - you deserve a medal. I am much more 'at home' teaching a tribe! 

And just in case you would like to work on a caterpillar theme one day - download this FREE 'Trace, Shade & Graph' worksheet. I whipped it up ready for our lessons tomorrow! 

Thanks so much for stopping by!