Folk Music and St. Patrick's Day

This week we took time to explore Folk Music along with St. Patrick's Day celebrations. We started the week with the book St. Patrick's Day in the Morning by Eve Bunting. We explored Irish music with selections from The Gathering 2013: 25 Classic Irish Songs and Ballads and The Very Best of the Irish Tenors 1999-2002. We spent time this week with The Peter Yarrow Songbook: Let's Sing Together! We also watched the following selection from Riverdance and worked on dancing our own jig:

For our music activities, we used our instruments as well as our ribbon dancers. These were inspired by this site and were made with Mason jar rings and leftover Christmas ribbon. I had a couple of my girls try them out as crowns this week as well.

Our table activities included a rainbow number tracing activity found here, a gem transfer activity with a worksheet from this site, our bead pattern stacking toy, a tweezer activity with pom-poms and color matching with our folder game from last week.

Our craft activities and art activities were varied this week. We glued a rainbow of dots on a shamrock shape. We also printed shamrocks with bell peppers as found here. We took time to make rainbow crayons as inspired by Confessions of a Homeschooler. One of our favorite activities included coloring the outside of a clear plastic cup and watching it melt down to a disc in the oven. We extended the activity by using our new discs on the light table as well.

We also took time to revisit an art process with shaving cream and green food coloring to marbleize shamrock shapes.

Some of our sensory table activities included sailing green ice boats and containers, finding treasure in the rainbow rice and in the split peas and beans.

Free play at the light table included our colored straws. color paddles and gems.

Some of the highlights of the week included a balloon race inspired by this site, making a rainstick  out of paper towel tubes, tooth picks, duck tape and foam stickers along with cleaning pennies with a vinegar/ salt combination along with ketchup. We also used a graph from this site with Lucky Charms.

We also had a surprise visit from a trickster this week.

Join us next week as we explore Spring. Until then, have a great week!