On the Go! (Transportation Unit)

For the past week and a half, we have been talking about transportation and space. Most of our games have been space-related, but our crafts and activities have been about transportation. Of course, we are on-the-go a lot, so just going about our normal week we are able to talk about transportation and vehicles. This is also a good unit to precede our annual trip to Kansas. One thing that I really enjoy about homeschooling is how the units can be fully integrated into our lives. Last Sunday, Darren and Kyrie built a large train track in the rec room while Degen found his favorite trains to push around. The kids were just having fun, but they were also learning about how trains go!

We LOVE food at our house, especially sweet treats, so I love coming up with food crafts that fit our units. Our crafty snack for our transportation unit was Twinkie Racers. This was super-easy and lots of fun! We started with a Twinkie as the body of our car and I used kitchen shears to halve 2 marshmallows (this gives you one sticky side). Kyrie added the marshmallow wheels to the side of the Twinkie and stuck in 2 m&ms as the headlights. Then I used the scissors to cut off just the end of one more marshmallow (again to make it sticky), and Kyrie used food markers to make her marshmallow driver's head.

Here is a bit more of the integration that I love so much! Taking advantage of a beautiful, fall afternoon I took the kids to the zoo. We spent quite a bit of our time at the zoo's new "Polar Playground" near the new polar bear exhibit. Part of the playground is a tundra explorer. Degen loved 'driving!'

Okay, so I told you how much we like sweet treats! Well, lucky for Kyrie that I had another great transportation activity involving one of her very favorite things: candy! I picked up some gummy rings at the store in preparation for our unit, but didn't quite know what I was going to do with them. Then I remembered that the book Bears on Wheels (Berenstain) was on our reading list. The light bulb went on and our next trip to the store I grabbed a bag of gummy bears. Kyrie was familiar with the book, which involves bears & wheels in varying numbers, from previous readings. I gave her gummy rings (wheels) & bears and told her that her task would be to use the candy to recreate the action in the book. She did a great job counting and using reasoning skills! This was a super-fun activity, especially at its completion when she was allowed to eat a few of the treats!

I'm always on the look-out for art & craft ideas to support our learning. Several months ago, I caught a clearance sale at one of the craft stores and bought a few things that I knew I could use. This purchase included 2 wooden vehicles. Both kids love to paint, and it's always fun to paint something other than paper, so they really enjoyed doing this project. I love how much concentration they put into this project (Degen, too, for a 1 1/2 year old). I was really impressed with how Kyrie took her time to attend to the details, carefully choosing her colors and being careful with the brushes. This was a great end to our unit!

These are just a few fun crafts from our previous "At the Pond" unit. I'm always tweaking and rearranging my units and next year, I will combine this unit with our Camping unit. The first craft is a frog Kyrie made by painting a plastic tub then adding eyes and pipe cleaner tongue with glue. The second craft is a 3-D paper pond. I used star, heart & circle paper punches that we folded and decorated or cut to make lily pads, grass, frogs & turtle shells. Kyrie likes this pond so much that she keeps it on her dresser.