Sunday, January 27, 2008

Turning a potential tantrum into a phonics lesson

Yesterday afternoon my parents & I took the girls to Rock Creek Park Nature Center we chose that one because one of the sites I looked on said they had an interactive display that let children experience life like the early settlers in this area lived which, since the girls have shown an interest in "the olden days", I thought they'd enjoy. We never found that aspect of it, if it exists, but the girls did enjoy th puzzles & books for a little while, an indoor sandbox with some animal footprint things to either hide in the sand & find or to use to make footprints in the sand, the turtles, the computer, etc. After we left there, since we were nearby we decided to go over to the National Zoo for a little while & check out some of the indoor animals on a day that it was likely to not be crowded (since it was COLD!!!!). We have a FONZ pass that gets us free parking, so stopping by for an hour or so works LOL. When Mom told the girls we were going to the zoo, they decided it was a "secret" and we weren't going to tell Mommy where we were going. So I played along, but then L accidentally said where we were going partway there, and despite my attempt to act like I hadn't heard (did you say we were going to play in goo?!?! That doesn't sound good!!), she decided she wanted to just tell me and A was upset about that and it was going downhill fast until mom came up with idea that the girls could SPELL the word zoo and then Mommy wouldn't be able to figure out what they were talking about. This led to a nice discussion about the oo sound, as I determined, after the kids spelled z-o-o that we must be going to the z-ah-ah once we got there & I acted appropriately surprised that we were at the zoo, we did abit of reinforcing of the concept by going over various other oo words, asking them what b-o-o, m-o-o, etc spelled.

The zoo trip itself was a huge success, not only did we get to see a sleeping armadillo again (which we've had surprisingly good luck with overall), but one was awake & running around in circle right near the glass. So we stood and watched that for a long time, and one of the volunteers had an armadillo shell (A can tell you what it's called, but I have no clue how to spell it . . . carapas?) that we got to touch (it feels kind of like finger nails if you wondered LOL). And then as we continued through the small mammal house L was fascinated by the naked mole rats although she insisted they were hamsters since they live in tubes that look kind of like the stuff people put in hamster cages.

We also spent quite awhile watching the hippos & elephants, before it was time to go.

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