Our week with the Kangaroo

*** My apologies for the lack of pictures in this post. Apparently it is not meant to be! At the original time of posting there were many Blogger issues. A month later as I am adding this update, I just sat for over an hour adding them again and it still isn't working. The pictures just showed them having a lot of fun and hopping around in aprons like Kangaroos :-) ***

Last week we had a fun and casual week learning about Kangaroos and Australia. We are really doing things lightly this summer, not really adding in a lot of extra pre-planned lessons to the unit or lapbooks, but simply reading great books, having fun acting them out and watching videos that bring the subject to life and going with the girls' delight. I have also been allowing myself some time during the day to get caught up on other personal things and household cleaning, and giving them a lot of extra free time to play and use their imaginations. I am so excited and impressed with how much their creativity has grown over the past few weeks! The elaborate stories they come up with (that all seem to involve different parts of the stories we have been reading), how well they are playing together and the imaginary worlds they create for themselves -- it is just so much fun to listen to and witness!

For the actual unit, however, this week we read Does a Kangaroo have a Mother, too?, Katy No Pocket, What shall we do, Blue Kangaroo?, and The Little Einsteins' Australian Adventure. We also looked through a few non-fiction books on Australia, koala bears, and kangaroos and found the continent on the globe. For supplemental videos we watched a few cartoons that came on with Kangaroos (it has been awhile and I can't remember them all but they were found with our lovely TIVO keyword finder -- I love that tool!), and some old videos my mom had saved of the Disney show Dumbo's Circus and the Winnie the Pooh show that had the people in costumes --do you remember that?!? Anyway, on Dumbo's Circus, there is a Koala character who talked about his love for eucalyptus leaves and Winnie the Pooh, of course, has Kanga and Roo! Yes, this was just a fun excuse to break out these old tapes, but the girls loved them!

Finally, we ended the week wearing our own aprons like Katy does in Katy No Pocket. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is about a mother kangaroo who doesn't have a pocket to carry her baby in and she is very upset. She goes to several animals to learn how they carry their babies around and the wise owl (there is also an Owl character in Winnie the Pooh, lol) tells them to go to the city to buy a pocket. When they arrive, they meet a very kind man who was wearing an apron FULL of pockets for all of his tools. He generously gives her his apron and Katy is overjoyed to finally be able to carry her child, as well as a few other animal babies, in the pockets! So, the girls got to choose an apron from our drawer and then we chose an animal for each of them to be their baby . . . we do not have any toy kangaroos, so we went with a dinosaur and a beanie baby creature (we think it is a dog?). The girls hopped all over the messy playroom to see if their babies would stay in their pockets. It was very cute!

So there you have it. . . a simple and fun week that exposed them more to Australia and the various animals that live there. We would have read Wombat Stew as well, but we had just read it for fun a few weeks back, so we just talked about it again for this unit.