Kangaroos

This week my daughter wanted to learn about kangaroos.  So that's what we did.  We had an idea of a project we wanted to do and shows we would watch to incorporate our theme.  The weather was really nice this week so we got a lot of outside time. Even lunch outside a few days! My son was pumped we were able to get the water table out and use it more than once!  

Monday we read a few books on Epic! and watched a Wild Kratts episode and a Curious George episode.  We read "Over in Australia" by Marianne Berkes and illustrated by Jill Dubin.  If any of you know the song "Over in the Meadow," you can sing this book is to that tune.  It had a lot of great info at the end of all the different animals that live in Australia.  My daughter LOVED this, we read/sung it twice.  We also read "My First Animal Library: Kangaroos" by Mari Schuh.  We were hoping to find out in this book how far a kangaroo can jump, but it wasn't included in the info in this book.  Epic! also had a National Geographic Kids video on the Eastern Gray Kangaroo.  The Wild Kratts episode we watched is called "Kickin' it with the Roos" from season 1 episode 19.  The Curious George episode we watched is called "Monkey Down Under/Bright Lights, Little Monkey" from season 7 episode 1.  We watch Wild Kratts on Amazon Prime and Curious George on Hulu.  We also watched The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh on Disney+.  We watched the "Party Poohper/The old SwitcheRoo" episode from season 1 episode 22.  

Tuesday we watched the Read Along with Michelle Obama on our PBS Kids YouTube subscription. Mrs. Obama read "Oh the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss and "Can I be Your Dog" by Troy Cummings.  I appreciate that she read "Oh the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss, but I'm not really a fan of that one.  I get it, it's graduation season... I always hated that it was always the speech that was given at graduations.  That's just my opinion though.  I still have the copy that was given to me for my high school graduation from a family member.  My kids spaced out during this one or played elsewhere in the house.  They listened a little bit more to the second book.  That was a really cute story about pet adoption.  And Mrs. Obama's special guest was her two dogs!!!  So fun!  

Wednesday we did Laurie Berkner's #berknerbreak on her Facebook page.  Today's theme was Colors!  I need to remember to get my kids to grab instruments before Ms. Laurie begins.  Both of them scrambled to pick something quick for the hello song she does.  They were ready.  My son picked the Fisher Price piano and my daughter picked her microphone.  They had a lot of fun this week with her show.  We knew a song she played today, "Little Red Caboose."  That makes it more fun for my kids when they know the songs.

Thursday we ventured out to Target.  I try to recycle the store-drop-off plastics.  Since the lock-down started I've accumulated two big shopping bags full of said plastics.  We also had a return to bring in that I had before the lock-down.  We were able to do the return, no problems.  They had the recycling bins covered and had a sign that they weren't doing customer recycling at this time.  Bummer... I'll have to check at other stores if they're accepting store-drop-off plastics.  After that we went through the car wash, always a good time.  

Friday we did the Metropolitan Museum of Art's story time or Storytime with the Met. Again, the kiddos had a hard time focusing.  But they sat in the same room and hopefully listened to the story even if they weren't paying attention to the TV screen.  They did "Sparky" by Jenny Offill.  We own this book, which might be the only reason my kids stayed in the room with me.  At the end the staff member shows their selection of artwork that goes along with the story they chose.  "Sparky" is about a sloth and the staff member chose a print.  It had animals, including a sloth, dressed in human clothes in a scene.  So great that they show kids artworks from the museum to go along with the story they read.  I really enjoyed it even if my kids were having a hard time focusing.  

We had been so busy with other things we never got to our kangaroo project until Friday.  We found out that Kangaroos can jump up to 25 feet!  So we decided we would use our measuring tapes and mark on our hall floor how far 25 feet was. With a piece of tape we made a starting line. We measured from there where the 25 feet was.  Then we took turns jumping and marking our jumps with tape with our names on them.  Then we measured how far we all jumped and compared them to the kangaroo jump.  Boy did we fall short!  A kangaroo jump is pretty impressive when you see it compared to your three foot jump.  

Hope you all had a good week.  Hope you come back next week to see what we've been up to.  Thanks for reading!