We're going on a Safari

We are going on a safari!
Hello and Happy New Year!
This month has been so busy! My husband came home from deployment and I wanted to make sure I was fully here to help get him back into the swing of being back in the fold of the family. But that meant a ton of my projects were put to the side. So I am going to do a full overview of the month of January and going on a safari!
This month the children started off with a grand adventure of learning about the continent of Africa. I am going to break this post up into the 4 themes of the month. It will give an overall clear picture of what we did and how we worked on it.
Getting Ready for Safari
For this theme we discussed the equipment needed for the safari. The two projects that the children were most interested in were the Passport and the packing list game. These two things are something these children have dealt with a ton in their short lives. They are military children and they have packed to move and travel basically since they were born. Playing a game that they could directly relate to their experience was super fun and tested their memories.
They also loved the passport art project. But while they all have passports, they loved it because they were able to actually put stamps in them all by themselves. This gave them a sense of accomplishment.

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(Pictures)
Wild Safari Animals
This weekly theme covered a few of the animals that live in the safari. This week while having interesting subjects was a little bit of a struggle for the kids. The art projects were not as engaging and seemed to require too much adult input. These types of projects seem to turn the children off and keep their interest less. They love projects where they have total control and build from top to bottom and a lot of these just were not doing that this month. But we did take the time to expand and learn about the animals more in-depth and watch the LION KING!!! The rhino horn was especially not an exciting project for them. But they did love making the lion mask and the zebra.

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Life in the Grasslands
This was a fun week! We found recipes from Ghana that we want to try during snack or lunch one day. We watched a video on street food in Ghana and went over the fact that Africa is a continent and that there are other countries on the continent. We go over this every Tuesday for Geography Tuesday but it doesn’t hurt to go over the information again whenever the situation presents itself. I am proud to say that they all love to learn about places on the map. We do not go too in-depth because it’s a lot of information to take in. BUT I firmly believe that children should be exposed to many different types of experiences and information. It is the building blocks of other information.

Until next time,
Live long and Keep Teaching!        
​Ms. Tessie