As simple as adding a puppet...

We love borrowing puppets from the library and often we'll get books that accompany whichever animal we're getting.
Puppets can make stories come to life. Recently we read an adorable book called, "Emma's Turtle" by Eve Bunting, with a turtle puppet. In the story, the pet turtle gets out of his pen and imagines he is traveling to all sorts of strange countries, when in reality, he has never left the backyard. It's an adorable tale, and we used it to review and explore our geography afterward. We were able to take our turtle puppet from the page to the map, to the globe, to our backyard.

Our Funny Farm

You can see from my Just Ducky post how small our ducks were just a month ago when we first got them. They are so much fun to watch grow and play (and waddle). The kids have had fun this week with duck puppets borrowed from the library, as well as a variety of duck books and stories. Our favorite fun story by far was, "Mr. Duck Means Business" by Tammi Sauer. We did similar activities surrounding our chickens this year with puppets, stories and egg experiments. You can read all about that here. We are having a fun year growing our little backyard farm.

Simple Sock Puppets for less

Pre-Christmas shopping in the craft section, I noticed "make your own sock puppet" kits, retailing for $20. It included 3 fuzzy socks and all the "fixin's" like google eyes, foam paper, string, puffs, etc. In other words, everything that any mom who ever does crafts with her kids should pretty much have on stock already, save for the fancy socks. Man, they really jack up the price on people who aren't naturally craft-inclined, don't they? I went over to the sock aisle, found fuzzy slipper socks on clearance, 4 pairs for $2 (making 8 sock puppets, instead of 3) and stocked up on normal crafts (in greater quantities than the kit gave) and put them together in a bag as a gift for my kindergartner and toddler to open, all the materials to make their own sock puppets for the bargain price of under $7. Oh, and another FYI- tops of cheap mop heads from the dollar store make great hair for puppets, too. We made some with my daughter's friend on a playdate after Christmas, and if I had bought the kit, that would have already been the end of the supplies. Thankfully we still have many more on the way. Here's my daughter's pink monster gal pal and my son's goofy zebra friend.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, for our house, it was definitely the chickens. We've had our chickens for over three months now, and we just this week got our first eggs laid! Needless to say it was an exciting event over here.
Since we have Bantams, the eggs they lay are quite a bit smaller than regular size chickens, (2 bantams equal approximately 1 regular) which has also made for further science experiments as we measure, compare and contrast our fresh Bantam eggs with store-bought regular eggs.


In honor of our first eggs, we've done some fun chicken activities this week.

Grandma brought over the first two eggs! We got a total of 5 this week (and found out we have a lot more roosters than we thought- uh-oh!)


Borrowed chicken puppets from the library and just-for-fun books like "Henny Penny" and "Big Chickens Go to Town" (such a fun read, especially with the puppets!)



Here are some fun sites we used, Chicken and Hen Theme, also The Little Ren Hen is awesome on the Starfall site, and gave the kids some interactive phonics reading time on the computer.
Worksheets for the kids, my kindergartner reviewed "Ch" and my toddler had fun with Humpty Dumpty activities.



The most fun by far, was the egg experiments we did!! Along with measuring the differences between Bantam eggs and "regular" eggs, we also did a really great density experiment where we sank an egg in plain water, and added salt to the same amount of water to make the egg float! We did predictions for water and water & salt for both kinds of eggs and then tested our hypothesis for each. It was so much fun! We also examined the eggs with a magni-scope to see if we could see the pores on the shells. It was great.








Here are the two sites I used to guide us along for this: Egg Fun and Egg Magic.

And here are a few more pictures, of our coop and our chickens shortly after we got them.





After our egg experiments, my daugther wanted to continue exploring what foods she could float in water, starting with an orange and an apple, lol. Don't forget the lessons don't have to end when the pages do!


For more related adventures we've had in the last few months, see my Where Things Come From post.