Animals in an Orchard

This week we got to learn about different animals that live in an orchard!

The first animal we learned about was a porcupine.

Miss M really loved making her pokey porcupine puppet. I showed her some pictures of porcupines and we talked about what might be dangerous about a porcupine (their quills). Then I set out some items that are pokey (hair brush, fork, etc) and let Miss M explore how each item feels. We talked about how porcupines have sharp quills on their body to protect them from predators (other animals who would want to eat them). Then she helped and we made our puppet!

See mom! :)

I’m glad I was quick this time and got a pic of our final product. Wasn’t the greatest, but you can see it

Aaaaand then she took the toothpicks off and thought it was really funny.

Then we watched a super cute video on Youtube of a porcupine eating a pumpkin. It makes the cutest noises!

 

This video is just adorable and Miss M loved it. I think we watched it at least 3 times.

Next we learned about bugs in the orchard.

We played “where is the ladybug?” and this was a big hit too. I’d give Miss M a photo card and encourage her to follow my directions I tried to give her (“raise it up, put it down”, etc). She didn’t follow all my directions but she still did pretty well. Then I got out some pieces of fruit and I’d put the ladybug under a piece of fruit and ask Miss M where the ladybug is.

She had lots of fun with this and loved playing with the fruit too and naming them. She knew apple but learned banana (nana) and orange.

We also learned about raccoons.

We got to make a raccoon mask that Miss M just loved. I invited her to come over and color the mask and draw white stripes on the tail with some white chalk. She was very proud of her mask.

Looky!

Then we played “what’s in your tree?”

First, I filled all the game board spaces with the game cards. We would take turns spinning the spinner and trying to identify the color. Miss M kept wanting to call all the colors “green” but when I would correct her, then she’d say the right color. Then we’d try to find a game color of the same color that the spinner was on and pick it off the tree. We’d continue to spin and remove the game cards until they were all gone.

We found another video online about a mama raccoon teaching her baby to climb a tree.

Another really good video that Miss M thought was hilarious was this video I found of the top 10 funniest raccoon videos.