Rowing "The Tale of Peter Rabbit"

The week of September 3rd marked the start of our school year. I hadn't planned on starting until the following week, but the kids were begging to get going. Who am I to deny them? Since I didn't want to mess my plans up. I decided to do Tuesday and Thursday the first week and Monday, Wednesday, Friday the next week. That way we get our full first week in, and we can ease back into our school schedule.

For the first week, we decided to row "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" by Beatrix Potter. I LOVE this book. There are so many things to learn from it's characters. The kids love it too.

Most of our activities are right out of the Five In A Row Volume 2 manual, so I won't go into those much. The manuals are very much worth every penny spent. (Though, I didn't have to spent anything on mine since I found them at a local FREE store.) I really wanted to share with you the sensory bin I came up with.

What you will need (cost):

Bin large enough to hold everything (free since I had it at home)

Potting soil ($0.97 at Walmart)

Seed packets ($0.10 a piece on clearance)

"Silk" flowers ($0.50 a bunch on clearance, I bought 3)

Shovels and other play things ($1.60 a piece on clearance)

As you can see, I didn't spend much on this bin. You don't need to really. I plan my sensory bins a few weeks out, so I can look through clearance isles and 2nd hand stores. I just make a list of everything I am going to need and keep my eyes open. If something proves to be too hard to find, I can usually find something else to fit in the bin, or just change the bin idea.

My kids LOVED it! Once we finished reading the book and doing our learning activity for the day, I brought this bin out. I put it on the floor with a large vinyl tablecloth underneath. (That made for very easy clean up. I found it at Goodwill for $2) This bin kept the younger two (ages 3 and 5) busy while I continued teaching my older two.

I left it out for maybe 30-45 minutes, then picked it up. I have found, with my kids, that if I leave things out for them too long, it will just become a huge mess. They were usually done playing with it by this time anyway. I wouldn't take it away from them when they were in the middle of playing. That is serious business. I would just pay attention to when they were loosing interest and put it up at that point.

We had lots of fun rowing "The Tale of Peter Rabbit." We hope you do too!