My 3.5 year old daughter found this book quite intriguing. For one reason - it features a pocketbook. A special pocketbook. Ellie LOVES her pocketbook and is always carting it everywhere with her. She has even also once left hers behind at our music class as does the girl in the book on the bus.
Our bible verse for this story was Galatians 5:22-23, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law."
I started this week of this book by gifting Ellie her own new little green pocketbook. She was so happy!! It was empty and she too wondered what she might fill it with. She ultimately filled it with her water and baby doll clothes. She told me she needed some money for it but I told her I'd hold the money! However; her interest in money with different rows did present an opportunity this week for learning too. We will get to how we utilized money play later.
I took Ellie to town on one wonderful 71F day to our beautiful small downtown area with local shops. We stopped for an ice cream, shopped local, and she donned her purse and showed it off the entire time.
I created a sensory bin with rainbow color dyed rice, a bus toy, "little people" figurines, a keychain, and laminated coins (for a bus fee) with her letters of her name on each coin that she could find as I'd buried them, and she could piece together to spell out her name.
We revisited her strong sewing skills to sew together two laminated and cut out green purses together to make one actual pocketbook. I had punched holes around the purse and gave Ellie some yarn which she sewed by herself and tied off at the end by herself to get those fine motor skills and sewing skills in. Patience, attention span strengthening, prideful purposeful work! She could not wait to show Daddy when he came home from work! She even displayed problem solving when the yarn would fray by snipping off the end of her string and then she fetched tape to tape the end for an easier sew. She had learned these things one time long ago and remembered how to solve the problem herself and managed and took care of issues by herself!
I had hoped back in May of 2020 when I planned this row for this very week that life would be normal again and I could cart her down the road to Clemson to ride the bus system on campus which I know and trust since we live in the country and buses are not common for our greater majority of our population around here. I wanted to ride with her around Clemson University and stop at the student center for ice cream and take her shopping, but I had to improvise and that is ok. So we did our field trip downtown Easley, and then I took two large boxes, zip ties, and a little paint and made a bus for her to play in imaginatively at home and it suited her just fine! I also let her take some paint and practice writing by painting on the bus. She writes by pen her name very well. Painting gives a new hand skill and is more difficult when painting a name as clear as possible. She did great. Also, I am introducing her to writing new letters and numbers now, now that she has her name writing down. so; I let her paint the word, "Bus" on the bus, too. I had to teach her and help her of course because how else do you learn?! Haha. She liked doing that and then she wanted to keep painting on the bus. I let her make it her own. Then, when it was dry, she got to ride around and around and around. She carted her babies around also.
One way that I incorporated more learning about money with Ellie using this book was to create a fee to ride the bus! I've been teaching her mostly about coins to start. I've been teaching her the material of each coin, the size difference, value difference, the presidents. To keep it simple and just reinforce what she had been learning, I told her the bus ride fee was 1 cent. I asked for a penny. She ran to the coin purse and fetched a penny!!
Another way I incorporated money math into this row was by using a go along book of "Benny's Pennies." I liked taking the idea of needing to pay a price to ride the bus and we need to know how to be prepared to pay! Using a dip tray with quadrant sections, Ellie and I together sorted and separated quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. We discussed each coin and it's physical and financial characteristics. Then using the bowl in the center of the platter, we counted how many of each coin we had. So we got to practice regular counting. I am not teaching her to count money at value yet because she has not got the foundation to do that yet and there is absolutely no rush to do that. Just teaching her for now that each coin has a value and what that value is. I was actually surprised how much attention and interest she invested into this playful lesson.
Another concept I really wanted to pull out of this row was primary colors and mixing them to make secondary colors. We used other go along books to help with this lesson. We focused primarily on how to make the color green for the green pocketbook. Expounding upon that, we made orange and purple, then focused on how to make darker and lighter shades of these colors. We did this playing messily with paints, reading books as Ellie painted, being silly, experimenting, and answering her questions by doing. We also learned more about color mixing by making a rainbow water xylophone. We've probably all done this. It taught Ellie about water volume, pitch, and also about how to mix colors to make the orange we didn't have in our food colors. After playing musically for a while, she began asking me questions again about what colors do you mix to make this color? And so she separated the colors into primary colors and we sang a made up on the spot jaunty little song about how the colors mix to make a certain color with each color combo we did. She tapped the glasses while I sang and taught with my song.
We did two different breakfast ideas to go with the book. One morning we made green pocketbook pancakes decorated with chocolate chips and bananas as the straps.
Another morning I made her cheesy eggs, decorated with gel food coloring for windows, and chocolate doughnuts for wheels. My creations don't look professional by any means but hey, they got the job done and she liked them! Haha!
I also made her a little purse sized calendar to go in her little green pocketbook. This was awesome and simple. I just printed, laminated, cut out, and tied the calendar together. It is a great tool for teaching the obvious months of the year, days of the week, and numbers. We referenced daily and will continue to! She liked this because it was "hers" and that made this special.
Go along books:
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