"Katy - No - Pocket" - BFIAR Activities

 

How precious is this book, mamas?! Ah! We loved reading this book together! Ellie found the humor in the book even amidst Katy's dilemma of no pocket for Freddy. She found the mother bird hilarious that she would push her baby birds out of the nest. She thought that saucy owl was funny wanting his sleep. She even told me at random one day, "You are as dead as a post!" Quoting the wise old owl. Gee thanks, Ellie. 

We had a lot of fun playfully learning along with Katy! Here is what we got into:

Our bible verse for the story was Numbers 10:32 - "We will share with you all the things that the Lord gives us." 

We talked about kindness, serving others, and blessing others with the means God has provided us. He gives to us and we ought to love like our Lord and give to others as well in need. 

We did a heavy focus on Australia and Australian culture with this book because of the Kangaroo. We love a culture & geography study!

We had fun with art! I set out plates of paint with colors chosen by Ellie and instructed her to hop into the paint and across the butcher paper like a kangaroo! Such effortless fun! 

The dear man with the apron full of pockets in the story was porting many tools in his apron. Ellie and her daddy are always working with his tools on little projects and Ellie is really very good with them. Ellie has a tool box of her own with play tools and we used these for fun process art where she could drill, saw, stamp, roll, slide the tools along the paint and paper. I love how her work turned out.

For lunch one day, I fed Ellie a pita pocket cut to hold ham, cheese, and carrots. 

One day I made Ellie a grilled cheese with the famous Australian Vegemite spread. She was not a fan. Haha! I don't blame her. It was a very strong salty taste and smell. But in embracing Australian culture we just had to try it!

Ellie is not new to sewing but she is still working on the skill and she really enjoys it. I think it is a really important skill to have and I have been sewing since I was about 8 years old. I've hemmed my own pants, fixed Ellie's ballet shoes, made blankets, and countless things. It is a great skill to have up your sleeve. I love sewing alongside Ellie. We lit a candle, played Beethoven (who we are doing a composer study on at this time) and we sat and practiced her sewing skills to sew pockets on her own apron!

We bought a cute pink ruffled apron at Hobby Lobby. It already had one pocket. We chose fabric together and cut it to make pockets. Ellie showed me where she wanted them sewn on. She told me how many and we counted them out. She asked for 5 but when you are a tiny person with a tiny apron 5 is a big number and we didn't have space for five. But we had space for 2! None the less, we did still count out 5 squares we had cut. We subtracted two from the 5 that would fit and discovered if we subtract 2 from 5, we have 3 squares left over. She is totally digging basic addition and subtraction practice in every day living these days. 

Then we sat and I helped guide her needle and when she grew tired I'd work on it. She did an excellent job! So proud of her!

She stuck her penguin named "Cauliflower" in her pocket. So sweet!

Ellie enjoyed telling me the story by looking at the pictures. She recounts the story she has heard by the photos she sees and it is so cool!

We made an Australian supper with traditional Australian meals. I will tell you now, our dishes do not look pretty nor do they look like they do in Australia...but we tried! Haha! We tried and it did taste good at least! We made an Australian meat pie and Lamingtons. Lamingtons are a traditional dessert with a chocolate and coconut and powdered sugar topping. 

Ellie loves to cook! This week she learned to brown meat and she rocked it! 

For a game to continue learning her ABC's (phonetically) Ellie dressed as a kangaroo (she is 3 and wears a girls size 5. SO TALL - hence the super short legs and arms of the costume...)😂 And dressed as a kangaroo she hopped from lowercase to lowercase phonetic sound practicing visual recognition of the lowercases. We have played this as a bunny before with the Uppercase letters. She basically has those down and can write her name and other small things now so I've started introducing the lowercase letters a little more for her to see and know. Ellie loves a game and playing is the best way to learn! I told her she was like Katy (if Katy had a pocket) and that Joey in the pocket was like Freddy. 

We also took a field trip to Marietta, GA, where there is an authentic Australian owned and ran Australian Bakery & Cafe. We stopped in to buy the Vegemite Ellie detested and buy some lunch and dessert. Ellie ate a Pavlov which is allegedly the National dessert of Australia. She also had a meat pie....looked WAY better than ours...😂😂😂 and a kind older gentleman sitting near us bought us a Shepherd's pie. He said he comes there almost every day and knows the owners and he talked to us a bit about Australian culture as well. Then, Ellie and I read her book again at the table. We brought some home for daddy, too!

Ellie had a really cool Australian coloring book that she colored in this week. Each photo to be colored was of an animal of Australia with a really interesting a informative paragraph about each animal.

In studying the Australian culture, we read a lot of books about the culture and we discovered the Didgeridoo which I had heard of but never had a picture in the mind. So we decided to also find an audible recording of one being payed and it was very different and cool. So we danced along to it!

Here are our go along books. The Margaret Wise Brown, "Young Kangaroo," is an excellent addition for a go along story. It is enlightening as to why it is so important for a mother kangaroo to have a pocket (pouch).

Have fun with this, y'all! Or shall I say, Mates! 😂😍