Mouse Count!

We are still loving the Ellen Stoll Walsh books, Mouse Paint and Mouse Count.

I found this super cute mouse pdf  and lesson ideas, and printed out the mice.  I had plans to do another color mixing activity with Delaney, but once again, she had better ideas. We had just read Mouse Count about 3 times and Delaney decided to be the snake. She snagged my mice off the printer before I could, cut them apart and began looking for a jar like the snake has in the book. I love the phrase from the book that describes the mice as the snake collects them..."little, warm and tasty."

Yes, we do dress up as Minnie Mouse for school time. Minnie is a good little student. :)

I just happened to have an old mayonnaise jar that I had saved that worked perfectly for collecting mice. You know teachers...we can't bear to throw anything away that looks like it might have a purpose someday.

After she finished collecting mice, Delaney found some mice and bees and various small bugs to "eat".

Then, she moved on to shapes. We have ten shapes from the shape sorter, so we pretended they were the 10 mice from the book.

After that, we found random items from around the house, estimated how many we could fit in the jar, filled it up and then counted our results.

This was especially fun, and it was Delaney's first adventure with estimation.

She guessed that 5 alphabet magnets would fill the jar.

Did you know that you can fit 17 magnets in a mayo jar? Who knew?

I think we will start using the jar on a regular basis as our "Estimation Jar". I can fill it with all sorts of things, she can estimate how many, and then we can count, sort, measure, etc.

Math is so much fun when you are three. :)