O Day: Orange, Oceans, Octopus, and Doughnuts :)

For O Day, I started out reading Lincoln and Nathan (and Ivan and Kaitlyn) one of my newest favorite board books called Ollie the Stomper by Olivier Dunrea. It's a simple and cute book and captures the nature of toddlerism almost perfectly. Check it out!

Then we went into the kitchen for a little practice making O's. I had cut out two big pieces of cardboard from a recent box I received in the mail, and drawn a big black O on each one. I remember loving to paint with sponges when I was in pre-school, and I haven't had Linc try it out yet. Today was the day. I gave both boys a piece of sponge and squirted some orange paint onto a plate and told them to try their hand and making orange O's. Lincoln did really well with his, except he wanted to fill them in after, so his look more like orange circles, but it's all good.

To introduce our next topic, I played the song "Way Down Here Beneath the Ocean" off of the Disney Silly Songs CD, and had them try to pick out the O word. They had a little bit of a hard time with this, since I hadn't told them the word before hand, but after a few clues from Suzy and I, they got it. Then I asked them what kind of things live in the ocean. Lincoln told me Nemo, which we categorized as a fish, and Nathan said octopus.

So we made wind sock octopi. I got the idea from here. She made hers out of a lot sturdier material though. We just used construction paper, tape, and streamers for the legs. We also glued on googly eyes, and a puff ball for a nose. We tried using a pipe cleaner for a mouth, but it wouldn't stay on, so we just drew one in. I think the most exciting part for the boys was hanging them outside and watching them blow in the wind.

For our last activity, we talked some more about the ocean, and I asked the boys if they would like to make one. They thought that sounded cool. I got the idea for this here. I gave each boy an empty plastic bottle (soda or juice work great, I think ours were V8 Splash) and I made little funnels for each one out of paper (not a necessity, but it helped with the mess) and had them use a plastic spoon to put decorative sand in the bottom of their bottles. You could use regular sand or dirt, but it might cloud the water. Then I filled each bottle with warm/hot water. Then I let each boy pick two Magic Growing Capsules (you can buy these in all varieties at the dollar store, if you are doing ocean you want to make sure you get the sea life ones)

to put into their bottles. After a few minutes the capsules grew into sea creatures. Lincoln got an octopus and a fish, Nathan got a penguin and a sea horse. Cool! Then we screwed the lids on tight (ideally we would have super glued them on, but I ran out of super glue) and let them have a good look at them.

The last thing we did was our snack. We had leftover doughnuts, so that's what I gave them. And yes, I am aware the doughnut does not start with O, but it is shaped like an O, so I used that to my advantage.

Nathan and Lincoln with their mini-oceans