Corduroy the Bear Fun Day

For several months, we’ve been doing school and living life, but we hadn’t really taken time to do any “just for the fun of it” learning with play.  It’s time to bring a little FUN back into our weeks!

I’ve known for a while that I really wanted to get back into this, but I kept putting it off.  My ‘kick in the pants’ was adding a few extra kiddos to our Wednesdays.  The kids and I are excited to have some special friends joining us once a week because their mama returned to work recently.  With 6-7 kids in the house each Wednesday, I knew we’d need a little structure so our days didn’t turn to complete chaos.

We started with a Corduroy The Bear day.

Our morning began by making cut-out cookie dough together;
there’s lot of fun and learning when you’re measuring and mixing together!

We let the dough chill in the refrigerator while we read the first Corduroy book.

{click below to link to the book on Amazon}

After reading the story, we went into the kitchen and made BUTTON COOKIES.  We rolled out the dough, cut circles, and made ‘button holes’ by poking a straw into the cookies.  While the cookies baked and cooled, we made icing with powdered sugar, milk, and coloring.  The kids then ‘painted’ their button cookies with icing.

I blurred out a few sweet little faces,
as I haven’t asked permission to share their pictures here…

After lunch, we read “A Pocket For Corduroy”

{click below to link the book on Amazon}

Using a pattern that I found through Pinterest, we made our own Corduroy bears and added a pocket.  (Yes, Corduroy has a purple pocket…but we had red paper on hand! )

We also sorted gummy bears by color, used a Teddy Grahams and a bear-counting printable page to count to 10 bear, and did a few line tracing/patterning pages together throughout the day.

The sorting/counting printables were my own creation.  I did not save these files, but I will try to remember to recreate something similar in the summer of 2014.  (REMIND ME if you’re reading this in Summer 2014 or beyond, and you want these…I just didn’t like these enough to share them, so I want to redo them and make them BETTER before sharing!)

The rest of the printables came from Homeschool Creations website.

Please note that this was not an entire themed day!  We read a book and made cookie dough (20 minutes).  The kids played for a while.  We did some fun pages and ate gummy bears.  The kids played for a while.  We baked cookies, made icing, and decorated cookies (30 minutes?).  The kids played for a while.  We ate lunch, and then we read “A Pocket for Corduroy”.  The kids played for a while…get the idea?   We scattered the fun throughout the day to keep the littles from getting bored or crazy, as is likely to happen with a houseful of small kids!

It was really fun to get back into the FUN of learning through play!  We’re going to TRY to do this each Wednesday with a fun or seasonal theme!