The Amazon at home

Our church has been laying new carpet. This means the biggest cardboard rolls we’ve ever gotten our hands on are just laying around the place and since we are studying the continent of South America, and looking closely at Brazil, when I saw them I immediately thought tree trunks.

This activity didn’t just serve as a huge visual reminder of our journey through the Amazon it presented numerous learning opportunities in itself.

The kids knew they needed brown but we had only the primary colours. I asked them if they could talk to each other and maybe do a few experiments to see if they could find brown, they had remembered the basic colour mixes but couldn’t think of two colours that made brown. Lani had a moment of inspiration when she remembered seeing brown when Sabi had gotten to their paint pallets and mixed all the colours together. So after a few trial runs that were too red they got the colour they were after.

It also turned out to be a fairly messy activity, like that’s a surprise.

This may not be top of your list of bonuses. However with one child who adores mess and will seek it planed or not and another who has been known to freak out over glue/paint/water touching his skin it proved to be a brilliant safe time to give in to obsessions and challenge phobias respectively.

Oh yeah and as the tubes were round and had to be held while painting them it was also good for all that bi-lateral, crossing the centre line, using two hands and both bits of your brain stuff….I should really listen better in class.

plus it was fun

Bet you can’t tell which child adores messy play. By the way bubbles are included in messy play in my world once you’ve seen what Sabi can do with a bottle of detergent, the kitchen and the time it takes Mummy to go to the toilet you would consider them a ticking time bomb too. But in the above photo she was being reminded (once again) that mess can be fun, but we do need to clean up after ourselves.

And then we learnt to fly.

Like an Amazon bird

or Amazon super hero?

before we all came back down to earth and made dinner.