Around the World: Playtime and Party Planning in Mexico

Our travel adventures continue here as we spent some time in play and party planning. As much as I love teaching a world travel theme, I was not sure how my little student would take to it. The verdict after just one day is that he LOVES it! He is proudly using the few words and phrases he's learned in Spanish (as we are "visiting" Mexico), and reported at bedtime last night that his favorite part of the day was having pretzels and orange juice on our pretend airplane (go figure!). This morning he went to his dress-up basket and retrieved his pilot's hat and immediately rearranged his chairs back into airplane formation!
Play is such an important part of our learning experience together. We do formal activities while also incorporating many opportunities for independent play and work with materials that have been demonstrated during lessons. My little guy loves all things related to transportation, and how we get around is certainly an important facet of world travel! Part of our toy rotation into this theme has including swapping in some favorite transportation themed toys and materials.

Our library was also a fabulous resource for books, music CDs and DVDs related to our theme. My son has taken a strong liking to the book This is the Way We Go to School: A Book About Children Around the World written by Edith Baer. It's a beautifully illustrated picture book with delightful rhyming passages about the unique transportation methods used by children and families all across the globe. We also talk as we read about how he gets to school (he walks downstairs!) and the different ways his parents got to school over the years! 

In conjunction with our Mexican theme, I provided some play materials for my son to explore in our free time.

He loves transfer activities and our "Mexican bean transfer" was a real winner. He feels so proud of himself as he independently carries the materials, tray and all, from his shelf over to the table, practices with the spoon (and sometimes with pouring, too), and carries it all back again at the end!

We learned that Mexican landscape is partially comprised of dry, sandy deserts. I wasn't quite up to getting lots of sand out for indoor sensory play, but kinetic sand was a great option! I happened to have some stored with some shells and natural materials we found on a family visit to Virginia Beach a couple of years ago and he had a lot of fun exploring it (even though shells wouldn't necessarily be found in a desert)!

 Our library had a copy of "Sesame Street Celebrates Around the World" on DVD that seemed like the perfect evening activity for us last night. While we don't have a TV and use videos and screen time somewhat sparingly, my son has a super sweet spot lately for Sesame Street, and this cute movie featuring New Year's celebrations in several different countries was a real hit in our house. He was so excited that the first segment took place in Mexico and also felt very proud that he already knew about the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah (which we celebrated a few months back) that was featured in the segment on Israel. We honestly didn't do much here for New Year's Eve being that it fell on a Saturday this year, but learning about celebrating in Mexico in particular was a perfect segue into our activities today: preparing a family Fiesta! He even got to see how a pinata is made and used, which was a perfect introduction to our morning project...

 Our Table Time activity this morning included some scissor skills practice with tissue paper strips. My little guy loves practicing with scissors. We are still working on hand positioning and remembering to keep thumbs up, but I try to balance the desire to correct for success with becoming over-involved and causing undue frustration. When he seems to be struggling or verbalizes that he would like help, I assist in positioning the scissors on his hand and even using hand-over-hand technique to cut together. However, if he reverts back to his own method (as pictured to the left) and is having success as well as enjoying himself, I allow and encourage him to experiment. It is most important to me that he develop confidence and then competence will follow. We used his morning work along with some pre-cut strips of tissue paper to glue onto a brown paper bag for our very own paper bag pinata. I found the idea and instructions for this project on this blog and it seemed like the perfect activity to modify for our Mexican theme.

After we finished gluing together and left it to dry, we took a little field trip to our local party supply store to pick out a few trinkets to fill it with. With Chanukah and some family birthdays now behind us and my husband back at work, we needed a little family fun night this week and an impromptu Mexican Fiesta seemed like a great way to incorporate our learning theme and our family needs. My son is so excited he even helped make an invitation to his Tatty while he was at work last night! This afternoon, he will join me in the kitchen to make some homemade salsa and black bean and cheese enchiladas for dinner. We will enjoy some Mexican Mariachi music in the background (YouTube is a great resource for this) and get to take a swing at our homemade pinata. I just hope he doesn't cry when his project gets broken!

Tomorrow our travels through South America continue with our next stop in Brazil...see you all there! Until then, happy playing!