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If You Give a Moose a Muffin


The second week of our "If you give a . . . " series! One thing I like about these books is that it has been very easy for both Levi and Owen to memorize the story line. Without ever talking about it, they're learning sequencing and story lines (in order to tell them to Daddy at dinner time, of course!). We haven't talked much about cause and effect yet, but I think I'll make that a teaching point for the next book.

Crafts: moose antlers and construction paper moose. Owen was having a hard time one day while Levi did school, asking repeatedly for an activity or craft to do. I often leave relevant websites open on the computer for such times, so that I can quickly glance over someone else's ideas for any given theme (find this week's open tab here), and the antler headband caught my eye. I googled "moose antler template," chose one that looked about right, printed it off, copied it onto cardstock, then had him color them brown while I finished up with Levi. Owen thought it was it was quite a hoot and left them on for most of the afternoon! I had planned to use glue, so as not to have big masking-tape stripes (as you can see below), but it was taking too long to dry and he was we were impatient.

This is one cute smoothie-drinking moose.

The moose craft was also very easy. I used two shades of brown construction paper because I happened to have them. We traced hands on the lighter shade (in retrospect, I should have had Levi try to trace his own), I drew a moose-face freehand on the darker, and cut out some oval-ish nostrils from black paper. A little glue, a few googly eyes, and ta-da! Moose!


Gluing on a hand-antler.

Working on a zoo on the side of the entertainment center.

Science/art: Wouldn't you know it, neither our Animal Encyclopedia OR the Ed Emberley drawing book had anything about moose. After a quick google search, however, I discovered that the National Geographic information pages are pretty cool, so we just read from that instead. That's also where I learned that a moose is really just a large species of deer (should I have known that already?!), so it was perfectly acceptable to draw the deer instead.

Levi wanted to color it in this week.

Food: Naturally, we had to make muffins! Thanks to the preponderance of zucchini in my freezer and the single banana getting mushy on the counter, I opted for these whole wheat zucchini banana muffins. Not bad, for a healthy muffin, but nothing special, either. (Of course, if I had done the browned butter glaze, I might be singing a different tune.)

It takes two boys to dump a bowl of dry ingredients.

It's always more fun to eat food you helped to make!

Guess who stopped throwing things enough that he can have his own plate now?!

It was Isaac's idea to end the week with moose tracks ice cream. Fun daddy, fun week!

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