M is for Monster: May Picnic & Boats
Last week I shared with you the first half of our M is for Monster‘s May Edgar box and today I’m going to share with you the second half. To recap, M is for Monster is a preschool aged (2-5 yr) monthly subscription box. It comes with 4-5 activities in 4 different themes. Everything you need to do the activities comes right inside your box – even down to a glue stick if you need one! Check out our first post from last week here.
M is for Monster Picnic Activities
For our Picnic themed items we worked on word recognition, creativity and math! We had a lot of fun with this series and the kids got to learn with (and eat!) candy during one of the activities! 
The Ants on a Log activity challenged A to learn addition by adding one jelly bean to the larger number. She had a great time learning about addition. Plus, we had a lesson is patience since the jelly beans looked like a great snack but she didn’t know how many she would need for each activity! Both of the kids enjoyed the jelly beans and A got the learn basic addition!
The Sight Word recognition activity, was fun a very well thought out! It came with a picnic picture with sight words and A had to match the word to the picture that matched then put the coordinating sticker there, as well. The words that cooresponded to the picture also starter with the same letter (to had a picture of table, etc.). For B to be a part of the activity I just let him have the matching sticker big sister needed and he placed them on the paper for his own scene!
Primary and secondary color recognition was a review for A, as she’s had known them for well over a year. However, painting the hot dog with “ketchup and mustard” was fun for both kids. I scanned an extra copy for B to participate. The puzzle, although a fun picnic scene was a bit hard to see with the light printing and fine detail (not M is for Monster’s fault!) so we ended up going off task with that one and making up a puzzle of our own!
M is for Monster Boat Activities
The boats activities were a lot of fun! The Alphabet boat book was filled with 26 different kinds of boats, coordinating to the appropriate letter of the alphabet. The kids loved the book and we learned a lot too! 
One of the activites was creating our own boat. We built the boat with a straw, construction paper, and part of a pool noodle. Once it was built we put it in a large bowl of water to see if it would float and then we talked about why we thought it was floating on the water. 
We did a bit of word recognition with fish and a boating scene with another fun activity! A would put a fish on every “for” and say “for”. I also had her say “F is for Fish” on some of them. To include B on the fun, I drew him his own fish scene and he put a fish on every “B” on the page and said “B”.
For this segment’s math activity we learned about subtraction. For this we used pom-Pom balls and matched them to the large number and took one away. We learned what the subtractionsymbol means and A loved getting the answers right. She would count out the first number, remove one, and recount! To keep B busy for this activity I drew out boat flash cards and put 1-5 boats on a card and he placed a Pom-Pom ball on the boats.
The last activity was making Water Beads with organic food coloring and basil seeds. As much as I love a good mess, I avoided this one for longer than I should have because it wasn’t that messy. We mixed the seeds and watched them plump a bit with water. The kids enjoyed watching the basil seeds grow and turn to the color in the packet. One bowl plumped more than the other and I let them mix the bowls around a bit!
As you can see, we had a lot of fun with our May M is for Monster box! I’ve been thoroughly impressed by how much is actually in the box for the price. The activites are fun, you can do many of them again and again, customize to your children’s needs, and the hard work of putting things together is already done for you!
You can get your June box ordered right now! It’s filled with fun activities as you can see!
