Mother Goose Time - F is for Fox Arts & Crafts

Friends and Feelings is our Mother Goose Time  theme for this month.

Here is a free Mother Goose Time arts and crafts activity, F is for Fox.

 

 

I love teaching my preschool-age daughter about letters and the sounds they make, while creating some type of art project out of the letter. She really enjoyed creating this fox by Mother Goose Time.

 

 

Here is her fox. Her favorite color is blue, so she tends to like to color everything blue right now (as you can see here).

 

 

Discuss:

When we discussed what animals can be friends and what animals can be kept as pets (as it explains to do on the photograph above under "discuss"), my daughter mentioned roly-polys and crickets (of course). She is really into roly-polys and crickets. We discussed how normally, people don't keep roly-polys and crickets as pets, but that we do. Hobby Lobby sells a roly-poly playground and it's really nice to keep pet roly-polys in. We usually keep crickets in a jar for one day, and then let them go.

 

We agreed that dogs are pets we can more easily keep as pets, as compared to a fox. A fox could bite us and it is a wild animal. Well, dogs are a lot of work, but they are friendlier than a roly-poly, which is what we were focusing on... Friendship.

 

Why do pet dogs feel more like real friends,  rather than a roly-poly, for example:

(Oh, the interesting questions we come up with while teaching preschoolers. Things you would never discuss with an adult, but truthfully, this conversation has a lot of depth to it.)

• We talked about how dogs make eye contact. (Some humans even have a hard time with that.)
• Dogs run over to you when they get hurt and comfort you.
• Dogs remember what happened.
• Dogs try to work on their friendship with you by doing the right thing to make you happy.
• Dogs need us to love and care for them, just as they love and care for us.
• Dogs sometimes like to do the same things we like to do, like play sports or go for walks. They also like to cuddle and rest.

 

Copyright Caroline Brooke



Copyright Caroline Brooke
Dogs like to go for walks. They get sleepy and thirsty, just as we do. Dogs are easy to have as friendly pets.

We talked about how foxes would probably not be good pets because they are wild animals. They would probably be sneaky and try to get our bunnies. (We have two bunnies, too.)

 

What Types of Animals Do Your Friends Remind You Of?

 

Then, we started to talk about how certain friends remind us of certain types of animals. The fox reminded us of friends who seem like they are your friends, but they really aren't. For example, they may talk bad about you behind your back. Maybe, they try to pressure you to do things that they know are wrong. Maybe, they tell you things that are not true and try to deceive you for their own personal gain. Maybe, they even try to use religion or similar interests to gain your trust, and then stab you in the back.

 

We talked about how those types of "friends" can be hurtful and confusing. We talked about how we can forgive when friends hurt us, but we also have to be wise about who we trust. Once someone shows us who they really are (e.g. a sneaky fox), it is not wise to trust them anymore and not only is that okay, but it is as wise thing to do. (I wish somebody told me that as a kid.) We want our children to have good discernment. That is an important ability we want to help them develop.

 

After all, we all know sneaky foxes, don't we? Or maybe you know a vulture, snake, leech, cat, turtle or frog?

Oh, btw, here's a fun Wikki Stix fox you can make, too.

 

Play

 

Then, we started thinking about what animals we are like? What animal would we want to be? Why? What animal would we not want to be? What behaviors do we associate with each type of animal?

 

We talked about baby chicks, cats, dogs, turtles and more. We remembered how we held the cute, fuzzy, yellow baby chick in the springtime...

Copyright Caroline Brooke

 

Copyright Caroline Brooke

Copyright Caroline Brooke

 

 

The girls liked acting out different animals being friends with their new Letter F foxes using their puppet theatre, and they came up with other types of animals, too. Even though the letter F fox was too easy for our older daughter (so only our younger daughter created one), using the puppet theater and talking about friendship was definitely something our older daughter enjoyed learning about, too.