Wild West

We headed out on the range to the Wild West. 

We read Cowpokes to get us started and to give us an idea what it was like to ride the range and live in the wild west...
 

There were horses to ride and cows to wrangle.
We wore cowpoke hats and boots for our dramatizations.

We sat around the campfire,

strummed our guitars and laid our sleepy heads on our bedrolls as we looked up at the nighttime sky. We sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "Home on the Range".

Just like in Matthew the Cowboy, 

we used branding irons (potatoes on a stick) each with our own brands (the first letter of our name and our hand prints) and decorated bandannas or kerchiefs to wear out on the range, to keep the dust out of our noses and mouths.

 

We also learned all about rodeos when we read I Want to be a Cowboy. 

We tried our hand at barrel racing. We donned our cowpoke apparel and galloped a horse around a barrel to the tune of "She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain". We threw our hats up in the air and hollered, "YeeHaw!" just like they do in the rodeo.

 We practiced using a lasso to rope a stray horse.

Harmony Jean has some pretty fancy boots in Armadillo Rodeo. Bo mistakes her shiny red boots for another armadillo. 

We used tempera paint sticks to design our own cowpoke hats and boots. We talked about all of the "designs" in the book and some of us used those as inspiration for our own designs. 

Wanted posters were made with us in our "cowpoke garb".  Who wouldn't "want" these adorable cowpokes?

We chanted the fingerplay:
10 galloping horses came to town
5 were black.
5 were brown.
They galloped up.
They galloped down.
And then they galloped

out of town!

We told stories about us and our favorite horses...

We had fun eating our "cowboy lunch" around the campfire. We had pigs in a blanket, beans and apples. 

Yee Haw!