Camp Slop

A little motivation

2012-02-10T18:52:00.004-06:00

Are the months going by faster than normal? Seems like time just keeps slipping away from me. I'm still here, in a little of a crafting rut. I threw together this sign from an old picture frame and some scrap fabric for a little inspiration. I used a dry erase marker to write the message. I think it would be fun to make these for the kids' bedroom doors and leave them messages each morning.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-03T23:19:00.004-06:00

As I sat here tonight, it occurred to me that this is the first time in 4 years that I haven't posted my "Year of Crafting" list on New Years Day. It's partly because my life since Sprout was born has been so darn busy and partly because I feel like Pinterest has taken away my need to make long lists! I much prefer the visual element anyway.

However, I do need to update my sidebar with the last of my completed craft projects for 2011. I'll admit, I didn't accomplish anywhere near what I set out to do. I did try some new things though and hope that the coming year will bring me more time to craft and more time to post about the fun stuff my kids and I have been up to.

Enough rambling though. Here is my final finished project for 2011 - a wool penny rug that I gave to my mom as a Christmas gift.

I bought the kit (pattern and wool felt) from One of the Flock on etsy. Can I rave about her customer service for a minute? I totally messed up right off the bat - totally my fault for trying to take a short cut - and ruined the white felt. I contacted her about buying a replacement and she told me not to worry about it. She had a replacement piece in the mail the next day, free of charge. How cool is that?

The pattern was easy to follow and I have to say that it came together much faster than I expected. I worked on it in short bursts and was finished in about 3 or 4 days. With dedicated time you could easily finish this in one day.

What surprised me the most is how much I really enjoyed the embroidery work. I had never tied a french knot before or really used any stitch other than a blanket stitch. I had fun learning some new stitches and hope to do some more embroidery work this coming year.

I want to wish all of you a wonderful, blessed New Year. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking the time to stop by my blog. I look forward to another fun year!

Crafty Christmas Ornament Exchange

2011-12-09T05:30:00.001-06:00

For the second year in a row I participated in a crafty ornament exchange on a message board that I frequent.

Here's the adorable ornament that I received. His body is made of a light bulb!

This is the ornament that I sent to my secret draw:

It's a felt ornament that I embroidered and jeweled. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Next time I'll add colored crystals though instead of clear. I think that would make it pop a bit more. The tutorial is from here at BHG.

Paper Gingerbread Men

2011-12-04T21:45:00.005-06:00

Today's December Fun activity was a Christmas craft - paper Gingerbread men!

I cut large gingerbread men from paper shopping bags (I got the pattern from Chaos's preschool teachers so I'm sorry I don't have it to share).

The kids went wild decorating with buttons, felt, yarn, sequins, foam shapes and crayons. I think this would have been even more fun if we had gingerbread cookies to snack on while crafting!

Linking up to some of these great parties

Jesse Ornaments, Days 3 and 4

2011-12-04T21:09:00.008-06:00

Our first snowfall and Wild One's second birthday left us a little sidetracked on our Jesse Tree adventure. We caught up tonight by making 2 ornaments. Wild One colored her ornaments too, but I don't planned to include a picture of hers every day since they're all essentially the same. I'll post a picture of all of them when we're finished.

Day 3 led us to the story of Noah and a rainbow ornament.

To make these, I first cut out a rainbow shape from white cardstock. The kids then went on a hunt for different colors to cut out from old magazines. (This was a fun way to work in color recognition for Chaos as well!). The kids glued down the squares they cut out and I trimmed the rainbow when they were finished. Easy peasy! Chaos was pretty thrilled to have Lightning McQueen on his rainbow too. ;)

Day 4 was the story of Abraham's faithfulness to God. To represent Abraham's new home, we made origami tents.

We used this tutorial, but at the end, we tucked in the sides to make the tent more square.

Click here to see our other Jesse Tree ornaments

Christmas Canvases

2011-12-03T11:50:00.008-06:00

As part of our month long celebration, I've created a list of fun things to do each day during the month of December (the full list will be at the end of this post). Today's activity was to create some Christmas decor for the house.

I've been stalking cute Christmas pictures on Pinterest for awhile. I decided to try three different pictures - thumbprint Christmas lights, handprint Christmas tree, and footprint reindeer. We used washable paint (for my sanity) on canvas panels.

This one is my favorite I think. I love the bright colors of the lights.

Pinky insisted she did not want to have a red nose (the original picture had all of the reindeer with red noses) because Rudolph was a boy. We settled on Chaos having a red nose with all the girls sporting black noses and a bow in their antlers like Clarice.

I almost couldn't convince Wild One to let me paint her hand (hers is the lone handprint at the top of the tree), but once she tried it she wanted to paint her whole body! I still want to add a star at the top of the tree, but I love it even without it.

These turned out SO much cuter than I had expected. My original idea was to display them for awhile and then toss them, but now I'm thinking of framing them instead. I think these would make great gifts for Grandparents or, scaled down, cute ornaments too (I've seen a version of the reindeer made from thumbprints floating around Pinterest).

And as promised, here's our full list of December fun activities. I tried to keep things simple with lots of crafts and ornament making because that's what the kids enjoy most!

Watch a Christmas movie
Make Christmas decor for the house
Put up the Christmas tree
Make a Christmas craft
Make snowflakes
Make Christmas cards
Make and ornament for the kids' trees
Drink hot cocoa
Play with snow playdough
Make an ornament for the kids' trees
Bake cookies
Make an ornament for the family tree
Do a Christmas craft
Make an ornament for the kids' trees
Play a Christmas game
Winter sensory bin
Make salt dough ornaments
Make an (edible) Christmas craft
Do a Christmas craft
Make a snowman
Make an ornament for the kids' trees
Do a Christmas craft
Go sledding (hopefully there will be snow!)
Drive around and look at lights (this is a tradition we do every year after church)

Linking up to some of these great parties

Jesse Ornaments, Day 2

2011-12-02T23:34:00.000-06:00

Today's Jesse Tree Ornaments were based on the story of Adam and Eve. We read "The Sneaky Snake" in Pinky's Beginner Bible and then made an apple and snake ornament.

To make these, first I had the kids do apple prints on cardstock. Once they were dry, we cut them out and glued on a stem and leaf. Next, I made each of them a ribbon snake using this tutorial. We wrapped the snake around the apple and added a ribbon for hanging.

Wild One joined us today and colored two ornaments. I mounted them on scrapbook paper and added a ribbon for hanging.

Click here to see our other Jesse Tree ornaments

BANG! Sight Word and Alphabet Game

2011-12-02T11:00:00.001-06:00

I'm always on the look out for fun ways for Pinky to practice her sight words. When I discovered Bang! on Come Together Kids, I knew it was something we would love to play.

The game is simple. You take turns drawing cards out of a container. If you can read the sight word you keep the card. If not, the card goes back in. Whoever collects the most cards wins the game. Beware of the BANG cards though. If you draw one, you have to put back all of the cards you have collected.

The great thing about this game is that it is very adaptable. For Pinky, I made sight word cards, for Chaos I chose letter and number recognition. You could also do shapes, colors, math facts...and so much more.

Here's a closer look at how I made our game.

First, I printed out sight words, letters, numbers and BANG cards on different colored card stock. After trimming them to size, I laminated them for durability.

The container itself is just a shoebox decoupaged with scrapbook paper (I used Cheerful School Additions from Creative Memories).

I cut the word BANG on my Cricut and added them to the front of the box.

And that's it! We now have a fun new game that the kids LOVE to play and they're learning at the same time.

Linking up to some of these great parties

Our Jesse Tree

2011-12-01T13:37:00.007-06:00

Have you heard of a Jesse Tree? It was new to me when I stumbled upon it at 1+1+1=1. I followed her links to the (free) e-book at Feels Like Home. I was in love! I try to create a handmade ornament with the kids every day during December. What a better way to combine our tradition with the true meaning of the season?

If Jesse Trees are new to you too, there is a great description in the e-book. Simply, it's a way of celebrating advent by highlighting a bible story each day starting at creation and leading up to the birth of Christ. Each day's story is then represented by an ornament.

Pinky, Chaos and Wild One each have their own mini Christmas tree in their rooms (like these from Walmart). We decided these would be our Jesse trees. We are using the free e-book and Pinky's Beginner Bible for our Jesse Tree adventure.

Today we read Genesis and made our first ornament - the Earth and stars. (I decided to do different ornaments for Wild One, I'll get to those in a minute).

To make these ornaments, we first cut out a square of black foam and glued an Earth on it (don't those continents look exact? ;)). We added stars using glitter glue and silver sequins. To finish we punched a hole in the top and added a ribbon. I think they turned out really cute!

I wanted Wild One to be included in this activity, but I wanted to do something that she could be more hands on with (instead of me making the ornament FOR her). I found the idea of printing out coloring sheets (I'm using cardstock) and mounting on scrapbook paper from Christmas Your Way. I'm going to combine the printables on that site with the ones I found here at Catholic Icing. Wild One took an extra long nap today (I'm not complaining!) so she'll start her ornaments tomorrow.

Our plan is to do an ornament (or 2) each day. I'll do a post for each of them. I also have some other winter/Christmas fun crafts for this month. I can't wait to share them with you!

Thanksgiving Craft Books

2011-11-30T15:38:00.009-06:00

I'm a little late in posting this, but if you like it, you can pin it for next year!

While browsing Pinterest, I stumbled upon a great idea - a craft book that tells the story of Thanksgiving. The idea came from here on Musings of Me. I couldn't find a printable to go along with it, so I made my own.

Here's how ours turned out:

The cover is a painted hand print turkey.

The first page reads "The Pilgrims came to America." We made the pilgrims using construction paper, yarn and foam (for their hats).

"They sailed across the ocean on the Mayflower." First we painted the sky orange and sponge painted the ocean blue. The boat was made from construction paper and a straw (for the mast).

"The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock." The waves and yellow sand were cut from construction paper. We added a black foam rock and glued down sand for the beach.

"The men built houses for their families." Originally I wanted to make the houses from wooden craft sticks, but we were all out. Instead we cut strips of brown construction paper for the logs. The kids colored in the details.

"The Native Americans taught the Pilgrims how to grow and catch food." Our Native American is made of construction paper, foam feathers and yarn hair.

"They planted corn, picked berries, and caught fish." This page was my favorite. I had the kids paint with bubble wrap on a white sheet of paper (we used orange, yellow and brown paint). Once they were dried we cut out corn shapes. The green construction paper was added to complete the look.

"They hunted turkey." We cut out a brown turkey body from construction paper and added colorful feathers (this was Pinky's favorite).

"They had a wonderful Thanksgiving feast to celebrate how God had looked after them." This is Pinky's drawing of the first Thanksgiving (one Pilgrim, one Native American, turkey, cranberry sauce and blue popcorn).

When the kids were finished I punched a hole in the top corner of each page and tied them together with some ribbon. The kids are VERY proud of their books and they were a lot of fun to make.

Linking up to some of these great parties

A Blanket for Rapunzel

2011-10-21T10:04:00.002-05:00

Rapunzel being Pinky's American Girl doll, not an actual Rapunzel doll.

Now that we have that cleared up, I thought I'd share the first of what I hope will be a series of crafts for Pinky's American Girl doll. Since being gifted an AG doll earlier this year (by none other than Grandma!), Pinky has loved finding accessories for her. I don't know if you've ever shopped for AG clothes and accessories, but they are pricey. After spending a little (okay a lot) of time on Pinterest searching for DIY crafts, I decided to put together some handmade clothes and furniture as a Christmas gift for Pinky. This blanket is the first project.

It started with some leftover owl fleece (and the idea of building this bed from Ana White). I cut the fleece into 2 roughly 22 inch squares and cut a 3 inch square from each corner. If you need more detailed instructions for making tie fleece blankets, this link does a good job of describing it.

Normally when I make these blankets I use two different types of fleece. Since I was working with scraps (what I hope to do with all the projects in order to make them low cost) I didn't have that option. Still I really like the way it turned out.

Rapunzel seems to like it too, don't you think?

Linking up to some of these great parties

A Birthday Gift for Dad

2011-10-18T21:50:00.011-05:00

The kids made a really sweet, simple homemade gift for Daddy this year (the idea for this craft came from this post on I Heart Crafty Things). I started by having each of them fingerpaint 4 popsicle sticks. Wild One had a blast with this (once we convinced her that the sticks were not a utensil for eating the paint). When they were dry, we glued them together to form a square. Next I cut a piece of watercolor paper to fit the opening (I love the sturdiness of the watercolor paper - you could use any type of paper that you have on hand). The kids each drew a picture and we glued it inside the frame. We added a little twine so that these could be hung in his office.

Our mini-masterpieces:

Pinky drew her and her Daddy outside, Chaos drew a fence with birds on it, and Wild One just had fun scribbling.

Hooray for Reading

2011-10-15T21:43:00.000-05:00

One of my projects this summer was to create a favor for the annual "Welcome Back Brunch" at our preschool. The brunch this year had a book theme, so bookmarks seemed like a perfect idea!

Finished bookmarks (with the school name edited out)

These were relatively easy to make. I cut green and white polka dot cardstock to my desired size and adhered a piece of vellum (or the same size) using Creative Memories Frosted Splits. The owl was cut from cardstock using the Cricut Create a Critter cartridge. Using a textured cardstock, I printed the words "Hoot Hoot Hooray for (School Name)." I made a few for my kids that said "Hoot Hoot Hooray for Reading!" Finally, I tied a printed owl ribbon to the top to finish it off.

The trickiest part of this project was that after I printed the textured cardstock on my laser printer I found that the ink would simply rub off when touched. I scoured the internet looking for solutions and tried nearly every printer setting I could. Finally I found a tip to use a fixatif spray. I picked up Krylon Workable Fixatif spray at Hobby Lobby and it worked like a charm!

What we did this summer...

2011-09-09T21:03:00.000-05:00

The morning air is getting cooler, Pinky and Chaos have started school, and the leaves are even starting to change colors. I guess it's time to admit that summer vacation is really over.

I love fall - it's honestly one of my favorite seasons, but it's also, I think, one of the busiest and quickest. Still, I'm looking forward to a lot of new things this school year. Pinky is in Kindergarten (how is that possible?!) and Chaos is in his first year of preschool.

We had a lot of fun this summer. We tackled some of the "to do's" on our Summer Bucket List. We didn't get to them all, but we kept ourselves busy. We camped, we crafted, we bought ice cream from the ice cream truck. And we read. A lot. A whole lot. I have a few fun crafts and projects from this summer that I'd like to share with you, but I have to post this accomplishment first.

Pinky set a goal for herself to read 100 books this summer. For a girl who just started reading this spring, it was a pretty lofty goal. My husband and I decided to offer her an incentive of her choice (she couldn't decide between a new Barbie or lunch at the American Girl store).

With a lot of enthusiasm (most days) we plowed our way through the entire BOB book series, Biscuit Phonics, Dick and Jane, Hello Kitty phonics (surprisingly a really good set of phonics books), and many Early Reader books from the library.

Last week, Pinky reached her goal. 100 books!! There really aren't words for how proud I am of her. And even better? She wants to do it again!!

Her chart, finally completed, that hung on the fridge all summer. And in case you were wondering, she chose the trip to the American Girl store. :D

What My Child is Reading

2011-07-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile since I shared what I've been reading with Wild One so today I'm going to share a few of her new favorite books.

We're big fans of the "That's not my..." series from Usborne books, so it's no surprise that Wild One loves our newest book "That's not my tiger..." Wild One loves the touch and feel pages, while Pinky and Chaos enjoy "reading" the book to her (memorizing the short sentences on each page).

Another touch and feel book, Baby Einstein Touch and Feel Farm Animals, has also been a new favorite.

Zoo Babies is our second AniMotion book (our other is Bee & Me). If you don't know what AniMotion is - you can see it in action here at amazon: AniMotion video. The kids really love these books (and so do Mom and Dad!).

Linking to:

What My Child is Reading

2011-07-10T09:44:00.004-05:00

We had 2 fun finds at the library this week.

Chalk is a wordless book with beautiful, engaging illustrations. When friends find a bucket of chalk at the playground, they soon discover the chalk makes their drawings come to life.

Press Here is a fun book that instructs the reader to "press here", "now tilt the page" and more. With each push, turn, and tilt, the pages "change" leaving the reader wanting to keep going. My kids couldn't stop laughing while we read this. The first day we read it at least 5 times in a row. They never tired of it.

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Pen Pal Letters

2011-07-08T09:27:00.000-05:00

Pinky and Chaos both have pen pals. They've had a lot of fun sending letters back and forth (and what a great way to work on handwriting!). We decided to send something a bit different to their pen pals this time.

Each of them wrote (or drew) their message on a blank puzzle. (Please don't mind the smudge areas - I blurred out each of the kids' names).

Then they took the puzzles apart and put them in the envelope. Their pen pals will have to put the puzzle together to read their messages!

Linking up to some of these great parties

Lowercase Letter of the Week

2011-07-06T09:05:00.000-05:00

Pinky has been very interested in the letter of the week activities I've been doing with Chaos. She wanted to make her own letter crafts and, since we've done the alphabet together before, I suggested we try the lowercase letters this time. We spent one rainy afternoon getting caught up to where Chaos is in the alphabet (her request, not mine).

Here's what she has created:

Apple a (idea from Confessions of a Homeschooler)

Butterfly b (idea from Confessions of a Homeschooler)

Cat c (Pinky came up with this one!)

Duck d (idea from No Time For Flashcards)

I think that when we finish the alphabet I'll put these pages into a binder for the kids to keep. It will be fun to look back on them!

Linking up to some of these great parties

Dragon D!

2011-07-01T08:45:00.001-05:00

Chaos and I completed "Dragon D" this week.

We started by reading several books about dragons (there are some really great dragon themed books available at our local library).

The first book we read was The Knight and the Dragon by Tomie DePaola. This was a favorite of both Pinky and Chaos. Neither the dragon or the knight has any idea how to fight each other so after a series of "whoops" they put their skills to better use.

Next we read There's No Such Thing as a Dragon by Jack Kent. The dragon in this story gets bigger and bigger the more Billy's mom insists that dragons do not exist.

Finally, I was thrilled to find a Dragon ABC book. The Dragon ABC Hunt is another great alphabet introduction book. (Sorry, I still need to upload a picture!)

After we finished reading, we made our dragon D! (The idea came from here at No Time for Flashcards.) I had intended to use red and orange tissue paper for the flames, but Chaos had other ideas. What kid can resist glitter glue?

Linking up to some of these great parties

Cloudy with a chance of CRAFTS

2011-06-30T08:20:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: I can take no credit for this post as it was all Pinky's idea.

Pinky's favorite book has been Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs for a long time.

While reading it (again) the other day, she decided we should make an art project to go with the book.

She decided to make "spaghetti and meatballs" using yarn and pom poms.

Pinky chose to glue her meal to construction paper, but it could also be fun to use as play food. Put the "noodles" in a bowl to be served with tongs and spoon the "meatballs" on top. Bon Appetit!

Linking up to some of these great parties

Tie Fleece Blanket

2011-06-27T08:33:00.000-05:00

Pinky's teacher recently became a grandma for the first time and because she has been such a big part of our lives, I wanted to give her something special.

Her teacher has visited our house to read bed time stories to the kids before (SO fun!), so I thought I would give her own "bedtime story kit" to use with her new granddaughter.

I found a great "I Love Grandma" fleece at the craft store that I knew would be perfect for a tie blanket. I love how it turned out.

I added in a wonderful book: If I Could Keep You Little by Marianne Richmond (read this one with tissues nearby).

Wrap them up together and she's ready to snuggle with her granddaughter at bedtime!

What My Child is Reading

2011-06-20T05:06:00.001-05:00

We chose a great selection of books from the library this week.

The Wildest Brother is a great story about a little brother who "protects" his sister from a whole host of beasts from his imagination (and sometimes ruins her things in the process). In the end, it's the big sister who protects him when he is scared.

Unintentionally we picked up another book by the same author (Cornelia Funke). The Princess Knight is a great girl power story. When her father, the king, wants to give away her hand in marriage, the Princess Knight uses her quick thinking to outsmart (and out joust) everyone else.

The Crayon Box that Talked is a wonderful book about diversity. When a child forces the bickering crayons to work together to make a picture, they learn that everyone is needed.

The Super Hungry Dinosaur was our favorite book this week. When a really hungry T Rex shows up in Hal's backyard threatening to eat him, Hal fights back - and even gets the dino to apologize.

Three owlets awake to find their mother gone from the nest. The story unfolds as they ponder where she has gone and if she will ever come back.

Katy No-Pocket is one of my favorite stories from childhood. Katy is a kangaroo without a pouch. She needs a new way to carry her joey. After advice from many other animals on how to carry her baby, she goes to the big city and finds a perfect solution.

What have you read this week?

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Happy Father's Day!

2011-06-19T07:42:00.005-05:00

Happy Father's Day to all the wonderful Dads out there!

Here's a look at the cards Pinky and Chaos made their dad this year:

Chaos: "Happy Father's Day to the Greatest Dad I ever SAW" (idea from here at that artist woman)

Pinky: A Father's Day tie collage (idea from here at Nini Makes)

I also updated our yearly D-A-D pictures for my husband's office:

Hope you all have a wonderful Father's Day!

Fun with MUD!

2011-06-15T06:03:00.000-05:00

For the start of summer vacation I thought we needed to do something good and messy!

We started by reading a few books:

We had to start with the classic "dirt" book, Harry the Dirty Dog.

Next we read "Dirt Boy." It's the story of Fister Farnello who, to escape his bath, runs away to the woods and meets "Dirt Man."

Diary of a Worm is a hysterical story told, in the form of diary entries, from the point of view of a worm. This was a family favorite!

Finally we read Mud. The beautiful illustrations show the world turning from snowy winter to the big, muddy mess of spring.

It's the last book that leads to our craft today - MUD painting!

I simply dug up some dirt from the yard and mixed it with water to make a nice muddy mixture. I gave the kids some paintbrushes and recycled cardboard to paint on and told them to have fun.

They quickly gave up on the paintbrushes and moved to using their hands.

While the finished pictures aren't something we'll frame, the process was fun, fun, fun! And I have to say, clean up wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. :)

Linking up to some of these great parties

Playing in the sun...

2011-06-08T21:47:00.002-05:00

Taking a little break to enjoy some summer fun with the kiddos. I'll be back soon. :D

What We Did This Week - Friendship Theme

2011-05-28T08:02:00.002-05:00

Our local library has a really neat resource - story time kits. Each kit is centered around a theme and contains books, games, movies, music and other items related to the theme. We had never checked one out before, so we decided to give them a try at our last visit to the library. The kit we checked out was themed "Friendship."

Even the tote the kit is packaged in is cute!

The contents of this kit included 11 books about friendship, 5 puzzles, 2 movies, a music CD, a memory game (I Never Forget a Face), and lesson plan book.

Here is a highlight of our favorite books from the kit:

The Best Friends Book was the kids' favorite book. Each page tells what makes a best friend - some silly, some not. "A best friend shares everything - even chicken pox" is one example.

Being Friends is a great book about how friends can like different things but still like being friends. It delivers a great message that it's okay to be yourself, different from others, and still be a good friend.

You Are To Me is a cute story of friends telling each other how much they mean to each other.

Though not included in the kit, we had to include The Rainbow Fish. It's one of the greatest books on friendship, in my opinion.

Art
We decided to paint our own rainbow fish. I started by tracing a rainbow fish coloring page (I found one here) on to watercolor paper. The kids traced over the picture with oil pastels and then painted with watercolors. Once it was dry we added glitter to the fins and glued on tin foil scales.

Next, we made a "Friendship Drawing." We started with one sheet of blank paper. I went first and drew one element (the grass). Then I passed the paper to Pinky who added one element. She passed it to Chaos and we continued in this manner until our picture was complete.

Science
For a twist on the classic carnation and food dye experiment, we tried making "Friendship Flowers." We cut the stem to a white carnation in half (but left both halves in tact to the flower). Each kid picked one color and we dipped them stem halves in them.

Pinky with the yellow/red flower before.

Chaos with the red/blue flower before.

When the dyeing was complete, the flowers had turned 2 different colors.

We even tried a tricolored flower (red, blue, and green).

Alphabet
For a third week we continued our letter of the week craft with Chaos. We found 2 really great alphabet books at the library this week that were perfect for my little guy:

Alphabeep is a stroll through the alphabet with every letter represented by a vehicle (fire truck, garbage truck and the clever zamboni) or street signs (yield, keep left).

Alphabet Under Construction is just as the name suggests - an alphabet being built by a little rat.

It's from the second book that I came up with the idea to make a "construction C." After cutting out the letter C, Chaos added popsicle sticks (wood), sand paper and "wire" (necklace cord) to build his letter.

Linking up to these parties

Let Summer Break Begin!!

2011-05-27T07:43:00.001-05:00

We kicked off our first day of summer vacation by whipping up a Sand Cake. We used this recipe from myrecipes.com.

In hindsight I would have either doubled the recipe or used a smaller sand bucket. Oh well. It was delicious and is our first item checked off on our Summer Fun List!

End of Year Teacher Gifts

2011-05-25T18:58:00.007-05:00

Pinky has been blessed with two wonderful, amazing teachers this year. I give them so much credit for keeping the school year fun and getting Pinky excited about school.

When I started searching for ideas for end of year gifts for her teachers, I stumbled upon this project at A Turtle's Life for Me - it's a "What will teacher do this summer" gift card scrapbook. I knew it was just what I wanted to do!

I made a few changes but am THRILLED with the finished product.

I couldn't find chipboard albums at my local scrapbook store, but they did cut chipboard to the size/shape that I wanted. Had I thought ahead I would have had them cut the paper too - that would have made this project even easier!

I covered each of the pages with bright and fun summer themed papers. When the pages were done, I drilled a hole through the corner and tied the book together with a coordinated ribbon.

Here's a more detailed look at one of the books (the two books are almost identical):

The covers of both books - "What will (teacher) do this summer?". I cut the roller coaster and the sun from another summer paper.

The first page - "Eat ice cream" with a $5 gift card to Dairy Queen. I had Pinky do the illustrations for each page.

Page 2 - "Read a good book" with a $10 Barnes and Noble gift card.

Page 3 - "See a movie" and a gift card for a single admission to the movie theatre. I cut the movie tickets on the left page from a carnival themed paper.

Page 4 - "Plant some flowers" and a $10 nursery gift card. Pinky didn't want to draw a garden. She drew her teacher shopping in the flower store instead.

I used the back cover to write a short thank you note to each teacher.

These were a HUGE hit. Her teachers cried and hugged us. When I picked Pinky up from school, other teachers (and the assistant director of the school) came up to tell me how much they liked the scrapbooks! I guess I'll have to make these again next year for Pinky's Kindergarten teacher. :)

Linking to:

What My Child is Reading

2011-05-22T15:45:00.005-05:00

Pinky and I have been reading a lot of chapter books lately. I thought I would dedicate this post to some of the new series we've started.

After finishing all 7 of the Jewel Fairy books we've moved on to the Weather Fairies. The story lines are still the same, but Pinky remains interested (and that's most important to me).

Pinky has shown a lot of interest in reading Harry Potter (because both of her parents are HP nerds!), but we feel it's still too old for her. I picked up the first book of the Spiderwick Chronicles, The Field Guide, as a younger alternative.

A funny story about a mermaid trying to help her friend Eel get his "zap" back. This was a quick winner for Pinky, who loves all things mermaid.

The Magician's Boy was a surprise hit to me. It's a quick read about a magician's assistant who gets sent into a story on a hunt for the magician's missing puppet. Pinky really enjoyed this story and recognized most of the classic stories the boy traveled through (which made me feel like I had done a good job of reading the classics to her!). I felt this book was a nice change - it still contained the magic that Pinky loves but was free of unicorns and fairies.

We continued with book 2 of the Magic Tree House series, The Knight at Dawn. Pinky (and Chaos) remained just as enthralled as they were with the first book, with Pinky asking when we can read the 3rd book. I am still amazed that she has taken to this series since it is outside her normal choices. I'm glad I gave it a try!

Finally, we read the first(?) book of the Disney Fairies series - The Trouble with Tink. This book is longer, more advanced, than the other chapter books we've been reading but since it 's all about Pinky's favorite fairy, she enjoyed it.

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What We Did This Week - Bunny Theme

2011-05-20T21:47:00.001-05:00

While playing in the backyard this week we discovered a rabbit had built a nest right next to our swing set. That was all the motivation we needed to learn more about rabbits!

I found a book (perfect for preschool/toddler aged children) about rabbits at the library.

The book covered a lot of basic information about rabbits - where they live, physical attributes, feeding, life cycle, making nests and mating.

After learning how rabbits build their nests, we decided to make our own. First I had each kid paint a paper plate brown. While they dried, the kids cut out bunny shapes that I drew for them.

Once the paper plates were dry, we cut them in half and stapled them together to form a "nest"." The kids used Easter grass, crayons and paper cut to look like straw to decorate their nests. Finally, we glued in the rabbits.

I was also able to find some poetry books about rabbits at the library.

Nibble Nibble (by the author of Goodnight Moon) contains 5 simple poems. The illustrations are lovely and the poems are quick reads.

Rabbits, Rabbits contained many more poems including some longer poems than the previous book. My kids really enjoyed the variety of poems in this book.

We also continued our Letter of the Week activity with Chaos. This week we made a "Bunny B." He loves that the ears are so long they hang off the page.

Finally, we did some "bunny math" using Carrots for the Rabbit play doh mats at the PreKinders blog.

What have you been up to this week?

Linking up to:

5 a Day Books

2011-05-16T16:08:00.003-05:00

To learn more about the 5 a Day challenge click here.

Here are our choices for this week:

I Love You As Much... has been one of my favorite books since Pinky was a baby. A lullaby rhyme that tells how deep a mother can love, it's the perfect bedtime story for little ones.

A counting board book, My Love For You describes love as being "bigger than 1 bear, taller than 2 giraffes..." This is a sweet, quick read.

Lemons are Not Red has become Wild One's favorite book. She loves the cut outs on each page and demand that I read it again when we reach the end. The older kids love the silliness (purple carrots, red lemons, grey flamingos...).

This is a simple book about loving everything you see. There is also a Spanish/English version that would be wonderful for children learning to speak Spanish.

What did the animals do while you were sleeping? This short counting book will tell you. My little animal lover liked this board book and wanted to look at the pictures over and over again.

Linking to:

What My Child is Reading

2011-05-15T21:15:00.005-05:00

The kids requested books about cars and mermaids this week, so after a little research (No Time for Flashcards has a great book resource by theme), this is what I came up with from our local library.

The Three Little Rigs, as you would expect from the title, is a retelling of the classic 3 Little Pigs. The story is cute, with the big bad wolf being replaced by a big bad wrecking ball and the Little Rigs chanting "not by the chrome on my chinny chinny chin!" My kids loved this story, but if your kids are sensitive, the ending could be deemed scary as the wrecker (and a couple other not so nice tools) end up in the melting pot.

My Truck is Stuck is a rhyming, counting story about a stuck truck and all those who try to help get him unstuck.

Another hit with the kids was I Stink. The story is told from the point of view of a garbage truck. He even shares an "alphabet soup" recipe that includes puppy poo, kitty litter, and dirty diapers. My kids loved the gross factor in this book.

Maxi was once a stray dog until he was taken in by a nice taxi driver. The book tells of his adventures in this quick, rhyming story.

Mermaid Dance was Pinky's top choice for the week. While the story was a bit thin (mermaids prepare for the solstice party), the illustrations are enough to keep you turning the pages.

Meriam doesn't like to get ready for bed. As her mom brushes out her hair at night a few surprises (like a little fish and seashell) lead Meriam to explain how they got there. A surprise at the end of the story left Pinky smiling.

The Dragon and the Unicorn is a story of both conservation and friendship. When King Orlando begins ordering his men to cut down the forest, Valerio the dragon and Allegra the unicorn must find a way to preserve their home.

I Love You the Purplest was my pick for the week. I have wanted to read it since I read this post during the Read Along at Helping Little Hands. I think this is a great read for moms of more than one child.

What have you been reading with your kids lately?

Linking to:

What We Did This Week

2011-05-14T20:00:00.002-05:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 3 years, Wild One is 17 months, and Sprout is 1 month

We were blessed with beautiful weather this week so we spent a lot of time playing outside (and as I get ready to post this, it's back to rainy, cold weather). I hope you had some time to enjoy playing outdoors!

Geography
This week Pinky learned all about our state in school (in preparation for our state's birthday this past Wednesday). It tied in perfectly to some map activities. First we explored our new Usborne Children's Atlas.

This book is a good intro to maps and different cultures. Both Pinky and Chaos had fun finding the different animals pictured in each country.

For a more in depth map, Daddy printed out a giant map of all the parks in our city. The kids had a lot of fun trying to find our house based on landmarks (the lake, a big park, etc). We plan to use this map to mark all the places we've been on our playground tour.

Math
Pinky tried out a new book/game - Math Gear Addition. It's a neat book that quizzes kids on addition facts up to +12. Each page has a spinner so the child can change to first number that is being added. Once they've tried to find an answer they can lift the flap to see if they are correct.

Pinky LOVED this book. I was amazed by how long she played with it. I think it will be a great book to take on long car trips to keep her busy. There are other versions of Math Gear too, and I may just pick up the subtraction book as well.

Reading

Inspired by this post at Living, Loving and Learning at Home, I decided to make Pinky her own BOB books to illustrate. This activity combined her two favorite things - reading and drawing - so we may be doing more of this!

The books are simple to make with construction paper and plain printer paper (I'm sure you could make them much fancier too). I made two books this week: Pinky and the Cat and Dogs, Dogs, Dogs! The text in each book is simple:

"Pinky had a cat. The cat was sad. Pinky had a hat. The cat saw the hat. The cat had a hat. The cat was glad."

I made the second book to contain all of our names because Pinky loves to be able to spell and write names for the whole family:

"Pinky had a dog. Chaos had a dog. Wild One had a dog. Sprout had a dog. Mom and Dad had a dog. Dogs, dogs, dogs!"

Alphabet
I decided to start the letter of the week with Chaos. What's funny about Chaos is that he can tell you what the letters are for - he'll point to a P and say it's for Pinky, a C for Chaos, etc - but he can't actually name the letters.

We started by reading The Sleepy Little Alphabet. It's a cute book about putting all of the letters to bed at night.

Next, we made an Alligator A (from this post on No Time for Flashcards). We even gave the alligator glittery teeth! I was really happy that Choas made this (and surprised at how good his scissor skills are!) because he is not usually interested in crafts.

He's very excited to make the whole alphabet and hang it up in his room.

I also added some alphabet magnets to the fridge for him to explore. I selected A, B, and C (with lowercase magnets to match) to start with.

Finally, the most favorite activity of the week (for all of us), Alphabet Cookies!! I found this adorable alphabet cookie cutter set at a garage sale and was excited to try it out.

We had so much fun frosting and decorating these (and eating them too of course!).

Shapes and Colors
Chaos tried his hand at sorting shapes and colors this week. I printed these shape mats from Confessions of a Homeschooler and had Chaos sort plastic buttons according to shape.

He did pretty well (I was surprised that he knew the difference between a circle and an oval). The rectangles/squares confused him, but I know he'll get it soon enough. Later we tried sorting by color, but he got frustrated, so we stopped.

We also used our new geoboard for the first time this week. Pinky and Chaos had fun making shapes while I used it show the kids how to make letters. I hope to spend more time playing with this next week.

Fun With the Younger Kids
Wild One spent a lot of time playing with Chaos's Chuck E Cheese tokens. She loved to put them in the jar one by one and then dump them all back out and start over. It's the simple things, right?

As usual, she also spent a lot of time reading. I think she would be happy to read every minute of the day. I'm glad that she occasionally gives me a break and looks at books by herself too!

I introduced PlayDoh to her for the first time this week. She did so well! Much like the coins, she liked to dump it out and put it back in the jar, but she also had fun tearing it into little pieces. I gave her a stamper to try and was surprised that she had enough strength to make the stamp (a fish) show up!

Sprout has been spending a lot of time on her play mat these days so I made her her own felt board to look at (the instructions can be found at this post on Made by Joel) . It was super quick and easy to make and the kids had fun switching out the shapes and colors for her.

What fun activities did you do this week?

Linking up to:

5 a Day Books

2011-05-09T14:01:00.004-05:00

To learn more about the 5 a Day challenge click here.

This weeks books are aimed towards Wild One, though the older kids like to listen and help read as well.

Our five books for this week are:

A classic book that all of my kids have loved. There is something about the rhythm of the text that draws me in every time.

"How do I love you, let me count the ways..." A story of the many ways we love our children.

This book was chosen for Wild One's love of learning words right now. Each page is a colorful picture and one word.

This book was a gift from my mom and is a good reminder to the kids of how much she loves them.

A celebration of all the things we love about baby - from top to bottom! A quick, rhyming story that Wild One loves.

Linking to:

What My Child is Reading

2011-05-08T13:29:00.005-05:00

We stocked up on some new library books this week, so we've been reading a lot.

There were a few books that were "recommended reading" during the online art class that we are just now getting around to reading.

The first two, Not a Box and Not a Stick, are great, simple stories about using your imagination. Pinky and Chaos really liked these books and loved to guess what the box or stick would be next.

The next book, I Ain't Gonna Paint No More is a great story about a child who just can't stop painting. The rhyming is very catchy (I can't stop myself from singing it) and the ending had all of us laughing out loud.

The next two books we read, Sammy the Seal and Danny the Dinosaur, are classic Syd Hoff books that I recall reading as a child. Because they're easy readers, Pinky was able to help me read them.

Chaos's favorite book this week was Little Pea. It's a story of Little Pea and how much he hates to eat CANDY for dinner every night. His mom and dad tell him he can only have dessert if he takes 5 bites of his candy. What's for dessert? Spinach of course!

Finally, Pinky and I started the Magic Tree House series with Dinosaurs Before Dark. I was hesitant to try this series with her because I wasn't sure she would deem it "girly" enough for her tastes. I'm really glad I gave it a try. She loved it and has asked to read the next book in the series. I love that there are real dino facts in this book and the plot has a lot more substance than the Rainbow Magic books we are currently reading. Even Chaos listened to most of the story and seemed interested. That's a success in my book!

What are you reading this week? Are there any books your child has chosen to read that have surprised you?

Linking to:

What We Did This Week

2011-05-07T20:30:00.031-05:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 3 years, Wild One is 17 months, and Sprout is 1 month

Counting and Numbers
We read two great books about numbers this week. The first, aimed more at the younger kids, was 1,2,3 to the Zoo by Eric Carle. It's a simple animal counting story, but, as with all Eric Carle books, is beautifully illustrated.

The second book we read was a new one to me, but has quickly become one of my favorites - Numbers, Counting in the Natural World. Filled with beautiful nature pictures, this book counts to twelve and discusses sequence, comparison (lot, little, none; smallest to largest, etc), greater than and less than, evens and odds, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I have the feeling we will be reading this book a lot!

Math Activities:
Pinky has decided that she really wants to learn to count to 100 before she starts Kindergarten. She knows the basic pattern but forgets the 10 place holders. I printed out a number chart from 1-100 for her to count with. I highlighted the 10 units and she practiced skip counting another love of hers) to help reinforce her memorization.

You can find the number chart here at apples4theteacher and the skip counting charts here at Homeschool Creations.

Chaos and I made sticker math charts together. He's gotten very good at counting, and I was surprised at how interested he was in completing the charts with me. The idea for this activity came from this post at Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.

Magnets:
We had a lot of fun exploring magnets and their properties this week. We started by exploring our new magnet sensory box.

Next we tried an activity I read about on the Prekinders blog. Using a ruler, we placed a magnet marble at one end and slowly pushed our magnet wands toward it. We took guesses as to how far the marble would "jump" to the wand.

We then experimented with different strength magnets to see which could make the marble jump the furthest.

Our magnets - magnet wand, refrigerator magnet, a MagnaDoodle magnet and our magnetic cabinet lock "key"

Our next activity (inspired by this post at Tinker Lab) was to see if the magnets would work through glass and water. We submerged a marble magnet and tried to retrieve it using our different magnets. Both the wand and the cabinet lock key were able to move the magnets.

This was definitely the favorite activity for the kids. They loved "rescuing" the magnets over and over again.

We also read two books about magnets: Magnet Power and What Makes a Magnet?

We tried a few of the activities in each of these books which included magnetizing a needle, discovering North and South poles, making our own compass, and discovering that the refrigerator seal is magnetic (this was news to me too!).

Finally, we decided to do some magnet painting!! This is such a fun project to do. We filled 4 small bowls with Crayola fingerpaint and added a magnet marble to each one.

We put paper in the bottom of a shoe box and dropped in the magnet(s) of our choice.

By moving the magnet wand on the underside of the box we were able to paint our pictures.

Reading:
Pinky continues to read the Bob books. I've noticed she has some trouble distinguishing the lowercase b, d, p and q. Using an idea I found here at Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary, I made a letter matching game for her to practice matching uppercase and lowercase letters.

And since I had even more plastic eggs, I also made a few word family eggs to play with. The idea came from this post on Living and Learning Now.

Other Reading Activities:
This week we were also lucky enough to host Pete the Pigeon - a friend from Pinky's preschool class. He takes turns visiting each student during the school year.

This was our second visit with Pete the Pigeon. The first time he visited he brought along Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus for us to read. This time he brought Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog. Pinky and Chaos both find the Pigeon stories hilarious.

At the end of Pete's visit, we record what we did with him in the classroom journal and Pinky is able to share her story with her classmates. It is so much fun to read all the stories! This week Pigeon Pete joined Abby at dance class, Spanish class and was even able to attend Sunday School and sing in church! I think he had a good time.

Also this week, Wild One had fun with her first sensory box - The Texture Box. She liked to cuddle the softer fabrics and had a fun game of emptying and refilling the bin over and over again. Finally, Pinky showed her how to use the squares as small blankets for her Little People.

Speaking of Little People, Wild One had the best time playing with the Little People school bus this week. She would open and close all the doors, pull out the stop sign, and push it all around the house. She even let her baby dolls take a few rides.

Sprout continues to grow bigger every day. I am amazed that she is a month old already. We spent a lot of time cuddling this week and spent some time on exploring her playmat (she has just started noticing the toys hanging from it). She surprised us all by rolling over from her belly to her back this week too!

Here's one of my favorite pictures from this week. Sprout was crying so Wild One gave her back her pacifier and was stroking her cheek. So sweet!

Linking up to:

Summer Fun List!

2011-05-05T16:11:00.005-05:00

With only 3 weeks left in the school year, the kids and I have started working on our summer fun list. It's still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share what we have so far - maybe someone out there has some fun ideas we can add!

Cook and eat a sand cake (crushed cookies and pudding)
Have a bike wash
Go on a nature scavenger hunt
Blow BIG bubbles
Create a nature journal
Create a terrarium
Give the kids a dirt pile to plant and play in
Make a mud pie (Pinky wants no part of this one)
Fly a kite
Catch fireflies
Play in the rain
Paint outside
Make fairy houses
Go fishing
Continue our Playground Tour (a quest to visit every playground in our city)
Make a bird feeder

Do you have a summer fun list or a "bored jar"? What sort of things are you hoping to do this summer?

Head on over to Little Wonders' Days to link up your own "Summer Bucket List."

Sensory Boxes!

2011-05-03T11:30:00.008-05:00

I made two new sensory boxes today. The first, for Pinky and Chaos, is a magnet sensory box. I've been excited to show them this one since they love playing with magnets so much.

The base of the box is sawdust (wood bedding for small animals). I then hid magnetic and non magnetic objects for the kids to find (they pretended to be pirates finding buried treasure) with magnet wands.

They sorted the objects they found into magnetic and non-magnetic groups and made predictions about which objects would be attracted to the magnets. They were tricked by aluminum foil and quarters (which they thought would be magnetic) and the bread twist tie (which they thought would not).

The second sensory box I made was for Wild One! This is her first sensory box. I'm calling this a texture box. I added squares of different types of fabric and a few large pom poms for more interest.

The fabrics include terry cloth, minky, fleece, flannel, cotton, a velvet-type fabric, silky fabric, and even a bit of oil cloth.

I used a shoe box sized bin to hold everything.

Chaos and Pinky helped her discover her new treasures!

I'll post more about our activities with the sensory boxes in my weekly recap.

5 a Day Books

2011-05-02T09:44:00.005-05:00

I've decided to join The Imagination Tree's 5 a Day Books challenge. You can read more about the challenge here.

Our five books for this week are:

Bear Snores On

This is a cute rhyming story about a group of animals that sneak into Bear's cave to keep warm one winter's night - and what happens when he wakes up!

It's Spring

This is one of my favorite books to read to the kids. A short, sweet rhyming story about the animals announcing that spring has arrived!

Gossie

Gossie the gosling never goes anywhere without her favorite red boots. But what happens when she loses them? A cute story about sharing.

A Mother for Choco

Choco is looking for her mother, but no one looks like her! Then she meets a wise mother bear who explains to Choco that being a family does not mean that you have to look the same.

Pouch!

A short cute story about a joey slowly discovering his world. He is afraid of the smallest creatures, hopping back to the safety of his pouch until he meets another joey who is just as scared as him.

Linking to:

What My Child is Reading

2011-04-30T20:21:00.003-05:00

Easing back into the blogging world with some of the books we've been reading this week.

After reading all 7 Rainbow Fairy books of the Rainbow Magic Series (did you follow that?), Pinky was very excited to learn that there are a lot of other book sets. She was even happier that the Easter Bunny was kind enough to leave one of those sets in her basket - the Jewel Fairies.

The books are about 2 girls, Rachel and Kirsty, who help a series of fairies overcome Jack Frost's evil plans and save Fairyland. The books are repetitive, but that hasn't stopped Pinky from enjoying every one. They're perfect books for those beginning to read chapter books or for any child who loves magic, rainbows and fairies.

She has also been reading BOB books. I really can't tell you how much we LOVE these books. Great for beginner readers.

Chaos really enjoys I Spy books. We've been reading I Spy Little Numbers a lot lately.

He has also requested A Mud Pie for Mother nearly every night before bed - a very cute story about Little Pig searching for the perfect gift for his mother.

Wild One continues to love books. We read nearly all of the books on her bookshelf each week, but her favorite this week seems to be Baby Einstein Mirror Me. Each page shows a character making a silly face (puffing out cheeks, sticking out tongue, etc). She really enjoys looking at herself in the mirror on each page. She doesn't always try to mimic the facial expressions, but she finds it hilarious when I do.

Linking to:

Activity Calendars

2011-04-16T11:41:00.000-05:00

I found these simple and easy activity calendars at Preschool Express the other day and thought I would share the link. They have planning calendars, preschool activity calendars and toddler activity calendars that you can print for free. Each day has a simple activity to do with your child. I love the simplicity of having things planned out for you - great (for times like now) when you're super busy!

Click here to see the Preschool Express calendars

Scrapbook Stash!

2011-04-13T20:21:00.000-05:00

I've posted my fabric stash in the past, but have never posted some of the fun stuff I buy for scrapbooking. This is the paper I bought to make Sprout's birth-1 year album (always my favorite album to put together). It's from Creative Memories Simply Beautiful line (all photos are from the CM website).

Simply Beautiful 12x12 Power Palette System

Simply Beautiful 12x12 Spring Addition

Simply Beautiful 12x12 Summer Addition

Simply Beautiful Birthday 12x12 Addition

I can't wait to start using it - it's so bright and pretty!

Kid Link Parties

2011-04-10T17:40:00.014-05:00

Here are the carnivals I link up to that are kid focused.

Tot School/Kid Crafts/Kid Activities:

Sunday:

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

Monthly:

Always open:

Seasonal Parties:

Know of any others? Feel free to add them in the comments!

Where to find fun activities!

2011-04-07T14:46:00.001-05:00

While I'm busy with Sprout, I thought I would share where I find some of the fun things I do with my kids.

The first thing I recommend is checking out some of the link parties I link up to each week (the buttons are always included at the end of each "What We Did This Week" post). There are some amazingly creative bloggers out there who are wonderful enough to share their ideas day after day.

For 0-12 Months

Baby Play by Gymboree is a great book that I've used with all of my kids
Baby Center also has a fun list of activities by age for the first year
Letter of the Week has a full curriculum for baby's first year - great source of inspiration
I also have handouts from my county's childcare division on activities by age (some are posted on my blog - I hope to have more posted soon)

For Toddlers

Toddler Play by Gymboree is the newest addition to our library and I love it just as much as I loved Baby Play
Letter of the Week also has a curriculum for toddlers
Family Fun Magazine - I've had a subscription for a few years now and love the ideas. Their website is also really useful.
I also have handouts from my county's childcare division on activities by age (some are posted on my blog - I hope to have more posted soon)

For Preschool/Kindergarten Resources

Family Fun Magazine - I've had a subscription for a few years now and love the ideas. Their website is also really useful.

Another great website for all ages is No Time for Flash Cards. There are a lot of great activities posted and there's even a break down by age.

If you'd like to check out some of the activities I've found through other blogs, feel free to check out my Pinterest links:

What unique places do you use for ideas and inspiration? Any favorite books or websites?

Handmade Cards

2011-04-04T09:18:00.000-05:00

One of the great things about having kids is that I may never have to buy another store bought card again! I love having the kids make cards for their cousins, grandparents, friends, etc. And the kids really love it too. I think there is really something special about receiving a handmade card.

I've posted a few of the cards we've made in the past:

Bubble print thank you cards

Christmas tree cards

Painted tissue paper cards

Valentine's Day cards for Daddy

I thought I'd share a few more ideas.

Pinky got a spin art machine for her birthday and the kids have had so much fun making pictures with it. The problem is we now have about a million of these little pictures lying around the house.

I thought it would be fun to use my scrapbook punches to cut out some shapes from the paintings and make cool pictures.

You can see the spin art shapes in the back on the left. Chaos and I made a rocketship birthday card for his friend. The front card is a simple crayon drawing that Pinky made of her and her friend playing in the mud. On the right is one of our painted tissue paper cards.

I'd like the kids to mail a card to one of their great grandmas every week so you will probably see more posts about handmade cards. We may try some fingerprint painting for our next batch of cards.

Do you have any cute handmade cards to share? I'd love to see them!

Michigan State Tie Fleece Blanket

2011-04-01T09:12:00.000-05:00

An old project that I never got around to posting - This was a gift I made for a friend when I went to visit her new baby for the first time. We were college roommates so I had to make something Michigan State related.

Front of the the blanket

Back

I also included some adorable MSU hair clips made by a friend and INTENDED to include MSU burp cloths, but my sewing machine broke before I had a chance to make them.

Looking at these pictures again, I think I'll have to make one of these blankets for myself!

Overjoyed to announce...

2011-03-30T10:55:00.002-05:00

The arrival of Sprout!

Big sisters and brother are thrilled to have her home. We are all doing well and Sprout is happy and healthy!

I have some posts scheduled for the next couple weeks. If I don't respond immediately to emails or comments please know that we are busy savoring the precious first weeks with our newest blessing!

What We Did This Week - Week 7

2011-03-27T12:09:00.017-05:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 36 months, and Wild One is 15 months

Despite the best of intentions, we had a slow week around here - mostly spent impatiently waiting for Sprout who appears to be the first of my kids to be a LATE arrival! :)

We are still following along the online art class at Pineapple Paintbrush, but I saved most of the activities for next week when Pinky is on spring break.

We did read two art books this week though. First, as I posted about earlier, we read I Spy Shapes in Art and had a really fun activity to go with it.

You can read more about the many games we played with these construction paper shapes here.

We also read Harold and the Purple Crayon - I think this has become Chaos's new favorite book. He asks me to read it to him a dozen times a day.

The kids did plenty of drawing with their crayons in these adorable Color Your Own journals that I found at Michaels for 99 cents.

(Whoops, forgot to take a picture of these. I will upload it first thing tomorrow!)

To further tie in with the book, we printed and colored two mini books. The first was "It Looked Like a Dot" from Waddlee-Ah-Chaa.

This is a really cute and unique printable. Pinky had a lot of fun with it.

The second was "I Can Draw" from DTLK.

Each page has a simple sentence as a drawing prompt (I can draw a tree, I can draw my brother, etc.)

In non art related activities we just had to try the Ivory soap experiment that has been popping up on various blogs (I believe I saw it for the first time on Housing a Forest).

The kids loved watching the soap grow in the microwave. Pinky had guessed that it would melt so she was surprised to see it get bigger! It was fun to play with too (after it cooled).

We didn't want to waste an entire bar of soap so we added a bit of water back to the soap blob and made our own soap shapes using cookie cutters. The kids had fun using them in the bath.

Two birds and a heart

In real life activities, Pinky had her dance observation class. She has really enjoyed the last couple years in dance and has come a long way from being too shy to perform in front of the other parents.

Pretty in pink

I switched out Wild One's Discovery Box this week. I put in an assortment of foam blocks and (as I thought she would) she loved them. She really loves to build towers and has gotten quite good at it!

She played a lot with her baby dolls this week too. She even pretended to feed them and change their diapers, though apparently she did NOT want to share this cool bed with them.

My favorite picture of the week:

Why play WITH your toys when you can play IN them? She was pretty mad that I took a picture before rescuing her.

Linking up to:

The most fun you'll have with construction paper

2011-03-22T20:08:00.002-05:00

Don't you love when the simplest of activities turns into hours of fun? That's what happened here today. I had planned to save this for the weekly wrap up, but we had so much fun with it I thought it deserved a post all its own.

As part of our art focus, we read I Spy Shapes in Art together.

My kids LOVE I Spy so this book was a big hit with them.

For a quick, fun game I cut out shapes from construction paper in different colors (if I were to do this again I would use craft foam instead for durability). I made circles, ovals, squares, rectangles and triangles. Next, I had the kids lay them out on the floor in a random pattern.

(Please excuse the dim pictures - it was a very dark and rainy day today!)

For the first game, we used Chaos's stomp rockets as "shape rockets." I called out a shape and the kids took turns trying to throw or stomp the rockets to the right shape.

Though I started by calling out shapes, we did eventually move to colors and then, for the hardest round, to shapes AND colors.

Extensions of this game

Add additional shapes for difficulty
Draw letters or numbers on the shapes and alternate calling out shapes, colors, numbers or letters
Add letters to the shapes and call out a word. Have the child throw the rocket to letter the word starts with
Add numbers to the shapes. For older kids, give a simple math problem and have them throw the rocket to the correct answer

When the kids were done launching rockets, I switched up the game. I had them go on a Shape Scavenger Hunt. They had to search the house and bring back items to match each of the shapes on the floor.

I loved how creative they got with this. The green tray in the above picture had a triangle shape on it so they deemed it a triangle shape instead of a rectangle (the shape of the tray). We also played this game with colors.

Extensions on this game

Add numbers to the shapes. Ask the kids to find like items to match the numbers (3 blocks on the number three, 4 puzzle pieces on the the number four, etc)
Add letters to the shapes. Have the child find items that start with that letter.

Finally, when we were cleaning up, Pinky discovered that she could rearrange the shapes to make pictures. She spent a lot of time (and thought) arranging the shapes into new works of art.

Extensions of this game

Challenge the child to make a specific object (house, person, butterfly, etc)
Play "guess the picture" - one person creates a picture and the others have to guess what it is
Attempt to imitate some of the art in the book or in pictures around the house

Other Game Ideas

Play your own version of Hullabaloo. Have the kids start on a certain color, then ask them to spin, crawl, walk, silly dance, etc to another shape or color (or letter or number).
Have the kids sort by matching shapes, then by matching colors

What ideas can you come up with for these simple shapes?

Linking up to:

What We Did This Week - Week 6

2011-03-19T19:35:00.032-05:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 36 months, and Wild One is 15 months

We didn't have a specific theme this week, though art did play a large role in most of our activities.

This week we started the online art class from Pineapple Paintbrush. If you're not joining in you really should be - it's a lot of fun! You can click the button in my sidebar to learn more.

We started by reading Mouse Paint since this week's class is all about color.

Then we moved on to a few of the activities Dani outlined in her class:

Color wheel (Pinky now knows all the primary and secondary colors - so cool!)

Color blending:

String painting (this was our favorite by far - even I had fun making a few pictures!)

Next we read the book Ish. It's a cute story about a boy who loves to draw and learns that his drawings don't have to be exactly perfect.

We decided to make some "Ish" drawings. I really wanted to encourage the kids to draw, even if they didn't think they could. I was so impressed by Pinky (who is always quick to say she "can't" draw something) telling me that she was going to TRY to draw a caterpillar. I think she did a GREAT job!

The caterpillar she was trying to draw

Her finished drawing!

The next book we read was Elmer. It's a story of an elephant who, though he looks different, learns what is special about himself. This was definitely the favorite book of both Pinky and Chaos this week.

Just for fun we colored some Elmer elephants with our oil pastels. The coloring page was printed from here.

For some non-art related activities:
Chaos has been very interested in learning his letters lately, and Pinky has been very interested in spelling. I traced our alphabet magnets and added pictures (our rhyming cards from Dr. Seuss week) to spell simple CVC words.

The kids both LOVED these. I plan to make quite a few more (these are double sided and "laminated" in contact paper).

I didn't want to leave Wild One out of the art activities so she made her first ever collage using felt and contact paper. This was a great sensory activity for her too! The idea for this activity came from here on The Activity Mom.

I also made her a Discovery Box (inspired by this post at The Imagination Tree) filled with musical instruments. She loved it!

Her Discovery Box - most of the instruments are from our years in Kindermusik or Melissa and Doug sets.

She dug right into the basket. Her favorites were the xylophone and the rainbow bottle (Pinky made it a few years back - it's simply an empty 20 oz bottle filled with beads and decorated with with rainbow tape. If you make one be SURE to secure the lid tightly).

My favorite picture this week...

Wild One is NOT pleased to be giving up her role as the baby in the family! I hope she changes her mind - Sprout will be here very soon!

Linking up to:

Some business stuff...

2011-03-15T15:28:00.001-05:00

Just a few things I wanted to let you know. First, you may see my posts slow down (and at some point stop for awhile) as we anticipate the arrival of Sprout very soon. I'm trying to schedule some posts for while I'm gone, but I can't make any guarantees.

Second, I'm working on streamlining my labels. I plan to keep the full list (because I use it a ton to find posts), but it will most likely get moved to the bottom of the page. I'm working on some simple buttons for the sidebar for my most used categories. I think it will be a big improvement!

That's all...back to fun stuff now!

Don't forget!

2011-03-14T19:43:00.002-05:00

The online art class at Pineapple Paintbrush starts today. Click the button in my sidebar to learn more!

What We Did This Week - St Patty's Day Theme

2011-03-13T10:21:00.032-05:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 35 months, Wild One is 15 months

We had a great time with a St. Patrick's Day theme this week!

St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin
I finally changed out the sensory bin (though the kids were still really enjoying the Rainbow bin). I got the idea for this bin from here at No Time For Flashcards.

Our bin is filled with green split peas and yellow corn kernels (the lentils were too hard to find). I added shovels, plastic green and gold coins, green and gold poms, and buckets (not pictured) to collect their treasures. As an afterthought, I made shamrock and rainbow shrink art and added those too! (The shrink art idea came from another blog I saw this week, but I can't remember where! I will continue to look to so I can give proper credit!)

Lucky Gold Treasure Hunt
Another idea from No Time For Flashcards was a simple Treasure Hunt game. Using more of the plastic coins (I found mine at the Dollar Store) and some construction paper, I made a fun game to help Chaos with his counting and number recognition.

I was VERY impressed with how good Chaos was at finding the gold!

Searching through our boots for more leprechaun gold!

Catch a Rainbow Science Experiment
What's St. Patrick's Day without a rainbow? This week we tried the Catch a Rainbow Science Experiment from Kidzone.

I introduced the kids to primary colors and we talked about what colors they made when mixed. They had fun watching for a bit, then Pinky asked if she could blow on the colors to make them move faster. It turned out to be a great idea. A gentle blow caused the colors to move all around, and it was as though we were painting. Very cool!

Pot of Gold Fingerprint Painting
We made our own pots of gold! First I drew a pot on black construction paper and had the kids cut them out and glue them to a piece of white paper (Chaos needed some help, but Pinky did awesome). Next we painted coins and shamrocks using our fingers! The gold coins are thumbprints and the shamrocks are (mostly) pointer fingers. The kids thought this painting was hilarious and loved making their leprechauns "rich" with gold!

Finished pictures. I wanted to take some in process pictures but the painting got messy quickly!

Don't worry, we didn't forget about Wild One this week! She had her fair share of rainbow inspired fun!

First I put together a rainbow pom shaker like the one on No Time For Flashcards.

I tried desperately to get a picture of Wild One actually playing with this because she really loved it, but the second she saw the camera she giggled and ran away.

Next we played with her wooden rainbow stacker.

I ordered this way cool rainbow stacker from Imagination Kids on etsy. It's all wood with nontoxic paint - perfect for little ones. I've ordered a few toys from Imagination Kids and have been impressed with the quality and service! (And that's my non-paid, unsolicited opinion).

Wild One LOVED knocking it down and (trying to) set it back up. We used it as an opportunity to talk about colors (I told the older kids about the color order of the rainbow) and size.

Finally, we did some coloring. She seemed to like these crayons a lot more than the last ones we tried. I like to keep it simple with only one or two crayons (green and orange this time in keeping with our theme). I also gave her some rainbow stickers since she enjoyed them so much last time.

Not sure if you can see the smile behind her pacifier in the first picture, but she was pretty excited to color!

We've been having a great time with our at home activities. Next week we plan to join in the online art class from Pineapple Paintbrush! Hope you'll join us!

Linking up to:

Read Along with Helping Little Hands

2011-03-09T17:00:00.005-06:00

I am so honored to be part of the read along at Helping Little Hands. If you haven't seen what Polly and fellow bloggers have been up to, be sure to click the link below or in my sidebar to see all of the great books and crafts that have been posted so far!

Around here, we love robots. So the book I chose to share is The Robot and the Bluebird by David Lucas.

The book is a wonderful story about a robot with a broken heart. Being deemed "unfixable" he is thrown out to the junk pile where he befriends and helps a bluebird struggling to fly south. The bird takes up residence in the space where his heart used to be, and once again the robot feels as though his heart is soaring.

After reading the book (and taking a moment to wipe my tears), we decided to make our own robots to love.

First, I made felt boards (just as I did during Dr. Seuss week). These are SO easy to make! All you need to do is glue a sheet of craft felt to cardboard and cut out various shapes of felt. I used my pinking shears on a lot of the pieces to make the robot look more...well...robotic! And of course we had to give our robots a heart!

Next we made robot pillows to hug!

Wild One has no idea what is going on but insisted on being a part of the picture

To make your own robot pillow you will need:

robot coloring page
scissors
fabric markers
light colored fabric
stuffing
coordinating thread and needle or sewing machine

Cut out 2 pieces of fabric for each pillow you want to make (I cut mine to the same size as my coloring sheet). One piece will be the front of the pillow, the other will be the back.

Print out your robot coloring sheet (the one I used is from here at Confessions of a Non-Domestic Housewife) and lay a piece of fabric on top of it. Trace the design using fabric markers.

Let the kids color and decorate their robots with the fabric markers. When they're finished, follow the instructions on the package to set the marker.

I love that they added lots of birds to their pillows (Pinky drew birds for Chaos)

Place the top of your pillow (the robot picture) FACE DOWN on top of the bottom of your pillow and stitch on three sides using your sewing machine or by hand. Turn right side out.

Stuff the pillow, then sew closed the 4th side.

You're finished - give your robot pillow a great BIG SQUEEZE!!!

We had such a fun time with our robot crafts that we plan to have a complete week dedicated to robots soon. I hope you'll check back!

Thanks for stopping by and be sure to check out what Polly has in store for the rest of the month at Helping Little Hands!

Linking to:

Our newest addition

2011-03-08T14:29:00.001-06:00

No, Sprout didn't decide to make an appearance just yet, but we're still pretty excited about this addition.

There are many, many things we love about our house, but there are a few things we wish we could change too. One of those things is the small eating area. We have no dining room - just a small bump out area in the kitchen. It's a tight squeeze for a soon to be family of 6!

This was our old dining table in the space. You can see that there isn't enough room for everyone to fit (and you can also see the metal folding chair we've been using since we broke the 4th chair years ago). At family meal times, we'd pull Wild One's highchair as close as possible to the table, but it still felt as though she were eating in a separate space.

This weekend we finally picked up a new-to-us dining room table that can fit the whole family (thank you Craigslist)!!! The table certainly takes up a lot more space than the old one did, but we can finally have the whole family together at one table (we have a booster seat for Wild One to sit in at the table).

I think a table runner and some flowers for the center of the table would really dress it up, don't you?

What about you - is there something you would like to change about your current space?

What We Did This Week - Dr. Seuss Recap

2011-03-06T07:41:00.021-06:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 35 months, Wild One is 15 months

It's been a really busy week celebrating Dr. Seuss! Read along to see what we did each day this week or click the button below to see all of our posts from the week!

Day 1: We read Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. We made Thing 1 and Thing 2 pencils, made a watercolor painting of the Cat in the Hat, and played a hat game with Wild One.

Day 2: We read Horton Hatches the Egg and watched a video of a robin hatching from its egg. We "hatched" some plastic eggs with Wild One.

Day 3: We read Sneetches and Bartholomew and the Oobleck. We made our own oobleck, pretended to be sneetches, and played a color/shape sorting game.

Day 4: We read And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. We made up our own tall tales, did Goldfish math at snack time, played with fish felt boards, and played a rhyming matching game.

Day 5: We read The Lorax and The Foot book. We painted footprint fish, played a shoe game with Wild One, made our own Truffula tree centerpieces and learned about water pollution first hand.

Day 6: We read The Shape of Me and Other Stuff and Oh, The Places You'll Go. We traced Pinky and Chaos to make giant drawings, played with a shape sorter with Wild One, and played 2 homemade games - a movement game and a good choices game.

Day 7: We ended the week by reading Green Eggs and Ham. The kids had a great time role playing with their felt green eggs and ham.

Not feeling done yet? Check out what we didn't have time for (but bookmarked for NEXT year!)

There's a Wocket in My Pocket art project from Teach Kids Art

Horton Hears a Who craft from Meet the Dubiens

Thing One and Thing Two handprint paintings from Stuff by Ash.

Cat in the Hat and Thing One and Thing Two Finger Puppets from Craft Jr.

One Fish Two Fish Art Project from Deep Space Sparkle

Hop on Pop Twin Sheet Tutorial from ObSEUSSed

And lastly:

A round up of ideas to keep you busy for a long, long time from Roots and Wings Co

Dr. Seuss letter writing printables from Missmernagh.com
Printables 1
Printables 2

Thanks for joining us all week! Now I'm off to rest my tired rhyming tongue (and hopefully my thoughts will stop rhyming soon too!).

Linking up to:

Dr. Seuss, Day 7

2011-03-05T19:15:00.007-06:00

For the final day of our week long celebration we read, in my opinion, the most well loved Dr. Seuss book there is - Green Eggs and Ham.

Now, I'm sure the MOST logical activity to pair with this book is eating green eggs and ham, but, since my kids won't touch normal colored eggs and ham, I had to get creative...

FELT green eggs and ham!

The kids had a blast pretending to be Sam-I-Am and reenacting the book.

If your kids are a bit more adventurous when it comes to eating, you may want to check out My Delicious Ambiguity for a great round up of Seuss-inspired foods.

Whew! What a week. I hope you had as much fun as we did. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our recap and a few activities that we ran out of time to do.

If you missed any of our other posts this week, click the button below to see them all!

Dr. Seuss, Day 6

2011-03-04T19:14:00.013-06:00

Thank you so much for stopping by Day 6!

Two more great books to talk about today - The Shape of Me and Other Stuff and Oh, the Places You'll Go!

After we read The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, Chaos surprised me by asking if he could pretend to be other shapes (I LOVE how imaginative he is becoming lately). We pretended to be pretzels, whales, frogs, and even a trumpet!

When we finished our game, we started our shape activities. Using a large art roll, I traced the shape of Pinky (R) and Chaos (L).

They spent a lot of time coloring clothes, faces, jewelry and other things to finish their pictures. Then we hung them on their bedroom doors.

Wild One, in the mean time, had a great time playing with a shape sorter. We have lots of shape sorters around the house, but I'm particularly fond of this Fisher Price Peek a Block one. The blocks are cute and eye catching and (best of all for Wild One) it has a handle to carry it around.

I'm sure many of you have read the next book - Oh, The Places You'll Go, but it's always worth a reread! I found two GREAT activities at Bright Hub.

First, we played a movement game - a wonderful activity when your kids are just chock full of energy. I made two piles of cards - one with movements (jump, skip, hop, walk backwards) and one with locations (the kitchen, the couch, your bedroom, etc). They took turns picking a card from each pile and acting out what was on them (jump to the kitchen, bear walk to the bathroom...).

The next game we played was all about Making Good Choices. I made a simple game board using markers and a piece of cardboard. Then I wrote out choices - both good and bad - on cards (cut up construction paper). We took turns rolling the dice and picking a card. If we correctly identified it as a good or bad choice (and it was fun to hear the logic behind some of these!) we were allowed to move forward. The first one to the finish line was the winner.

Our game board. I used some jumbo plastic jacks as game pieces.

This was a fun homemade game to play for family game night!

There's only one more day left of our Seuss celebration. Be sure to stop by tomorrow for the last of the festivities, then catch our recap (with a few activities we didn't have time for) on Sunday.

If you've missed any of the posts this week, click the button below to get caught up!

Dr. Seuss Week, Day 5

2011-03-03T18:34:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Day Five!

Today we read The Foot Book and The Lorax.

After reading The Foot Book (which Pinky was quick to point out was full of opposites) we did some fun foot activities!

The older kids painted their feet and walked across an art roll in the kitchen. We then turned the footprints into fish (inspired by this post at Crafty-Crafted). Hmm...this would have paired well with One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish yesterday. :)

Later I let them color more details to the picture - seaweed, bubbles, a dolphin, a boat...

Finding an activity for Wild One to go with The Foot Book was a no brainer. SHOES! My little girl is seriously shoe obsessed these days. I just picked out a few (some are big sister's, some are from dress up) and she had a blast trying them all on.

A girl has to have CHOICES!

Well, who wouldn't go for the ruby red slippers first?

She's not so sure about the leprechaun shoes

Next we read The Lorax. This is a book I have been wanting to read for awhile now. I really love it (and the message). To teach the kids about the effects of pollution, we built a water pollution bin like they did at Along The Way to see if we could clean up the damage (this is another activity I've been itching to try for awhile).

The kids were pretty shocked that I threw trash into the water (after I told them to pretend it was a beautiful lake with fish in it).

They had a great time cleaning up the trash (I was afraid they might find it too gross). When it came time to get the little particles they were very concerned about how we were going to clean them up. We built our own water filtration system using a strainer and a coffee filter. They were honestly just amazed! This was a really fun activity!

After the water clean up, we built a Truffula Tree Centerpiece for our dinner table. You can find the instructions to make your own on Craft Jr.

Creating...

Chaos decided he wanted to plant Truffula seeds instead of making trees (which I thought was very clever), so the poms stuck in the playdoh are seeds!

If you're looking for more fun activities to pair with these books check out some of these great ideas:

Mom Endeavors made her own family foot book! Click the picture to read more!

How about making your own storybook felt board as featured on ObSEUSSed? Click the picture to learn how!

Though his birthday is over, we're STILL not done celebrating! There are 2 more great Dr. Seuss books and activities tomorrow. Be sure to check back!

If you've missed any of the fun we've this week, click the button below to see it all!

Dr Seuss Week, Day 4

2011-03-02T20:27:00.000-06:00

I can't believe the week is halfway over already! Don't worry, we still have some really fun things planned for the days ahead!

Today we read two more Dr. Seuss classics - And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.

We started with Mulberry Street. After reading the book the kids made up their own stories about what THEY may have seen. Pinky really enjoyed this activity. Here is her picture and story (the printable is from Chalk Talk: A Kindergarten Blog).

"Sprout, Chaos, and Mommy holding hands with a bird. The bird is holding hands with the car. A big storm is headed to our house, the highway and Shop-O-Rama."

Next we read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (I think my tongue needs to be in a splint for the next week to recover from all that tongue twisting rhyming!). We read the story at snack time, so naturally we had to have Rainbow Goldfish to eat! I gave the kids a few math sheets to "play with their food" and they were so excited (since I'm usually telling them to STOP playing with their food).

Pinky loved the fishbowl addition sheet (also from Chalk Talk).

Chaos loved the graph from What the Teacher Wants Dr. Seuss Unit. I colored the words at the bottom of the graph so he could tell at a glance where the fish went. He loved sorting by color.

After snack, I gave Pinky and Chaos each a felt board I made (SO simple using just a sheet of felt glued to cardboard). I cut out lots of fish and underwater items for the boards. These were such a BIG hit that I may make a few more with different themes too.

Finally, we played a rhyming game before bed. (I'm so sorry, but I can't remember where I found these printables - if anyone knows, please email or comment so I can give credit). We started with all of the cards face up and picked pairs that rhymed. After a few rounds, Pinky decided to turn them over and play a memory style rhyme/match game to make it a bit harder.

Be sure to check in tomorrow for an activity that I've been looking forward to all week!

If you missed any of the posts this week, just click on the button below to get caught up!

More Dr. Seuss Resources

2011-03-02T13:39:00.005-06:00

Looking for more Dr. Seuss activities? Check out these great links:

Chalk Talk: A Kindergarten Blog offers a lot of great ideas including a free 40 page downloadable Dr. Seuss mini unit.

What the Teacher Wants! also offers a free lesson download that includes word searches, self portraits, number sorting, writing, simple crafts and much more.

Oopsey Daisy has a great post summarizing what she did to celebrate several Dr. Seuss books including Green Eggs and Ham; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish; The Foot Book and more. There's even a Dr. Seuss matching game to download!

2 Teaching Mommies also has a some great printables and ideas for a Dr. Seuss unit.

Finally, check out ObSEUSSed for a lot of great Dr. Seuss resources and fun!

Happy Seuss-ing!

Dr. Seuss Week, Day 3

2011-03-01T19:59:00.008-06:00

Welcome to Day Three of Seuss fun!!

Today we read two of my favorite books - Bartholomew and the Oobleck and The Sneetches.

We started with Bartholomew and the Oobleck and of course we HAD to make oobleck. If you've never made it before, it's really quite simple. Mix 2 parts cornstarch with 1 part water. You can add a few drops of food coloring if you want (we made ours green like in the book).

When the oobleck is touched, stirred or in any way played with, it becomes hard and solid.

(Don't worry he wasn't eating it - he didn't want to touch it at first)

When left alone, the oobleck starts to "melt" (turn liquid).

We even tried forming the oobleck into shapes using cookie cutters. The kids REALLY enjoyed this part.

Clean up is not as hard as you might think. As the oobleck dries it becomes powdery again and easy to sweep up and throw away (do NOT put this down your sink drain!).

Next we read The Sneetches. I love this book for so many reasons. It's a great jumping off point to talk about how we are all different, but still the same. Pinky really related to this book and even came up with a game for us to play. Using some star stickers, some of us became Star Bellied Sneetches and some of became Sneetches Without. Pinky and Chaos had a great time role playing.

Fighting sneetches

Sneetches who can be friends, despite being different.

The role playing went on for a very long time and even extended to their stuffed animals. They even transitioned into the activity that I had planned (don't you love it when things work out that way?) - sorting. They began sorting their stuffed animals into groups - gold stars and silver stars, one star and more than one star, big stars and little stars, etc.

Using an idea I found on the Imagination Tree blog, I made a counting and sorting activity using an empty egg carton and some Melissa and Doug lacing beads.

This was mostly aimed at Chaos who is both learning to count and learning his colors, but all of the kids enjoyed it. We spent time counting the wooden beads, matching the beads to the color of the number inside the egg carton, and sorting by type of bead.

Even Wild One got involved in this activity. Though she's too young to really grasp the concept, we continued to talk about colors and numbers as she enjoyed putting the beads in and out of the egg carton (she preferred the dump it out method). She even tried stacking the beads.

To end the day, the kids colored some more printables from Seussville and did some "Which is Different" activity sheets. I'm not usually a fan of worksheets, but I couldn't resist seeing Pinky work on this with her Thing 1 pencil!

Be sure to join us tomorrow when we read two more classic Dr. Seuss books. If you've missed any of our fun this week, click the button below to see it all!

Two exciting things in blogland

2011-03-01T15:01:00.000-06:00

Two very exciting things kick off today in blogland, and I wanted to share them with you.

First, you may have noticed the new button in my sidebar for Read Along Month over at Helping Little Hands. Polly has a great line up all month long of books and activities to get kids excited about reading. You will even see a contribution from yours truly sometime during the month. Click the button below (or on my sidebar) to read more. You won't want to miss it!

Secondly, Pineapple Paintbrush is teaching an online preschool art class (you can see a class outline and sneak peek here) that kicks off March 14th (supply lists are available starting today). Best of all - it's completely free. You should really stop by her blog for more information (and lots of great art ideas for kids)!

Dr. Seuss Week, Day 2

2011-02-28T20:00:00.003-06:00

Welcome to Day 2 of our week long Dr. Seuss celebration!

Today we read one of my personal favorites, Horton Hatches the Egg (or, as Pinky calls it, Horton CRACKS the Egg).

After we read the book, we talked about why birds have to sit on their eggs. We watched a video (you can find it here) on YouTube of a robin's egg hatching. Pinky and Chaos thought it was pretty neat (I have to say I thought it was pretty cool too)!

To get Wild One involved in our activities, we had our Mother Duck "hatch" 5 eggs and sang "5 Little Ducks" to her.

I also filled a few plastic eggs with different items from around the kitchen (rice, cereal, etc) to make our own egg shaker sounds. (Using items from the kitchen meant there was no worry of baby eating anything if the eggs accidentally popped open!)

The kids finished the day by coloring a picture of Horton sitting on his egg.

If you're looking for more Horton activities, you could try making your own elephant ears and trunk as posted on Crafts~N~Things for Children. So cute!

Join us tomorrow for Day 3 - when things will get MESSY!

Click the button below to find out what else we've been up to this week!

Dr Seuss Week Begins!

2011-02-27T20:17:00.000-06:00

If you couldn't guess by the (very obvious) hint in my last post, we have a whole week planned around Dr. Seuss!! I am so excited. I've decided to post each day this week and recap all of the books and activities on my "What We Did this Week" post on Sunday to avoid having the longest post ever at the end of the week.

To get started, I printed off lots of coloring and activity pages from www.seussville.com and made both Pinky and Chaos their own activity books to go along with the books we plan to read.

And if you're going to finish mazes and dot to dots, you MUST have a Thing 1 and Thing 2 pencil (tutorial here on Skip To My Lou). I could not find fur for the hair, but I think the blue felt works just as well. These were a little too hard for the kids to make, but I sure had a good time with it.

The first book we read was The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. After reading it, and talking all about who Dr. Seuss was and why we are celebrating him this week, we did our first art project. Using a free print out from Art Projects for Kids, I had the kids do a water color resist painting. First, they colored the cat's hat with oil pastels, then painted over it with watercolor paints.

When the paintings were dried, I taped them to the front of their activity books.

After we finished our paintings, we played a hat game with Wild One. I simply chose a bunch of different hats from our dress up trunk, and we all took turns wearing them and laughing at how silly we looked! Wild One is really into trying on hats and shoes these days.

At bedtime, we read Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are and made a list of all the things we are thankful for (there is a printout for this at www.seussville.com under activities).

In their own words:
Chaos is thankful for: himself, books, Sissy (Pinky), Momma, and pencils
Pinky is thankful for: her eyes, Taylor (one of our cats), Care Bear, Mom, Dad, her pencils, her pencil holder, Chaos and Wild One

The kids are really excited to find out what book we're reading tomorrow.

I've added a button to my sidebar and below so you won't miss any of our activities this week! Be sure to check back tomorrow (and every day this week) for more Dr. Seuss fun!

Do you have any Dr. Seuss activities planned this week? I'd love to see them!

What We Did This Week

2011-02-27T07:11:00.002-06:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 35 months, Wild One is 14 months

The kids were all sort of under the weather this week so we took it easy on activities. Here are a few of the highlights of what we did.

Surprise Buckets
I put surprise objects in 3 tupperware containers and lightly placed the lids on top. Wild One had a good time taking off the lids and discovering what was inside (a taggie blanket, a stuffed frog, and an egg shaker). She repeated the game over and over, stacked the containers and eventually started putting her own things inside.

Pipe Cleaner Manipulative
I found this great idea on The Imagination Tree. With just a few pipe cleaners and our colander all the kids spent a good deal of time rearranging and working on their fine motor skills (and wearing it as a hat too!).

Wikki Stix
We also played with Wikki Stix this week. I printed out some of the play doh alphabet and spelling mats from Homeschool Creations for the kids to use. I put each printed sheet in a page protector so that we could get a lot of use out of them. The kids had fun both using the sheets and making their own creations. (Don't be afraid to cut your Wikki Stix into different sizes - it makes for more interesting building and creating!)

We had a lot more planned, but with the kids being sick, we spent a lot of time just snuggling and watching movies together.

Can you guess what we have in store for next week though? (I'll give you a hint...March 2nd is the birthday of a great author...)

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Great Art Blog!

2011-02-26T18:33:00.002-06:00

I've been on the hunt lately for new and different art projects to do with the kids. I stumbled upon a really great blog - Laugh, Paint, Create! - this weekend and wanted to share it with you. There are some great art projects for toddlers and older kids as well. Check it out (but be sure to allow enough time - I spent a lot of time browsing all of her great ideas!).

Friday Stash

2011-02-25T12:16:00.004-06:00

For those of you wanting to see some grown up crafts, I can offer you only a promise that I will post some soon. I met up with a great friend last night for dinner, and we even made arrangements to have a sewing day in a couple weeks. I'm so excited! There's nothing like sewing with a friend to keep you motivated!

In the mean time, the latest additions to my fabric stash:

Woodland Bloom Charm Pack - for this quilt

Freebird Charm Pack - not sure yet what I'm going to make with it, but I couldn't resist it! I was eyeing this quilt pattern, but I'm not sure just yet.

Can you tell I'm a sucker for precuts? What have you added to your crafting/sewing supplies lately?

Pencil Holders!

2011-02-24T10:07:00.002-06:00

Pinky has really enjoyed writing and drawing in her journal lately. She has a ton of pencils that she has collected and needed a better place to store them. I thought it was a perfect opportunity for a throwback craft I loved as a kid - tin can pencil holders!

I can not believe how much Pinky and Chaos enjoyed this craft (I guess I should since I loved it just as much when I was a kid). We covered the cans in felt, and then I let the kids go to town gluing on embellishments - pompoms, flowers, ribbon, sequins, buttons, etc. Chaos surprised me by being very involved in this craft. He loved the gluing (something he usually avoids) and in general just had a great time.

Here are the pencil holders in their rooms - with paper and journal nearby just in case they feel inspired to write!

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Mommy's New Toys!

2011-02-23T05:32:00.004-06:00

I'm super excited about 2 new things this week...

First, I FINALLY broke down and bought the Toddler Play book I have wanted forever. We have the Baby Play version and I just love it so I'm glad to add this one to my collection.

Second, and maybe most exciting, my new light box!!!! I've been wanting to improve the quality of the pictures on my blog for awhile and since a new (better) camera just isn't in the budget right now, I thought this might be one way to help improve the craft pictures I take.

I followed the tutorial here at The Scrap Shoppe to make it.

9 Patch Quilt Along

2011-02-21T13:30:00.000-06:00

Today is the official start of the Nestie Craft Board 9 Patch Quilt Along. We will be sewing one nine patch a day for roughly the next 140 days (easy peasy right?). If you want more info or want to join along, stop by Confessions of a Naptime Quiltaholic for the details. You can also check out our Flickr group to see what everyone else is doing.

Here's my fabric stash of 1930s fabric (I'm hoping I have enough!)

I need to get busy cutting and sewing. I'll try to post pictures of my progress every Friday (unless Sprout decides to make an appearance...).

Meal Plan Monday

2011-02-21T10:50:00.004-06:00

This week's menu was completely planned by my husband. It's nice to have a little break from having to think about what's for dinner!

Monday: Herbed Chicken and Pan-Fried Polenta
Tuesday: Orange Chicken with Rice
Wednesday: Chicken and Wild Rice Soup
Thursday: Chicken Burgers and Quinoa
Friday: Pork Ribs and Roasted Potatoes
Saturday: Pulled Pork Sandwiches and Baked Beans
Sunday: Tuna in Green Curry with Brown Rice and Green Beans

What We Did This Week

2011-02-20T15:36:00.042-06:00

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 35 months, Wild One is 14 months

Recently, Pinky has been telling my husband and I that she wants to be a zookeeper when she grows up. So this week I decided to have a Zookeeper theme to (most) our activities!

Where We Went:
In addition to all of our regular activities (preschool, dance, playgroup, Spanish, etc) the older two were also invited to a birthday party at a local gymnastics center. It was SO great to see the kids running off some energy. I was impressed with the activities that both of them tried!

Artist Study: Eric Carle
I wanted to find an artist to study who painted lots of animals to keep with our theme. Who better for kids to study than Eric Carle? We have several of his books so we started by looking at them and talking about the pictures and what made them different from other drawings.

Next, we visited the Eric Carle website and watched the slide shows of how creates his pictures. You can find the slide shows here on his website.

We divided the art project up over several days. First, we painted our tissue paper. I used leftover tissue paper from gifts (being a hoarder of supplies pays off sometimes!) and watered down some Crayola Kids Paint. I offered the kids different sizes and types of paintbrushes and told them to go to work! The papers were very wet so we set them aside to dry (they were mostly dry after a few hours, but we let them sit overnight).

After seeing an idea of painting with qtips (here), I decided that the next step should be qtip painting the background papers. I asked the kids to think about what type of animal or insect they wanted to create (Pinky wanted a flamingo and Chaos chose a bear - I made a fish to show them what to do). We talked about their habitats and what the paper should look like.

After the backgrounds were dry (we used blank white cards as we were making these pictures as Thinking of You cards for their great grandma) we cut out and glued our painted tissue paper to them (idea from here).

Here are our final pictures:

It was a lot of work, but we really enjoyed doing something different! They didn't turn out exactly as I had planned, but really, it's more about the process than the finished product.

Ocean Waves in a Bottle:
For this week's sensory activity we made ocean waves in a bottle. The kids really loved it (especially the glitter) and played for quite awhile rolling it back and forth to each other to see the waves. You can find the instructions here on Ten Kids and a Dog.

Zoo Maps:
This was by far the kids' favorite activity this week and it was SO simple! After building their own zoo (info below), we decided to make our own zoo maps. We looked at a few maps online, talked about what a zoo map would contain (sidewalks, welcome center, animal pictures, etc), and got to work. We used construction paper, animal stickers and crayons. The kids were SO proud of their creations and asked to make more zoo maps all week long.

Chaos wanted my help with his map. He isn't big into coloring with crayons so he told me what he wanted (mostly copying what big sister did) and added the stickers himself

Pinky's zoo map. The smiley building is the welcome center. The circle with the lion, bats, snake and oyster is the "scary place." I love the way she added monkeys to the trees where the giraffes are eating and planted flowers along her sidewalks. My favorite though is the nest she drew for the Easter eggs. Her favorite part is the "zoo fairies."

Even Wild One took a turn making her own map. This was her first real art experience and she really loved putting all the stickers on the page. She was a bit more reluctant with the crayons (though maybe it was the type we used), but she tried them anyway.

What We Read:
I checked a few zookeeper books out from our local library to give the kids an idea of what it is zookeepers do each day. We read Jungle Jack Hanna's What Zookeepers Do and A Day in the Life of a Zookeeper together. Both books had a lot of great pictures and just the right amount of information for Pinky's age (the links are in the widget at the bottom of the post).

Wild One read her Dear Zoo book (all the kids have loved this book) and we played with our Baby Einstein animal flashcards (even the older kids had fun with these - they took turns answering the facts on the back of the cards).

What We Played With:
The plastic/rubber animals have always been a favorite around here. So it was no surprise that the kids wanted to build their own zoo with them. They even had a zookeeper and Chaos grabbed the toy camera to take some pictures of all the animals.

Gathering animals to build a zoo

Popsicle Stick Puzzles:
I saw a cute idea on Impress Your Kids that I adapted to fit our theme. I let the kids search through some old magazines and cut out pictures of animals. We then glued them to popsicle sticks and cut them apart to make our own puzzles. Another really easy craft! You can find the tutorial here at Impress Your Kids.

Computer Time:
Once again we played at Switcheroo Zoo, but this week we tried the habitat game. Pinky was shown an animal and had to pick the correct habitat to make the animals happy.

Family Time Activity:
Since winter returned in full force here (after a WONDERFUL warm up last week) we had a great family snowball fight.

When we were done, we headed inside to warm up and watch some movies! First the kids watched two movies that I borrowed from the library, What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up: Zoo Crew and Adventures with Wink & Blink: A Day in the Life of a Zoo. Then, on the weekend, we watched Disney Nature: Oceans together as a family. What a great movie!

Mom's Favorite:

Wild One doing one of her two most favorite things - stacking blocks!

These amazon links are NOT affiliate links. I just want to share some of the toys, books and crafts that we love.

Amazon.com Widgets

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