Friday, July 31, 2009
Open Ended Art - Yellow Collage
Sunday School on Friday - Jesus and the Children
One day, I put these little clips on the flannelboard figures:
Thursday, July 30, 2009
What an Honor!
I am so honored! :) I love her blog and make sure to read it every day. Her daughter and my son are very close in age and it seems we share a lot of the same parenting philosophies, which I love. I started blogging a little over a month ago and have already met so many great people.
The rules are I have to pass it on to 15 other blogs I have newly discovered and like to read. Well, I have a long list of blogs I enjoy reading, and I'll post the ones most newly discovered, but I'm afraid I can't come up with 15 right now. Most of the blogs I read are ones I've been reading for a long time. I'm not sure what the parameters are for "newly discovered", but I'm pretty sure it's not 2 years. :)
However, there are a few really great ones that are new (to me) that I will pass this award on to:
Pink and Green Mama
The Bear Bunch
Superheroes and Princesses
The second award:
And the rules for this say I have to list 10 things about myself that you may or may not know. And THIS is the reason I haven't posted these awards yet. Sigh. I can not think of 10 things about myself that are even mildly interesting. However, I will give it a shot so I can mark this off my to do list. :)
1. I have been married to my husband for 10 years, and truly love him more now than I did on our wedding day (and I loved him a lot then!).
2. We suffered with infertility problems and several miscarriages for the first half of our marriage. It took us 6 1/2 years to finally have M, and even though he is almost 3 years old I still think about what a miracle it is to have him every. single. day. This is probably a little bit of "oversharing", but I'm mentioning it because I think sometimes I come across as bubbly and happy (and silly) and it can be a turn off to some people. I'm no stranger to suffering and grieving and I have grown in innumerable ways because of it. I just try to keep this blog as light as possible, but it's not the full "me".
3. I have an internet addiction. I can, and do, live without watching much TV, but I don't think I could manage if I didn't have my laptop.
4.I'm an avid reader, I'm always reading a book, usually 2 or 3 at the same time.
5. I drink a lot of Coke.
6. I left a very good, full time job to stay home with my son. And somehow I am much busier now than I've ever been before.
7. I love to play sudoku.
8. I love spicy, spicy, really spicy food!
9. I grew up in Montana, surrounded by mountains and sky. Now I live in Minnesota, where it's cold most of the year. We were cold in Montana, but somehow it wasn't so horrible to be cold there. (Can you tell I'm not a big MN fan?)
10. I'm double jointed. :)
I'm off to leave messages for the blogs I'm giving the award to. Have a good night!
How to Make a Great Sticker Book
Obviously M didn't really care about the pictures, the fun for him was simply putting the stickers on and off. But for an older child there's a lot they can do with creating sticker scenes with the various backgrounds.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
ABC Book - letter B
We have started making an ABC book.
I had this idea of creating a couple of lapbook-type pages of activities for each letter. We did B first. This was actually done a few weeks ago, but I waited to blog about it because I wanted to make all the activities available to print if you would like to use them too!
I'll give you the links to the .pdf files as I go through the page elements. Just click on the the picture of each activity (this does not include the letter craft picture) and you will be taken to the download page.
I hope this is as fun for you as it has been for us! Please use them for whatever you like; you don't have to make an ABC book like ours if you don't want to, but you could use them to make your own lap books or just for tot school activities. If you do, let me know, I'd love to see what you've done!
First, we did our letter craft, and glued buttons onto our Bb's. The templates for these are found here.
Here's a shot of the following activity pages:
The first pocket on the upper left is "Things that Start with B". We looked through these and named each one making sure to hear the /b/ sound at the beginning. (I also used some of the printables found here.)
Next we had the "Color the Bulldozers" pocket. M enjoyed this the most. I had each one labeled with a color to use, and the print was in that color (ex. red). M was able to see which color to use and did it all on his own. He was very proud (so was Mommy). The next time I will laminate these and let him use his window markers to color them. That way we can clean them off and he can color them over and over.
Next up is "counting baby birds":
And finally, "baseball size sorting":
{All of the pages are cardstock and here's a little tip:
*Place clear packaging tape along the side of the pages (fold it over so half of the strip of tape is on the front and half is on the back) before punching holes in it; this will make the pages much stronger and you won't have to worry about it tearing out of your 3-ring binder.*}
These activities were a fun way to practice other skills (colors, sizes, counting, etc.) while talking about the letter B and it's sound. It was a lot of fun! Letter F is up next!
Have a Beautiful day! :)
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Art Time - Masking Tape Resist Painting
Monday, July 27, 2009
35 Months
Your last month as a 2 year old is upon us. I don't know why people call it the terrible twos - you have been nothing but a joy. Well, ok, you've had your moments, but they are so easily forgotten and really, thankfully there haven't been *that* many.
Your little tractor (your favorite toy) finally broke down. It literally fell apart. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away, so I guess we are keeping its remains. I hope someday when we come across it we can remember you at 2 a little more vividly than we would without it. You have a new tractor now. Ok, here's a secret... it's not really a tractor. It's a John Deere 4-wheeler. But you don't know that... yet. It's your tractor and you mow the living room daily with it. But it's just not the same as the beloved old tractor.
You've been playing with your blocks a lot lately which Mommy loves to see. You build houses and garages mostly. Tunnels and bridges are high on your list too. And you've been quite the little artist lately:
You do this thing that you came up with on your own as far as I can tell - you pretend to be a robot that isn't working right, and only goes backwards, and we have to pull your levers, change your batteries and do all kinds of things, making the appropriate noises, until you are "fixed". You make the CUTEST noise as a robot. Kind of a zuz zuz zuz sound and you bounce around going backwards everywhere until you are fixed. It is just so darn cute. :)
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Tot School
Matthew is 34 months old
It seems like we did a lot of Tot School this week. I mentioned in an earlier post that we are trying to pare down our summer activities, and one of the happy results has been more time to spend on Tot School, which both M and I love.
We spent a lot of time reading the July issue of his High-Five magazine (put out by Highlights for preschool children) and playing with these fun dominoes that came with it:
M made "lilypads" on the pond, which we normally call our living room floor, and jumped from one to another like a frog. At least that is what he said he was doing. :)
We went away last weekend and spent some time in our camper. Here he is making his little whiteboard (we keep it there) into a matching game. It has the alphabet printed around it and he is using magnetic letters to match them. He came up with this on his own. I was so proud!
We did our little clip game. (Sorry for the huge up close picture, not sure what I was thinking with that one.) It seems activities that take me 2 minutes to put together, like this one, are his favorites. He wants to do this all the time. The ones that I spend hours on are the ones he's never interested in. {sigh} There's a lesson in there somewhere for me...
We did a new feltboard poem - 5 Little Seashells- which I downloaded from The Mailbox. He is really into the feltboard lately, which makes me very happy.
We matched color shades using paint samples I pilfered from Walmart. ;)
He practiced fine motor skills putting paper clips onto matching strips of cardstock:
He worked on these cards I printed up and laminated from here. They are transportation same/different cards. One picture is a little different and you are supposed to circle it. He did this no problem. I wasn't sure if he would "get it", but I needn't have worried. By the way, we use Crayola's Window Markers for anything we write on that's been laminated. They work so much better than dry erase markers. And when you wipe them clean they look like new again.
He did some transportation Melissa and Doug puzzles. They are wooden 12 piece puzzles and he does them completely on his own.
We sang songs from our songbook, and made music with our instruments. This is a very noisy, pretty un-musical-sounding, activity when you actually do it, but it sure is fun!
I put together another quick ABC matching game one afternoon. We took the foam letters out of our ABC puzzle and matched them up with some ABC flashcards (I'm not a big fan of flashcards, but these were a gift and M loves them). That's it for this week. I'm trying to pull together some new activities for this coming week. Hope you all had a great week too!