Letter of the Week- D

Last week's letter was D and it was Delightful!
D is for Dot- We did several Dot activities. I had Georgia Dot-paint a big and little D that I got here. Then we made it a Dot D- I cut out the big D she had colored and we glued it to another paper. Then I had her frame the D with little Dots I had hole-punched out of different colored construction paper. This was good for her fine motor skills too, in picking up those little Dots!

Another Dot D we made was using Dot stickers. I drew a big and little D in pencil on paper and had Georgia place the Dot stickers on my lines, to form her D's. She loves anything with stickers so this was a fun one!

D is for Diamond- I liked this activity because it helped her with her shapes too. We made a Diamond collage by gluing different colored Diamonds to Dark paper. I also had her match triangles to form Diamonds, but she insisted they go on their own paper! (Somehow we lost the other half of the red one before it became a diamond!)

D is for Daisy- We made a Paperplate Daisy together too. First I had Georgia paint a yellow D on our plate- we used the cut end of a carrot to Dot the paint on. It was fun to use a different kind of painting tool! She wanted to fill in the middle of the D... then, I had cut out yellow and orange Daisy petals and had her glue them around the edge of the plate. I suggested alternating the colors, but she had to do all yellow, then all orange. She can be quite particular about these things! :) And we had a very sunny Daisy in the end!

D is for Donut- I had intended on making Donuts at home, but instead we had a special Dessert trip to Dunkin Donuts one night with Daddy- that was a big D night! :) Delicious!!

D is for Dinosaur- In addition to reading a great Dinosaur book, we also practiced writing on our Dinosaur D sheet. I haven't done any writing practice with her before- no reason why- I guess I thought she wasn't ready. But, encouraged by other bloggers, I tried it this week and she did really well! She's still figuring out how to hold the pen/marker- honestly, I think she still doesn't know if she's right or left-handed yet! She still uses both to color, eat, even cartwheel. Regardless, I think we'll try more writing practice in our future letter-weeks. I put the tracing sheet in a page protector so we can wipe it off and do it again. ( I did the top row of upper-case D's, just FYI! She's not that good yet! ;)

See what other Tots are learning and get great ideas at 1+1+1=1!

Letter of the Week- C

Last week's letter was C and what a great week for it! As it was leading up Valentine's Day, it was perfect for Candy, Cookies and Cards, but unfortunately didn't end as sweet- Cold and Cough took over!
To make our "C" this week, I cut out "cookie" circles and Georgia decorated them with various stickers, like she decorated the cookies we made that week. Then I had her paste the cookies into a C that I drew in pencil on our paper. Cookie-C!!

Georgia also painted this Cloud- I guess it's the dark and stormy kind of cloud!

C is for Cookie- We made lots of cookies! 2/3 of them went to a nursing home that our MOPS group was visiting to spread Valentine's Cheer- we missed it b/c by then our Cold & Cough had settled in. But we still had fun making the Cookies!

Anyone else notice my child's OCD tendencies? Notice she used all the pink hearts, then green, then blue, instead of just grabbing them randomly...

This is not related to "C", but do you save your Box Tops? You should- it's for the schools. And don't we all like to help the schools?! Sometimes you gotta look for them- they're not always on the box top!

All of our other Cookies quickly disappeared, so we made more- with frosting & decorations! They were very yummy! If you add about 1 Tbls of flour to these package mixes, it helps the cookies be a bit more fluffy and soft, I've found.

C is for Candy- Continuing with our Valentine's preparations, we made Chocolate Candy. Basically, we melted semisweet chips in the microwave, then added handfuls of honey roasted peanuts, mini-marshmallows, hearts and cinnamon candies. Then I dropped them by spoonfuls onto wax paper and we added more candy on top. They certainly weren't Russel Stover's chocolates, but they were fun to make!

C is for Cards- we made some sweet Valentine's cards for our loved ones. Georgia liked doing the stickers the most, so I let her put a bunch of them on one paper, then I could cut those out and paste them to the cards. This satisfied her need to help and my need for the cards to look, well, NOT like a 2-yr old completely did them! ;)

C is for Cold & Cough- daddy was sick first and then shared his upper respiratory infection with the kiddos. Somehow I was spared! I think God gives mommies extra immunities. But that pretty much ended our fun for the week, besides getting to visit the Doc.

See what other Tots are doing & learning at 1+1+1=1.

Happy Valentine's Day!

"This is my command: Love each other."

John 15:17

L Short Set

I am still trying to learn to sew- no, I haven't giving it up already! Finding time is the hard part, but that's hard when trying to do anything with two monkeys to look after! But I did finally get out a pattern I'd bought and figure it out enough to put some shorts together for Lincoln. My first time to do an elastic waist, too. If anyone has an easier way to thread the elastic thru the waistband, please share!
Than I made a little shirt to go with them by just cutting an "L" out of the same gingham and just sewing it on a plain white t-shirt with a straight stitch- good thing an "L" is all straight lines! I just unraveled the edges of the L to avoid having to finish them in any way- and it turned out pretty good, I think! An easy way to "applique" a shirt, cheap & easy! Hopefully it'll last thru little boy messes and washings!

Sorry- no pictures of the finished product on my little model- the weather turned colder and he said "no shorts, mom!"

Letter of the Week- B

This week's letter was B and B is for: Banana, Books, Beads, Balls, Berries, Balloons... Buckets of fun!
I have to admit I was slightly discouraged this week when Georgia kept calling all our "B's" -A,A,A!! I don't know if A made a really big impact, or if I've just programmed her with that response. I'm going to trust in repetition as our key to learning and be comforted that at least I'm achieving our goal of some fun, intentional play time together! She did recognize a "B" on my T-shirt, though! :)

She wasn't really into coloring, as with crayons or markers, so we Dot-painted a Brown Bear B.

We also made a Banana B- I just drew 2 bananas and a line (not very well!) and let her paint them yellow. Then I cut them out and pasted them into a B on Blue paper.

B is for Book- a trip to the library would have been an awesome activity for this B week, but we didn't make it, so I just pulled out a few random stories from our shelves that had some B words.

B is for Bucket of B!- I found these great Buckets at Target on the $1 aisle- but B-ware, they are not $1! (2.50- not too bad!) I used one to keep some of our B-activities together.

B is for Ball- we took our Big Ball outside to play... (look at that form! Might have a soccer player on our hands... ;)

...until daddy accidentally got it stuck in the tree with one Big Kick!

He got it out- while mommy was B-ing nervous he was going to fall and get hurt!

Meanwhile, Baby Brother was also Busy- eating dirt!

B is for Berries and Bananas- since we like to turn anything we're doing into something we can eat, we made some yummy desserts together. Georgia mixed sugar into our Berries for Berry Shortcake...

And helped make Banana Pudding by unpeeling all the bananas for me and laying the cookies out in our dish.

B is for Binoculars- this was a fun and easy craft! I had Georgia color a piece of paper, then I cut it to wrap around 2 toilet paper rolls- she helped me with the glue stick too! Then I just hole-punched 2 holes in each tube- one at each end, and threaded a pipe cleaner through. Make sure the space between your tubes is narrow enough to put them over your eyes. We secured a bead necklace at one end by twisting the pipe cleaner around it so she could hang it from her neck.

I see you!!

B is for Beads- Georgia loved this activity. And it was so simple! I just gave her a bag of pony Beads and a couple of pipe cleaners- she loved stringing them on, and even did some sorting by colors on her own. Later in the week we did some more Beading with some special Valentine's beads to use next week!

B is for Bubbles- I'd read about Bubble Painting from several other blogs and thought it might be fun to try... I think I did something wrong. It didn't work. We could never get enough bubbles in our bowl to "paint" with, and when we tried to scope them out it just made a big mess. But please don't count this activity out yourself based on our experience- I really think it was just "user error". And Georgia still had fun blowing bubbles!

I even tried a shallower bowl, but that made an even bigger mess!

While we were bubble-ing, I set up baby brother with some pom pom Balls. Again- an idea I got on another blog. The idea was he could scoop out the balls with different sized spoons and put them into different containers. Seemed like something he would be into, since he seems to be in the stage where he enjoys putting things in things. Of course, you've probably already guessed how this one turned out...

...little balls everywhere!!

B is for Balloon- I blew up a few balloons- we started with all Blue, for B, but someone wanted yellow too. Probably Georgia- she likes yellow. They had a great time just kicking them around and bopping each other on the head!

The entry hall was a great place to play with the balloons because they could bounce them off the walls in that narrow space. I loved this pic below- I didn't even realize what Lincoln was up to till I was going thru my pictures at the end of the week. He's recently realized he's now tall enough and strong enough to open the front door and there he is- trying to escape! What you can't see is that Dad has installed an additional sliding bolt at the top of the door to prevent this kind of mischief!

That's all for B! It seems like we did a lot, reviewing it like this, but I think it was just more, smaller activities. It has Ben fun! :)