Stations

Today when my husband got home from work we set up stations to keep the girls busy while I made dinner.  It was really fun and the girls loved it.  While they were doing it my husband asked each of them Brain Quest questions... they really had a blast!

This is a picture of the jingle bell station.  Nattie did it first.  I had an empty Parmesan Cheese jar and some shakers that the jingle bells fit into.  This was probably their favorite station.

This is the color sorting section.  Here the girls separated the cubes into different colored cups.  Then they counted them.  For Alyssa, my 7 year old, she had to count them and then add them all together.

This is Alyssa sorting.

This is the links station.  They put the amount of links that were on the cards.

This is a reindeer ornament that the girls made.  It was really fun!

The finished reindeer ornament.

The snapping caterpillar that I made recently. 

This is the button snake I made.

Well, that was the second half of our day today.  The rest of the day was a lot of learning fun!  We bought some Comprehensive Curriculum books at Sam's Club.  Normally they are 20 bucks but at Sam's Club they are something like 7 dollars.  The girls love them!  Nattie is almost done with her Preschool book though so I'm thinking I'm going to start on Kinder soon.  I will work with her slowly on it for sure though.  Until next time...

Making cookies

I posted the other day about how we made and decorated sugar cookies, so as promised, here are some pictures of the fun.  I didn't get any pictures of the girls doing the cookie cutters.  They made a huge mess but it was so much fun and so worth it.





Mara took her time and made them look as pretty as she possibly could.

Nattie had a blast too!  She couldn't stop licking her fingers!

Syssa concentrating on getting her cookies just right.



Yummy!!!

First day of Christmas Break

I absolutely love having my girls home with me.  There is arguing, messes, and kids having too much fun to listen, but most of the time they are so much fun!  Today is the first day of their two weeks off of school and it's a success so far.  We made sugar cookies and decorated them.  The girls had so much fun.  Samara was super focused and concentrated the whole time, it was kind of funny.  We plan on doing many other fun things, none of which are planned on paper, all of which are chaotically (I make up my own words now and then) scrambled in my mind.  I will post pictures of todays cookie making fun a little later for all those who want to see.  Until then, I better go get my house vacuumed... then again maybe I'll eat another cookie and lay on the couch watching more Christmas movies with my girls. 

Snapping Caterpillar

 My wonderful husband went and bought me some snaps today to make my snapping caterpillar.  I've been wanting to make one for a little while now and finally got it done.  I got the idea from my friend's blog click here to get to it.  She did buttons and I had just done a project with buttons so I thought snaps might be fun.  Nattie (3) has a hard time doing this but her fingers will get stronger and stronger.  Mara (5) and Syssa (7) love to do it too. 

 My husband bought the snaps that you just hammer on.  They are called pearl snaps or something like that.  I cut out circle pieces from my felt.  I did them in two different sizes so maybe we can sort them into big and small and into colors as well, Nattie really likes doing that type of stuff.

If you want to try this I have a few suggestions.  I shattered some of the button tops, they are still useable and don't really effect the overall project, but to help prevent this there are some things that I did toward the end that helped.  I put a wooden cutting board down and then put about 5 pieces of felt on top to use as padding.  Then, when I hammered the buttons on I did it soft but many times instead of doing it really hard.  Yes, I know, I should've figured that out from the beginning. 

Samara's Class Christmas Party

Samara had a Christmas party at school so I took Natalie so I could help out.  A class full of Kindergarteners is a LOT of fun.  They decorated two sugar cookies, made a snowman from a sock, and colored a picture and made a "trail mix" of sorts (that's the station I was at).  Natalie got to help Mara out with all of these things.  She looked like one of the crowd... only a little smaller.

Decorating the cookies together.  Samara did a great job in letting Natalie help her out with all of her fun things.

My Mara

My Nattie

Making the sock snowman.



They did a musical chairs book exchange and this is the one Samara got.



All in all it was a great day.  It wasn't as messy as it could've been for a classroom full of kindergarteners.  I'm so glad that I got to go and help out.  Mara was so excited that her mommy got to be there.  Nattie had a great time too!

Ribbon Button Snake

Over at Counting Coconuts (I LOVE her blog... it's so helpful with tons of ideas!) I got the idea to make a Ribbon Button Snake.  It's to help Nattie figure out how to work buttons.  I think that Counting Coconuts is a lot better than mine so if you go here http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/button-snake.html you'll be able to see what she did.  All you do is take a piece of ribbon and attach a button to it.  Then I made a loop on one end so that Nattie could carry it around (this too was an idea from Counting Coconuts).... she's amazing.  Then you cut out little squares of felt and cut a hole the size of the button in them so that the child can put the buttons on.  And that's IT!

The finished button snake.  I made a ton of buttons for it which wasn't necessary.

I don't know if you can see it in this picture but I made them different shapes and colors.  We will probably use the felt pieces for color sorting and shape sorting as well.  I like things that are versatile like that.

A day of learning fun

We played a game when the girls got home from school which you can get at http://thoughtsofesme.blogspot.com/  This blog always has fun things for the kids to do.  We did this with all the girls and one of our friends too.  What you do is take the printout and 25 M&Ms per child and a die (sp?).  Then each child rolls the die and puts that many M&Ms on their paper.  Then when their paper is full you roll the die to take them off and EAT THEM!  It is a lot of fun.  I had a 7, 5, 4, and 3 year old here playing it and they all had a blast.  It made it better that they got to eat the M&Ms at the end.  They didn't understand why I kept telling them that they couldn't eat them M&Ms, then when they got to the end they understood.  It was brilliant!

The game board with the M&Ms.

Stocking Full of Candy

Nattie won!  And no she did NOT cheat.  I thought she was going to so I sat really close to her and she only ate the amount she rolled!  Way to go Nattie!

Syssa adding her M&Ms.

Mara adding her M&Ms.

We have been working with Nattie on writing her letters.  Mostly by tracing the dotted lines, or sometimes even solid lines, but sometimes, for some letters, we just draw a letter at the beginning and ask her to copy it, and she's doing it!  Not just doing it, DOING IT WELL!  We got these white boards in the dollar section of Target over the summer and the girls LOVE them.

Nattie's beautiful handwriting... the first letters are mine but the rest are hers!

Then we did lacing cards.  I made this particular set about a year ago and can't remember where I printed off the designs.  All the girls loved them.  Nattie has always struggled doing them... she's only 3 you know... but today as I was showing her how to do it, she was picking it up VERY quickly.  It's so much fun to watch her grow in the things that she can do!

I had to help her by holding the card at first.  After a while though I started just taking pictures and she was doing them all by herself... well, with a little help from her big sister, Alyssa.

This is something that Syssa loves to do!  I'll bet she's going to be a great seamstress when she grows up.

My Mara doing a flower.  She said that the remaining string looked like a stem.

Some of the lacing cards I made.  They were kind of hard to punch the holes into.  I didn't realize that it was going to be that hard.  My hands definitely hurt afterwards.

Our Day

 Today we had a fun day of learning and games.  Here's a few things that we did today.

These are just regular flash cards, I think I got them at Wal Mart.  They matched up the number of crayons on one card to the numeral on the other card.  I was surprised at how many Nattie was getting without the help of Mommy.

The finished product.

After they finished I had them put them in numerical order.  They did this in a snap!

These are printables I got off of Hubbard's Cupboard website.  They were supposed to glue the number of red pom poms to the trees that was shown for apples but I had them glue all colors of pom poms to the trees, mainly because I didn't have enough red pom poms to do all the trees.

The finished product.

Just for those who were curious, this is the Bible I read to Nattie who is 3.  We are learning about Adam and Eve and, of course, the birth of Jesus.

This is a game we played today that I got off of www.thoughtsofme.blogspot.com  She has some great ideas for early learning.  This game was super fun.  It's called Fill the Stable.  You roll two dice and put the item with that number on it in the stable.  The only thing I would suggest is maybe add magnets to the back and do this game on a cookie sheet as the pieces slid around quite a bit.

I had each of them count out the number that was on the dice.  It was such a great counting activity as well as a number recognition activity.

The stable has been filled.  We played where if a number was already taken then the person got to roll again until they got a number that wasn't taken.  This was super fun for the girls.



Linking Math

Nattie loves to play with her links.  She links them together and does some "patterns" with them, she sorts them by color and all that fun stuff.  I decided to add a little something to what she could do with them.  So I printed out these number cards and punched a hole in them.  Now she can look at the number and put that amount of links on the card.  It was a HUGE hit.  When she'd get frustrated she'd want to stop but I kept telling her she could do it and she did all of them!  I'm so proud of her.

The numbers with the hole punched in them.  Oh and I laminated them so maybe they'll stick around for a while.

The bin of links.  You can get these at Lakeshore.

Nattie showing us the number 4.

She was very confused at why the 0 had none on it.  This is something that I'm goign to be working on with her, the idea of 0 or nothing.

I am so glad that I did this project... it was simple to do and Nattie loves it.  I'm sure my 5 and 7 year old would get a kick out of it too.  Maybe for them I can have them do a pattern with the amount of links on each card.  If you have any other suggestions on how to use links, please comment and let me know.

Cutting

She was concentrating so hard.

 I've been asked by my three year old constantly if she can cut something out.  Especially when I'm cutting something out... she just wants to help.  So I decided I'd create a cutting bin.  The things that are in there are scraps of paper left over after I'm done cutting something out, or as you can see something I didn't use such as those Fall leaves in there.  She tried to cut them out and got a little frustrated so I showed her that if she cut out the smaller strips of paper first she could practice enough to do the bigger things.  She LOVED it!
     



Look what I can do Mommy!

Advent Calendar

Nattie and I have been working with this "advent calendar" since the beginning of the month.  It's really more for learning where the numbers go, in what order, and things like "put the number 7 after the number 6".  She's really catching onto number recognition and is starting to really understand cues such as after, before, and between.  I printed this out at http://www.childcareland.com/.  Shelley Lovett has a bunch of printables for free and videos for some to show you how to use them.  This is my idea tagged off of her printable. :-)

Here are the numbers.  I wrote Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve on the ones that were such.

Nattie trying to find the next number.





A close up of the actual calendar. 
I think you can print them in black and white as well.