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.