Mara's Christmas Tree

Samara had a project she had to do for school.  (She's in Kinder at the public school.  For those who are wondering why I have a homeschool blog, I am planning on homeschooling next school year.)  She came home with a tree shape and was supposed to decorate it with whatever she wanted.

The tree template that we got from school.

Samara had so much fun decorating her tree.  It was so cool to see her face light up as she put each "ornament" on the tree.

I printed the tree out on cardstock to make it thicker.  Then we put glue all over it and sprinkled green sugar sprinkles all over it, we didn't have any green glitter.  Then she put red hots on it.  Then she put on some paper circle ornaments (not pictured here) and a yellow star on top (also not pictured here).

I'm a little bummed that I didn't get a picture of the final project.  I don't know what I was thinking.  If it hasn't fallen apart when she gets it home from school I will take a picture and post it.  Don't get your hopes up though.

The Nutcracker Ballet

This day was so much fun. On Saturday the 4th of December Micah and I decided to take the girls to the Nutcracker Ballet.  Since they go to ballet at a church up the road they were really interested to see what it was going to be like.  Nattie is still a little too young so we decided to ask a friend of ours, also the girl's piano teacher, if she wouldn't mind doing something dress-up and fun with Nattie since she wouldn't be able to go.  She agreed and so off we went.  Nattie stayed with her babysitter and had a tea party, watched a princess movie, and of course ate tons of snacks.  The others of us started off in traffic.  We ended up sitting in it for about 20 minutes so needless to say we were a little bit late to the Ballet.  I know I know, bad etiquette.  It turned out to be really cool for the girls, and for Micah and I.  We had to sit in two different rows (discounted tickets) but it wasn't too bad.  It struck me as we were sitting there though that I didn't know the story of the Nutcracker.  *gasp*  How could have I missed that.  So this week Alyssa picked out the Nutcraker book so I could read it to them.  Thank you to my 7 year old for keeping me up with this stuff.  Anyways the day was super fun and I got to spend it with my favorite people!  We will definitely do this again next year... if we can get discounted tickets again.

The girls had fun taking pictures before we went to the Nutcracker.

We had such beautiful clothes on so before we went and when we got back we decided to take family pictures.  I think they turned out so cute.  Mara had a hard time in the morning so we only got a few smiles out of her but when we got back from the Nutcracker she was a happy girl so the pictures turned out much better.

The girls by the pool at our friends house.  All dressed up and ready to go.

Our beautiful Family

My Wonderful Husband and me on a swing in front of our friend's house.

Mara and Mama at the Nutcracker

Syssa and Daddy at the Nutcracker

I'm so glad I get to spend my life with these 4 beautiful faces!  I can't wait until we get to add to this family the two beautiful faces in Haiti!

Lesson Plan Organization

I found a calendar that I think I'm going to start using to make sure my lesson plans are in place. It's just Microsoft Outlook's Calendar and I'm going to have to get used to it but I think it will be better than Excel, which is what I was going to use before, because it's an actual calendar. I'm not going to be using the times on the side, however, for the simple fact that I don't know how long I'm going to need for each subject, but rather each hour of time will be a different school subject. Let me know if you have any other ideas but for now I'm going to see how this will work for us.

HomeMade Playdough

Just a few pictures of the girls playing with the playdough that I made yesterday.

I didn't put the complete finished product on my blog yesterday so I thought I'd do it today.

Nattie

My Mara

My good friend at http://ourdayinschool.blogspot.com/ introduced me to the blog http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com and she has a ton of ideas for Sensory Bins. (I think she calls them sensory tubs but I like the word bin better, not that it really matters ;-) I thought it might be fun for Nattie our 3 year old so I decided to put one together. I didn't want to go out and buy anything, I just wanted to use what we had laying around the house so she could use it today. This is what I came up with:


I put plates, forks, and spoons in there because everyone knows that in December we eat. Well, at least at the Jones house that's what we do. I put in some ornaments from the tree and some keychains as well which she liked putting on the plates and then burying them in rice. I put the rice in there as "snow". I put the little stocking in there and then (not in this picture) I also added a pinecone. I thought that would be fun. She loved it! I honestly thought she'd get bored of it after a couple minutes but boy was I wrong. I think she played in it for a good hour and then stopped and cleaned up (she had to vacuum a little bit because she did get some rice on the floor, and yes I have my 3 year old vacuum... she loves it and she knows that if she makes a big mess she's the one that will be cleaning it not me, she has a little vacuum she uses and not the big heavy one Mommy uses.) Anyways...


I put another bin next to her sensory bin so she could measure and scoop rice and whatever else into it and then dump it back. She had a blast. Her favorite thing was to use the spoon to put rice into the dish she has in her hand.


Here she is after she put the rice on the plate with the spoon and now she is dumping into the play pan.


And then she'd dump it out and start again.

When she got the pinecone she had a blast with it. She wouldn't look at me directly for a picture of this however. This picture is one of my favorites though so I'm not complaining.

When my two older girls, Syssa and Mara, got home from school they loved playing with it too. They weren't has happy to clean up after themselves but after a few whines they did it. Thank you to the people who brought this idea into my life... I will be doing a new one every month now!

December Play Dough

Today I decided to make playdough. I got the recipe off of http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/

I use a lot of her stuff for my 3 year old. They have a different recipe for every month of the year. The recipe for December is Peppermint. I ended up using mint because I didn't have any peppermint extract. Anyways it's pretty easy so enjoy! Remember if you want to enlarge an image just click on it and then to get back just click the back button.

The Recipe

The ingredients:

The almost finished product is below. It cooked for a little bit longer and then I let it cool down. I then stored it in two ziplock bags. I used this recipe in two different pans, so this is how much a doubled recipe would be. Just so that you know. It's super easy and the kids have super fun. By the way this is not an edible recipe. I have some of those but this one is NOT one of them. Happy playing!

Let's Watch A Movie!

I thought I'd post pictures of some of our favorite Christmas movies. If you'd like to see them bigger just click on the picture then click the back button when you want to come back to the blog. We have many more favorites but these are the ones that we own. We Netflix some others though.