Today was our monthly crafts day with our friends and the theme was perfect for September~ Apples! Our project today was a fun one full of messy fun! Using brown paint, we painted the hand and arm of the kids brown and stamped it on the paper to make a trunk and branches. After we washed them off, they used green paint and cotton balls to add leaves. To finish off the masterpieces, they used a cotton swab to add little red apples! These turned out so well! As I am sure you see!
After our art, the kids got to make mini apple turnovers for lunch dessert! Ohhh they loved that! They flatened the dough cut up the apples and folded them in! They turned out really well! Plus everyone loved to eat something that they got to make! 🙂
Yummy right! The rest of lunch was just as good too! We cut some bagels, placed a few slices of apple on top of it, sprinkled with cinnamon, and topped it with cheddar cheese! A few minutes in the over made them toasty and yummy!
It was a lot of fun today and a great way to get ready for all the wonderful things of fall that are coming our way! Now its your turn to share the fun thing you got to do with your kiddos! I would love to have you link up with with me here! Happy Taking Time Tuesday!!!!
Well once again, I am late in my Tuesday Linky Party!!!! 🙁 I am so sorry to all of you who are interested in linking up! I promise to get better at this! I dont know how things keep getting so mixed up in my head! This week I have done something that needed to be done here! I have a bad habit of not spending time playing with the girls. There are a million other things that I feel like I need to do and I just forget! So I made a Mommy Time Jar! This jar is filled with fun simple activities to do with the girls whenever we have a few extra moments! It is sitting conveniently next to my computer so I dont forget it! 😉 The girls are really excited about it and to tell the truth so am I! I think we may even make a Daddy Time Jar too!
What is in my are of fun? Here is a list of what I put in the jar:
Bake a snack
Take a walk
Paint nails
Paint a Picture
Do a project
Play a Game
Build a Fort
Build a Puzzle
Read a Story
That is what I have for now, but I need a few more idea of fun that we can do easily and on the fly! If you have one, please leave a comment! I would love to have a few more!
Now its your turn! What did you do this week with or for your kids? Link up and share! I love to hear your ideas!!!
So I am a day late on my link up party 🙁 So sorry! I dont know how it happened! So I am starting it today! I really hope share with us what you took time to do this week! I would love to hear it!
Yesterday we went to our friends house for a little playtime and fun! Everyone loved it (as always) and had a great time! While the kids were outside, they discovered that there were alot of tomatoes in the garden that were ready! So they picked them and brought them in. Not Bunny’s friend decided that it would be a good idea to make salsa! My friend, who is an amazing mom, let them go for it right then and there! They got out everything they needed and after a quick lesson for Bunny on how to cut with a sharp knife they were off! All on their own they made fresh salsa and they loved it! It was awesome to watch them enthusiastically work together, adding things, and working out the best way to cut something up! The results were awesome!
How yummy is that? They did great! I forget alot to let Bunny into the kitchen and letting them do this reminded me of how important it is and how much she can do! Taking Time to cook is an awesome idea!
Now its your turn! What did you take the time to do this week? Did you paint, dance, read, or blow something up? I would love to hear it! Add your link below and be sure to add a link back in your post! Plus I made this pretty button on the left hand side bar, feel free to grab it for yourself! 🙂
Welcome to our second Taking Time Tuesday Party! Last week was awesome and I am so glad that I had so many wonderful links! It is so much fun to see everyone’s ideas! I really hope you take a second to link up here again! I cant wait to see what you too time to do this week!
Today we had a playdate with some friends at the park and I thought it would be fun to pack some stuff to make forts while we were there. The idea was a hit! There was so much brainstorming, laughing, helping, and fun going on all over! After our amazing creation was built, the kids played there all morning! They played house (I think) and since I had brought dishes, there were alot of interesting dirt/ grass creations made! What I loved the most was seeing all them happy, in their own imaginary world working together! Since we set up really close to the playground, I noticed there were alot of curious glances and a few of the other kids even wandered up to see what was happening! Nothing inspired more then a world of fun right?
When all things considered this was a really simple idea that didnt take too much thought! In fact you could do it anywhere really, so long as there is something to hold your fort up! So why dont you make a fort building kit for your next trip to the park? Here are somethings you need:
~ Sheets or tablecloths can can get dirty
~ Twine or thin rope
~ Clothes Pins
~ Safety Pins (Wish I would have had these)
~ Scissors (to cut the twine)
~ A Hammer (this would have made things ALOT easier)
~ Some little play dishes to make it all come together
See how simple? A great day of fun and learning is right in your closet! 🙂
Now its your turn! What did you do this week with your kiddos? Did you do a craft, take a trip, bake a cake, read a book? Link up and share your ideas! And spread the work! Dont forget to link back here in your post! If you want my adorable button, you can grab the code on the top left sidebar of my blog! Happy Tuesday!
Well today I am resurrecting the Taking Time Tuesday posts and I turned them into a linky party! This is the very first linky party I am hosting! I really hope that some of you link up here with me because it will be alot of fun! The party is a collection of all the fun we took time to have this week with our kids! I have noticed that I always forget to make sure I have time to be with my kids and have fun! Do you? Well in this linky party I want us all to remember the good time we had when we took time to be with out kids!
For my first Taking Time Tuesday day, we had another fun Year of Crafts day! Our theme was bubbles! Who doesnt love bubbles? I had great plans for all kinds of fun bubbly things, but the rains sort of put a stop to some of it! But the kids laughed and got messy and had fun anyway! Since that was the point, it was a smashing success! We started off with the ever so fun bubble prints and then I had all manner of bubble wands for the kids to play with, and of course there was unlimited bubble solution! We set everything up outside (for obvious reasons) and got right to work!
Lunch was a bit trickier since it is rather hard to find bubbly food! So I found some clear plastic Christmas ornaments in my stash that were perfect to put all their favorite food in! It was perfect! They loved it and it was easy! 🙂 For dessert there were mini cream puffs! Talk about yummy!
How is that for a great day? The kids had a blast, I had a good time, and most of all there were memories made! 🙂 Now its your turn! Link your fun below and let us know what you did that was special for your family this week! Happy Summer!
I have a question to throw out at you….well a couple actually. I was hoping to write a couple of Montessori unit plans that will help you make the themes and trays for every subject area. I figured that I have done a lot of the work (and so have some other amazing bloggers who want to help with this) and I want to share it with you. Each unit, will have ideas for Practical Life, Sensorial, Math, Language, Science, Geography, Art/ Music, and even some book suggestions. This is still a work in progress and I have some things to do for it, but I wanted to know if anyone would be interested in buying these units. I was thinking of selling them for around $9 each. There should be enough in each unit to use for a month (just like I do in my classroom). Another thing that I really want to do, is start an awesome Linky Party! If my long time readers remember, I tried to write a Taking Time Tuesday Post each week in the fall. That kinda fell apart,but want to bring it to life again by letting all of you share your weekly fun too! The goal is to do one thing a week that you may not normally do. Maybe you cook with your 3 year old, or read a mountain of books, or have a cool party! Whatever you took time to do this week with your family! It seems to me, that the good moments get lost easily, especially when you have a rough week. This linky party is here to help us remember and hold on to the good moments! Mark your calenders! The plan is to launch it next Tuesday and I would love to have you all party with me! As for what we have been up to today, well….my Mom got a puppy!!!! Awwwww! Not just any puppy, one of the puppies from my in laws house (the same ones Pup was holding on Sunday)! She was so cute and actually loved all the kids at my moms house! I was so surprised that she seemed to fit right in so fast! Perfect! 🙂
Isnt she a sweetie?
The other things that happened today was that Bunny’s best friend was in a play at church! So of course we all headed over there for that! It was so sweet to hear them all singing and they did an amazing job! Bunny was asked if she wanted to be in it next year and she still gave a definite no! She really like to watch shows, but not be in them!
So there we have it! Lots of fun and new ideas floating about here! PLEASE let me know what you think of my ideas (Yes I am begging for your input)! I hope you are enjoying the last bits of summer! 🙂 Happy Schooling!
There are a couple of amazing bloggers out there who have had the idea of a century!!!! You know that I (and everyone else out there) is obsessed with Pintrest! There are a million ideas out there and they are all wonderful ones! So we saved them on pin boards that we name and categorize so we can find them easily and at a minutes notice! 🙂 However….sometimes that’s all we do! I know that I post so many things that I know I will never do. But Sarah over at Amongst Lovely Things and Pam over at Everyday Snapshots have put together a plan to help us DO some of them! Each week they are hosting a linky party called Pinning It Down. To play you need to make or do something from a pin board, blog a bit about it, and link up over at their blog! It a simple and fun way to get rolling on some projects that I really want to do! So….here is my first ever Pinning It Down post.
This week I am making things off of my Birthday Pin Board. Bunny will be turning 6 here in a week and a half and I am hard at working trying to plan a Pintrest worthy party, while at the same time keep my budget from going broke! 😉 She chose a theme of Rainbows and Unicorns. So today I made some recycled glitter crayons as party favors, and some rainbow clouds to hang at her party! I started with the clouds. This idea came from an idea I pinned here. It was fairly simple. I cut out some cloud shapes out of white felt (I cut two of each). I then used some blue rick rack I had on hand to to make three tails off of each cloud. Then i sewed the could pieces together! Next, I cut out six circle of each color, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. These I glued to the rick rack tails in rainbow order! That’s it! They are all ready to hang up on party day!
Aren’t they cute? I love them! They add some much color without looking tacky and cheap. Yet they only cost a wee bit in felt! I love Pintrest!
My next project is something that i have been planning on doing for a long while. I had a million old crayons that were piling up, so I planned to recycled them. I had peeled them ( I soaked them in hot water for a few seconds and they just unrolled out of the wrappers!) Then I found a great silicone pan that is tiny ginger bread men. I like that it was so small and easy for kids to use as crayons. So off to Pintrest to find the directions! That is when I found some heart shaped ones that glittered here! This amazing blogger used glitter in the pan before she melted them! How cool is that! I needed to try it! So I did. I made a batch of rainbow ones in individual colors, and then I made some mixed rainbow ones! They turned out so well and I think that the kids will love them! Here is how they turned out!
Aren’t they cool? These are awesome party favors! No sugar, original, and too cute!
So that is my Pinning It Down this week! Next week I’m sure will have more of the rainbow theme! If you want to see other regular people working hard on making their craft dreams come true, stop on by Everyday Snapshots, or Amongst Lovely Things! Don’t forget you can follow my boards on Pintrest (there is a link to do that on my right hand side bar)! Happy Pinning Everyone!!!!!!
PS I will be trying to post more of my crafty posts on my other blog Peace Love and Blessing. I have plans for helping Pup and Bunny re-do their rooms a bit, and I really would like to share other fun I do! This space is a bit more my “all about the girls” blog, and the other one is more about me! 🙂
Well today took a fun and very different turn then I thought it would! That is all the fun of following the child! The girls headed down to the school room mid morning and got to work. After a small bit of time, Bunny started working with packing peanut sculpture. She and I (I couldn’t resist it) both made a snowflake shape, but they weren’t the strongest shape. Then she decided to make an igloo. I thought that was a good idea and let her get to work (without me)! She did an amazing job building the whole thing. She made a roof and everything! Well I thought that she would love to get out the Arctic Toob Figures to put in her igloo and I was right! She loved it. This got us started talking about the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica. We started by talking about directions (North South, East, West) and about a compass. I told her how a compass is on a map to help us see where things are. I then showed her a bit about how compass works. This is a work that we will have to revisit, but it helped with the discussion about how the Arctic Circle is in the Northern part of the world, and Antarctica is in the southern part. After that I took her up to the computer to check out some pictures and videos of the people in the Arctic. Well, this led us to also looking at Polar Bears in a video and she really took off on this theme. So I found a PBS Nature episode about Polar Bears and we watched it during lunch. I was surprised to find the girls sat through it all and Bunny really was absorbing the information.
Pup was hard at work today too!
Here is Bunny working really hard on her igloo!
Pup pulled out the continent boxes! Although she pulled things out of all the boxes at once (creating quite a little mess) she also laid the animals out on the continent puzzle! Too cute!
Here we are working on where the Arctic Circle is.
Here we are watching some Arctic videos on the Internet.
This one is where some natives are building an igloo!
Here is lunch and Polar Bears. Lots of information and fun!
After Lunch I wanted Bunny to draw a picture and she thought that was a great idea! She made a polar bear, and narrated a report!
Under the Polar Bear is a seal in the water.
and on the back is an igloo!
Well, my next move was a spur of the moment and a bit crazy! I decided to take the girls to the zoo to spend some time with the Arctic animals there, especially the Polar Bear! So we bundled up (It is only about 22 degrees outside here) and off we went on our Arctic adventure! It was great! We had the zoo pretty much to ourselves and we really got to sit and study the polar bears and the seals in the warm Arctic building! We watched the bears wandering around and we sat and read some books we brought with us while we did! Then we had a chance to see one bear up close when he sat down against the window! The girls loved it, and it was great to see the bear so close, to see his paws, his ears, and his thick fur. It was such a great, peaceful learning exprirence. Especially since we were able to see seals in the same building. This allowed us to talk about food chains and we followed the food chain from sea plants to fish, from fish to bigger fish, from bigger fish to seal, from seals to polar bears, from polar bears to men (some Arctic natives eat polar bears).
Here is our polar bear.
See how close they were able to get? It was really cool!
Here is a seal. They are really hard to get a picture of since they are moving so fast and they are under water!
After our time with the polar bears and seals, we headed back outside to see the arctic wolves!
Arent they cute? Bunny was interested since she saw a few of them in the Nature video that we watched. They were hunting caribou.
We talked about so many different things today and it was really wonderful! I love spur of the moment learning that is all about following the child! I think that the girls learned alot about the Arctic today and I love it when they can really experience things for real that you are learning about! I love so much that Homeschooling allows us to do that. Learning is an amazing journey and I love being able to have so much fun doing it! Happy Schooling!
Today we were able to hang out with some friends of ours for a while and the kids had a bast! However, I didn’t get any pictures of that. We also were at church today and Bunny worked really hard with some of her friends to sell all of the ornaments that she made! Bunny is not much of a sales person, she is shy and naturally reserved. She has some friends however that love to talk to others and sell things, so it worked out well. They were selling the ornaments for a donation. The proceeds are to go to the Maryknoll Sisters who help the poor. I think that Bunny did a great job spending hours working on the ornaments, and she and her friends did a wonderful job making sure that got a ton of donations! All in all the girls made a total of $52.30!!!! I am so proud of the girls for working so hard to help others who need it! I really hope that it is the beginning of a beautiful life full of love and generosity! PS If you are interested in making a donation too, there is a button on the left side bar of the blog labels “Bunny’s Donation”!
Well yesterday was St. Nicholas day and of course he stopped at our house to fill the girls shoes! Bunny was too excited to fall asleep and when she woke up she flew down the stairs to see if he came! He did of course! She and Pup were just so happy! I love the magic of childhood!
Bunny was so excited she was moving so fast! This was the best pictures that I could get! 🙂
Pup was s happy too!
St. Nick got both girls new outfits for their dolls! Pup loved hers and wanted to dress just like her later when it was time to put clothes on! It took a while to find the perfect outfit to almost match! 🙂
Here are the dolls all dressed. Bunny set them up!
As you can see they got right to playing!
The other amazing thing that happened was that we got a tiny bit of snow! When Bunny saw it she said “There is snow and St. Nicholas came and its is JUST LIKE CHRISTMAS”!!!!!! 🙂 This snow was just a dusting and I know that we will get so much more soon, but this deserved to be celebrated, so we went out in it! The girls rolled around in it, ate some of it, and threw some of it! 😉 After a bit I suggested that we go out to the park and the girls thought that sounded good! So we took the time to go to for a walk! I forgot how great it is to be outside in the cold and I realize that we need to get out more even though it is cold. Here are a few pictures of our time outside!
There was no snow out on the hill since we were on the lake and its a bit warmer there!
There was a ton of mud though!
So we had a fun day and I love being able to do these things with my little girls! It really is a special time together! What do you to have time with your kids?
