Letter U Day

Today was the day for our co-op preschool to meet at our house. Our group does a letter a day and a number a day. Sometimes we also focus on shapes and colors. Today was letter U day, and also, the number 21.

As I was researching activities for letter U, I was coming up pretty short. There's just not that much out there based around the letter U. But the few things that I found and liked ended up working out really well, so I thought I would share.

We always start out preschool with "circle time." You know, weather, calendar, singing the days of the week song; I like to play a little I Spy With My Little Eye...etc. After that, we started right into our 1st letter U activity--which just so happened to also be our number 21 activity:

The Upside-Down Contest! 
The night before I had made this big chart with a place for each kid to record how long they could stand on their head or hands (upside-down). The chart measured all the way from 1 to 21 seconds. Each kid took a turn standing on their hands or head (some on a pillow) and the rest of us would count together. Most of the kids wanted me to hold their feet up for them and almost all the kids made it all the way to 21. When they were done, I let them color in their section of the chart to correspond with how long they were able to stay upside-down. The kids had a blast with this one. When everyone was done with their turn we could check out the data and make comparisons. Then it was time to read a book:

Up Above and Down Below, by Sue Redding

This is a pretty great book! The illustrations are wonderfully intriguing. All the kids gathered around and wouldn't ever let me turn the pages because they were so interested in the pictures. We made a game of pointing to a more obscure item on each page. Also, the book really helps give the kids a concrete idea of what "up" and "above" and "down" and "below" mean. After reading the book, I figured the kids were primed to display their new knowledge of positional words:




Positional Word Practice
I gave each child an object. I would then call out a positional word; there are an abundance of positional words to chose from but you better believe I at least started out with up, above, down and below. The kids would have to move their objects somewhere around the room to accomplish the positional word. I found it helpful to point out to the kids that they could use their bodies as a reference point. For example, if I said the word "above," the children could put the object above their heads, or above their arm, or above their foot. By the time we had exhausted my repertoire of positional words, the kids were ready for:

Play Time & Snacks
Not too much to say about this one. I looked around everywhere for letter U snacks, but most of them were way too labor intensive for me. So we just had fishy crackers and apples and chocolate chip cookies :-) We then moved onto some singing and dancing:

The Ugly Underwear Song
I found this song on the DLTK website and I'm SO glad that I did because it was a huge hit with the kids. The lyrics go:  "Oh I'm glad I don't have UGLY UNDERWEAR! (repeat) It would make me switch and twitch and maybe even itch! Oh I'm glad I don't have UGLY UNDERWEAR!" It's sung to the tune of, "If You're Happy and You Know It." I made up some funny dance moves, more like simple actions really, to go along with it and the kids loved to dance along, even if they didn't catch on to all the words right away. Very fun! Thanks to Becky somebody for posting that one! We kept the action alive after that with a:

Uniform Parade
We have a lot of dress-ups at our house so I let the kids pick out "uniforms" to put on. I tried to discuss the idea of a "uniform" while we were all outfitting ourselves, but I'm not sure the kids really got the difference between a uniform and a costume. Oh well. When we were dressed, a police officer, a fireman, a construction worker, a lifeguard, a farmer, a buzz lightyear, and a knight all went on a big parade around the house playing follow the leader. Everyone had a turn to be the leader, then we sat up to the table for our craft:

Letter U Umbrellas
Each kid got a worksheet/printout deal for the letter U. I used this one, but any other would work just fine. We used a cupcake liner, folded in half to make the umbrella top and glued it to the umbrella shape printed on the worksheet. The kids cut a length of pipe cleaner to match the handle in the printout and curled it up and glued that on too. We found out that pipe cleaners actually do not glue to paper well--I had to break out the extra extra strong glue to get them to stick successfully.

I had precut raindrops in a few different shades of blue that the kids could then glue to their worksheets. They also got a chance to trace the letter U that was printed on the printout. That's about it. By this time, all the parents were coming to pick up their kids, so some of the kids didn't finish and got to take the materials home with them.

That was our fun-filled day of letter U activities.

The end.

Couch Long-Jumping

I'm not sure this even qualifies as a "preschool activity," but if I give it a title it sounds more official. Right?

Well, sometimes, when I'm just not prepared for the day (like today), I fall back on this activity because my kids ALWAYS love it and I can make myself feel good by calling it a gross motor activity. The deal is: we use the couch as a jumping playground. I know--uncouth. But what can I say?

• Excuse #1: I have all boys. 
• Excuse #2: We own a very crappy couch that we happen to have owned since when we were in college. And that was, like, FOREVER ago.
• Excuse #3: I'm just not a very "couth" kind of girl. 

All excuses aside, I will tell you that letting your kids loose to jump on the couch is a lot of fun. We like to have contests. For example, who can stand on the armrest and jump the furthest across the couch (as in across the seat cushions). And...who can stand on the armrest and jump the furthest to mom, who will catch them. And...who can do the funniest jump from the armrest onto the couch. And sometimes we do "shows" in which the children come up with a routine and perform it for me to watch. This is usually very circus-esque. But the kids think they are hilarious.


When you don't own a trampoline in your backyard, as we don't, couch long-jumping can be the next best thing. Besides, here's excuse #4: it's really good exercise!

Soap Explosion

Explosion is really a much too generous word for this experiment. Said "explosion" is really just "a bit of a puff up;" let it be known that nothing actually explodes. It is decently neat though. It's like watching those black "snakes" (fireworks) that we sometimes set off on the Fourth of July. Only it's soap instead of black, dirty, dusty coal junk. So, yeah.

I found this idea on a plethora of sites on the net, so I'm not going to credit any one place or another. It seems that lots of people have done this, but it was a first for us. The main idea of this science experiment is to put ivory soap in the microwave and watch what happens. We followed the advice of a friend who warned us not to put in more than 1/4 of the soap bar at a time. But after doing it, I would say that the allowable amount probably totally depends on your microwave. I think we could have probably done the whole bar and it would have been just fine. But hey, better safe than sorry. I'd at least start with the 1/4 bar.

Another friend told us to let the microwave go for anywhere between 1 and 2 minutes to get the soap to "explode." It took our soap almost exactly 1 minute. We gathered around our microwave, eyes on the soap inside, and waited while the time counted down. Eventually the soap started expanding and growing. It took it just a couple of seconds (think 10-15) from the start of it's growth to when it was done. So make sure you watch it the whole time. This is what it looks like when it's done, approximately:

Don't try to handle it too much at first. We learned this the hard way. Even though the outside cools off relatively quickly, the inside is still very very scorching. While we waited for the first piece to cool down, we put another 1/4 bar in the microwave and watched again. It was pretty funny to see it get all puffy. The kids were interested in the first two go-rounds. But after that, they were kinda done.

So it was on to some hands-on stuff. We put our soap explosions into bowls and played around with it a bunch. Mostly all they wanted to do was pull it apart and make it into "sand" in the bottom of the bowl.

But the more they played with it, the more they complained of the soap starting to make their skin feel itchy. Therefore, the activity didn't last too much after this.

I tried to get them excited about reconstituting the soap, or at least an attempt, but their interest had completely waned. Nevertheless, later in the day I spent some time adding some water and swirling it around until finally dumping the whole sudsy mixture down the drain. 

Anyway, it's pretty fun. It gets about a 7 out of 10 for us. It's not horribly interesting or horribly cool, but it is pretty interesting and pretty cool and really unique. And there you have it. 

Sock Puppets

These are the sock puppets we made today:

Gloo, Franny, and Sam

Honesty, I was pretty worried about this activity, what with all the various little crafting materials, and whatever means I might use to attach them to the socks, and how on earth would the kids be properly involved? But I'm happy to say it turned out really well. The kids loved this activity and played with their puppets all night long. 

All we did was pick out a sock of each of our choice from our "lost in the laundry" box of unpaired, lonely socks. Then I poured out pom-poms (in various sizes), googly eyes (in various sizes), buttons (in various sizes), ribbon, rick rack, and yarn into little piles on the carpet. The kids choose whatever they wanted to fashion a little puppet guy and arrange it onto their sock. When they had finalized the placement of all accoutrements onto their puppets, I used my handy glue gun to adhere everything on according to my children's direction. And it worked out very nicely, smoothly and with a lot of laughter! 

When our puppets were done, we played for awhile making them talk back and forth, then finally came up with a story to act out for our daddy when he came home from work.  Which thing we did, to great success and much fatherly applause.  

Next week, I'm going to go buy butcher paper and read, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, to the kids to explain to them how a background can be used for a puppet show. Then we're going to make one and put on another play with background, props and everything! I hope it will be fun! 

Preschool Backpacking

When I looked outside this morning, I saw that it was a beautiful day. Consequently, I was trying to think of an idea for a preschool activity that would get us out of doors.

A week or so previous, my son had been having a few conversations with my mother about a backpacking trip we had planned as a family when I was young. Since then, he has been very interested in all the particulars of backpacking. As he asked me, yet again, when OUR family would be embarking on our first backpacking trip, a brilliant idea popped in my head. "Let's go right now," I informed him. Truly, hiking is one of my very most, top favorite things to do in life, so I was thrilled at the prospect of pretend backpacking right outside our door.

I had the kids find their preschool backpacks, suit up in tennis shoes, and told them they could bring along any gear they thought they would need. One son packed swimming goggles, mittens and a retractable claw sort of toy thing. The other picked out all his favorite action figures to keep him company on our trek. We concocted some "trail mix" by throwing together a variety of whatever snacks I had on hand. Today, it turned out that we had fruit snack, pretzel, fishy cracker, raisin, conversation heart, chocolate chip trail mix. We added our snacks to our backpacks, slung then on our backs and headed out the door. I told the kids that while we were trekking they had to find 5 new things for us to discover and put them in the brown paper bags I had brought for each of them.

The rest of this kind of activity is pretty easy and very rewarding. We walked around and looked at things we had never noticed before like mosses and the veins in leaves and buds on the ends of stems etc. Each child put 5 or more things into his bag. When we were tired of walking around, we backpacked back to the house and dumped out all our treasures for discussion. Here are the treasures we discovered:

It was fun to mention a few facts about each item and have the kids point out things they liked or were interested in. We had a good talk about lichen and how pinecones differ. Mostly, we talked about how much we want to go on a real backpacking trip sometime in the near future. Either way, we'll for sure be going on another preschool backpacking trip on the next nice day we find.

Demolition Observation

I figured since we are abandoning all crafts for awhile, we might as well go big with our manliness. I found an idea on a website a friend sent me called, No Time For Flashcards. "Wrecking Ball Science" looked like it was just what we needed to bring up our levels of testosterone.

If you click on the link, you'll see that the author of this activity posted some awesome pictures of how "wrecking ball science" worked out for them. My picture is much less exciting, but here it is in all it's glory:

Honestly, I think this idea is pretty genius, especially for boys. It is probably one of the most successful activities we've done in terms of short- and long-term interest. The boys were SO excited about every aspect of playing around with a wrecking ball.  The first thing we had to do was find all the blocks in our house and construct a big city next to an empty doorway in our house. The doorway that goes into our kitchen is a pretty good one, so that's where we set up camp. After we had a decent sized city, we spent some time talking about construction. I asked them questions like, "What happens when people don't want a house or building anymore? How do we take it down? Can we do that?" which led us to talking about demolition and wrecking balls. They wanted to know what kind of truck held a wrecking ball so we found some pictures online. Google's "images" option is so helpful sometimes.

Anyway, after that we found a medium-sized ball and I jimmied some sort of a net around it with yarn. The yarn was then threaded through a key ring that I taped (with strong tape) to the top of a doorway. Now we had two ends of the yarn to deal with. One side pulls the ball up and down and the other end holds the ball. For us, it worked best to let one kid hold the up and down end of the string tight; while the other kid got to hold the ball, determine angle and let it drop. Then we'd switch. The kids LOVED it! They could hardly wait until it was their turn. And so it went. Construct, demolish. Construct, demolish. For...oh...hours. When I finally made them stop, they immediately started pestering me for when the next time would be that they would get to do the wrecking ball. So, the next day we did it again. And the next. And now we're taking a break, but I had to promise them that we could do it again another day next week...and so forth.

Unlike the author of this idea, I called this activity "demolition observation" because I'm afraid I'm not much up on the "science" of a wrecking ball and I didn't feel like I could very accurately explain any of the forces at work here. So we mostly just observed and played around with dropping the ball at different heights and angles to achieve complete demolition and destruction of whatever building or city we had constructed. Even though I didn't spend time explaining too much of it to the kids, I think they learned a ton just by participating. All in all, a complete 100% successful activity! One I would whole-heartedly recommend to any mother of boys.

P.S. I'm sure girls would like it too, but I don't have any daughters so I really couldn't say.

P.P.S. Next time I'm going to use string because we found that the yarn broke pretty easily. Just FYI.

Salt Volcano

I asked a friend of mine to make me a copy of an activity she had from a book called, The Science Explorer Out and About and we got around to trying it today. The activity is titled: "Salt Volcano," but after our bout with it, I would call it: "Salt Dud." I know. I'm SO creative. Anyway, I don't know about the rest of the book, but this science experiment totally sucked. So much so, in fact, that I didn't even bother taking pictures--because there would have been nothing for anyone to see.

The instructions call for oil, salt, water and food coloring. You fill up a jar with 3 inches of water. Add 1/3 cup vegetable oil and a drop of food coloring. Shake salt over the top. The instructions go on to say, "Wow!" so you would think something pretty cool would happen. But it doesn't. Oh sure, the salt falls down through the oil, dragging a bit of oil with it to the bottom, and then releases the oil, which then bubbles back up to the top. But it is so slow, and so minuscule of a reaction as to be hardly worthwhile. Certainly not, "Wow!" More like, "Hmmm...did something just happen?"

Therefore, "Salt Dud" I have aptly termed this experiment, and there it will forever remain in my memory. On the other hand, I was perusing the Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas blog where I found a similar experiment. Only this experiment looked like it actually worked to the magnitude of "Wow!" so we will be trying it sometime very soon.

Crafty Vases

Here's the last craft that I forced my chillins to do. I realize that Valentine's day is past, but when you've gone to the work of getting a bunch of supplies together, well, you want to utilize those supplies. Therefore, we went through with this vase/paper flower craft.

The idea came, once again from the kid activities website, but the author didn't post a picture, so I wasn't sure how well these were going to turn out. Thankfully, a friend of mine brought her daughter over to be crafty with us today and helped me interpret the directions successfully. These are they:

They make a cutesy little centerpiece for our table. Here's how we made this activity kid-friendly. We let the kids pick up to 3 colors of cupcake liners. It took a little bit to model how to pinch the bottom of the cupcake liner to make it look like a flower, but after a few tries, the kids got it. If anyone ever attempts this craft, make sure you have plenty of cupcake liners on hand that you don't mind if the kids practice on and then throw away when the "flowers" don't turn out just right. Then the kids handed the flowers to us moms and we twisted green pipe cleaners around the pinched up parts. I don't think there's any way in heck that preschoolers could do this part by themselves. We tried to make it fun by having a variety of green pipe cleaners for them to choose from. Then we had the kids make a little ball of green playdough and squish it into the bottom of their baby food jar -- soon to be vase (said vah-z, naturally) -- and poke the stems down into the ball to make the flowers stand up. That's where the directions left us. My friend had the idea to cut out paper leaves, hole punch an end of them and let the kids string a leaf or two onto each pipe cleaner. That worked out pretty well and made the flowers look more real. I had the idea to try to hide the playdough lump in the bottom of the vase with grass, cut out of a strip of green paper. That idea did not work out as well. So our advice would be to use artificial grass, like the kind you would put in an easter basket.

All in all, very enjoyable. The kids forgot their hate of crafts for a few moments, either from the excitement of having a friend crafting right along side them, or because this craft was actually more fun. It seems that any time they are allowed to make a lot of choices (ie the color of the flowers, the color of the pipe cleaners, shape of leaves, number of leaves, size of playdough ball, etc.) they are much happier. And, when they are much happier, I am much happier. So this craft got a thumbs up from all of us.

Crayon Hearts

I basically forced the kids to do my last two crafts because I already had them all prepared. Poor little kiddies. I know. It's a tough world.

The first forced craft we made was our crayon heart deals, an idea from the Martha Stewart website.  Of course, Martha's crayon hearts turned out amazing, whereas ours turned out not exactly like Martha's. But still, pretty cool. It's fun to hang them near a window so the sun can shine through the wax paper, giving the hearts that "stained glass" effect.

We followed the directions from the website implicitly. To paraphrase, we:

• used a sharpener and some valentine's colored crayons to get crayon shavings
• sprinkled the shavings inbetween 2 sheets of wax paper
• ironed over it on super low
• cut the waxed paper into hearts and hung them up

That's about it. It's very simple, but honestly, my kids didn't enjoy it very much. In fact, after we used the iron, they ran away rendering them out of commission. I had to finish up the cutting of the heart shapes and stringing from the ceiling solo mio. Ah well. What do you expect from kids who didn't want to participate in first place? 

My children did get a lot of practice with the sharpener. That's something.

Anyway, the hearts are lovely. 

Estimation Station

After our last crafting activity my son said to me, "Mom, why do we keep having to do this stuff that we don't want to do?" Well, what does one say to that, I'd like to know. So I thought for a minute and said, "Ok, no more crafts. Let's do some math, shall we?" Now, truth be told, I had everything all set to make these crayon heart crafty thingees, but obviously, it was time to switch it up a bit. I cast my eyes around for something math-ish and came upon a jar filled with conversation hearts that I had left out for snacking on after we had done our candy graphing a few days earlier. It was just the thing I needed--come to rescue us from the crafting-doldrums.

This is the jar that I grabbed and set down between us--

and led out with: "So, how many conversation heart candies do you think are in this jar? How many would you guess? What is your estimate?"

To which my oldest said: "I think there are 100." 

"Fat chance." I thought to myself.

"20!" said my younger son.

"Hmmm...probably a few more..." I thought to myself.

"I'm going to estimate that there are 50 candy hearts in this jar." I said proudly.

We then poured the candy hearts out onto the carpet and commenced counting. I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to practice counting over 20. And indeed we did count over 20. And over 30. and over 50. We counted all the way to 99! When we got there my oldest son yelled out an exultant, "YES! I won, I won, I WON! I'm smarter than Mama!" And indeed he was. Can you believe there were 99 little candies in that jar? It doesn't seem possible to me, but there you have it.  Count them and weep.

After our bout with the conversation hearts we went on a hunt all over the house to find other things to estimate and count and see who won. Let me just say that I never, actually won, pathetic as it is to admit. But those little buggers had quite the case of beginner's luck...er...something.

Estimating is fun! That's what we learned. Apparently, it is WAY funner than crafts. Depending on who you ask. Nevertheless, I think I will have to abandon crafts for a few more days.

Valentine's Placemats

I wanted to make something to decorate our table for dinner on Valentine's day; placemats got the vote. So I searched for a fun idea and found this one: valentine's activities, including placemats.  

The site has a billion ideas that I wanted to try, but we only found time for a couple of them. Good thing there's always next year. 

This idea is pretty simple. I cut out matching rectangles (or ovals, or whatever you want) from clear contact paper. I also cut out hearts in various sizes and shapes from red, pink, white and purple construction paper. Then I gathered the leftover squares of tissue paper I had saved from when we made our ugly wreaths. I pulled out some old glitter and I was ready for the kids to take a turn. 

First I let them pull the backing off the contact paper and they helped me tape it, sticky-side-up, onto the table. Then I gave them free range to stick as many hearts and tissue paper squares as they wanted all over the contact paper. When they said they were done, I let them pick some glitter to sprinkle over the top. The final step is to pull the backing off the other contact paper portion and lay it, ever so carefully, over the one taped to the table. This part was tricky and I found that I mostly had to do it for them. But they were able to help a little bit--they liked to use their fingers to spread out all of the air bubbles that get trapped in between the contact paper. 

And there you have it. Ta-da! Super fun (not to mention, sparkly, always a bonus) placemats that the kids can be proud of and enjoy at dinner.

Family Home Evening

Every Monday evening we get our little family together for "Family Home Evening." It's an idea instituted by our church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I think it's the most wonderful idea ever, and my kids love it too. They look forward to FHE all week long. Every Monday they each get assigned a job, and whether it's to do the lesson or the activity or plan the treat or pick a scripture to read or a song to sing they are equally thrilled to be a part of our big family night.

Tonight we combined our Family Home Evening and our preschool lesson because I didn't have time during the day to get to the preschool lesson. We were pretty busy getting prepared for Valentine's day and the big surprise we were planning for our daddy (which involved a lot of baking)!

Anyway, I feel I am not unduly proud of our heart-themed FHE (they are not usually so well coordinated) so here's what went down in our house:

Song: we always let our kids pick whatever song they want when it's their turn. if it's "I'm a Little Teapot," well, then, so be it.

Prayer: someone gets a turn to do this too.

Lesson: we read an article out of the February 2012 Friend magazine entitled, "My Heart is Happy" and talked about what types of things make our hearts happy.

Activity: earlier in the day we had read the book, My Map Book, by Sara Fanelli, and now we took the opportunity to make maps of our hearts similar to the author of the book, based on our conversation about things that make our hearts happy. I got this idea from the Playful Learning website.

This picture is from the Playful Learning website-it's not my own-because we forgot to take a picture while we were painting. I don't know what the other author used, but we used watercolor paper; black sharpies for the lines, pictures and words; and watercolor paints. They turned out beautiful!

Treat: earlier in the day I had made red cinnamon rolls (dyed the dough red with food coloring), with pink frosting! Heart-shaped sugar cookies were my second choice, but I wanted to eat cinnamon rolls more ;-)

The end. Our FHE's are pretty short because our kids are still really small with relatively short attention spans. Usually, I'd say 95% of the time, our activity is a physical activity like swinging the kids in blankets, or jumping contests, or playing Red Light/Green Light. So I was worried that painting wouldn't be something that proved equally enjoyable for the kids, but it turned out to be a smash hit!

Strung-up Hearts

So, I know I pretty much strike out whenever I try to do an idea that I think up all on my own. But I thought I would give a go, just one more time. 

I wondered if I might have more success by keeping it really simple. SO I bought those paper doily heart deals, super cheap from the store. Then I drew hearts on red and pink construction paper that were big enough to accommodate the doilies. I thought I would have the kids cut out the heart shapes, but when we sat down to do this activity, neither were in a very scizzor-ish mood. Sometimes that happens. Therefore, I -myself- ended up cutting the hearts out for them, but it would have been cooler had they done it themselves. Next, I let them paint watered-down glue on the back of the doilies and attach them as close to the centers of the cut-out hearts as they could get. I tried to emphasize the "center of the heart" to them so it would give us a chance to talk about positional words and phrases like: bottom, top, center, middle, on the side of, kitty-corner to, etc. They got pretty close. Obviously, if you look at the picture, some of our attempts were better than others. Then I let them pick a color of crepe paper that they wanted to use to hang their heart and taped it to the ceiling. 

They are not, actually, very attractive decorations, but they were decently fun to make. Also, I liked this activity because it kept the boys' attention the whole time, as opposed to other crafts that seem to be a bit too long for my guys who would generally prefer running around and smashing things to doing artsy-types of sit-down activities. Oh well, so it goes as the mother of little boys. 

Candy Graphing

I was spending some time looking at the Playful Learning website and loving it. So I found this idea there and decided to try it with the boys, since conversation hearts are in abundance right now in our household.

The coolest part was that the author of Playful Learning also included a printable empty chart that I could print out and use and not have to come up with one myself. Hooray for other people doing the work for me! :-) Anyway, the kids loved this activity and it gave us a chance to ask a lot of great comparison questions like, "Which line is the tallest?" "Which is the shortest?" "How much taller is the tallest line than the shortest line?" We also got to talk about which color was our favorite to eat. Both boys chose blue.

What I like about activities like this is that both kids can participate at the same time, even though their understandings are at different levels. I feel that the younger benefits from the kinds of questions and answers and ideas that the older comes up with, and the older benefits from the reinforcement that comes from listening to the more basic explanations I use when talking to the younger.  Good activity--very easy--and you get to eat all the candy at the end. A winner all around!

Popover Perfection

In the previous post I explained about our fun trip to the library, which event led to the temporary acquisition of this book, which I am very excited about. 

The truth is, I had never heard of this book, I just picked it up randomly off the shelf at the library. But it looked interesting so I gave it a little look-see. I like it because it has recipes in a format created entirely just for kids. Particularly, kids who can't read yet. It also contains a whole page or so on tips for how to involve your children more when you are cooking/baking together. Tips like letting your kid use a ruler to smooth off the top of a measuring cup so they make sure they don't get too much or too little. Genius! I've always wondered how to help them figure out how to do that part. Anyway, we brought it home and today we tried out the popover recipe. 

I've never been able to get a popover recipe to be successful. Should I even begin a paragraph with that information? Well, you should probably know that I don't get many recipes to come out overly successful. In fact, if you must know, I usually despise cooking. It's just not my thing. But I enjoy cooking with the kids so maybe I just liked this book because I thought it could act as a positive segue between my lack of interest in cooking and the kids' enthusiasm for making something-themselves-that is yummy. And the verdict is that it totally worked!  Ha!

Let me chronicle the levels of success for you:

• the popovers popped over--I've never gotten them to do that before, though I have tried many a time
• the popovers were delish--usually they are ok, but these ones were awesome!
• the kids followed the recipe, easily, all by themselves because the recipe is made up of pictures
• the steps are clear and accurate
• really, I mean this, I didn't have to read anything to them. they sat down on the floor with the cookbook between them, looked at the pictures and got to work! how cool is that?! 
• SO, when Daddy came home and I pulled the popovers out of the oven the kids could, in all honesty, say "Daddy!  We made these popovers for you!" And when he looked at me like, "Look at our poor, disillusioned children.  Aren't they cute?" I got to shake my head at him and smile and say, "No really, they really made them all by themselves." 
• The pride that my kids felt was palpable--and THAT was the best success of all :-)

Library Visit

I realize that most moms and dads probably take their kids to the library, so this is no big news to anyone. But I truly enjoy taking my kids on a library visit. Usually, when we go, I count it as our preschool activity for the day because:

1). it pretty much takes us all morning just to get everyone dressed, fed, out the door with matching shoes, and in the car, so we don't have time for much else in our day anyway.  And...

2). we always end up learning a lot while we're there.  Things like, what it means to "borrow," what categorization is all about, how to look up and find the book you want, how to use our quiet voices (which is something my rowdy family really could use LOTS of practice on), fiction vs. non-fiction, big people books vs. picture books, and why running away from your mom to play hide and seek behind the bookcases is NOT ok. Also, why jumping on the library furniture is not acceptable. And also, how to ask the librarian for help and how to check out. It's true that the checkout counter is pretty much the most eventful time at the library for us. I think the boys think it's magic. Plus, our library has a self-checkout counter which means that the kids get to experience the magic first hand. We like that.

The boys, though, would tell you the most wonderful thing about the library is taking turns pushing that little button on the wall that makes the door open up all by itself.

Anyhow, I think the benefits of a trip to the library are pretty obvious. But my favorite part is bringing home lots and lots of books that we get to read and we didn't have to buy and they don't have to clutter up my house. I'm a big fan of that part.

Ugly Wreath

Sometimes you win and sometimes you don't. This wreath idea was more of a "don't." Well, as far as looks go. Ok, it's pretty hideous. But we DID have a fun time making it/them. Sadly, I can't blame anyone but myself, because this ugly wreath is what happens when you leave me to come up with an idea all on my own. I just needed a pattern or a picture to follow or something.

But hey, I'm trying to look at the positives here. And well, there aren't many, but it really WAS fun to make. So I'm sticking with that one.

Here's what we did. We each got a 6" paper plate and cut out the middle. I mixed up some school glue with some water and cut up tissue paper into small squares. Then the kids painted the glue onto the remaining circle that was their paper plate. We attached the tissue paper squares to the glue wherever and however we liked them. Honestly, if I had left the wreaths at this point, it probably would have all turned out pretty good.  But no, I had this silly idea of putting stickers on over the tissue paper layer. So we waited all morning for the glue to dry and by mid-afternoon I sat the kids back up to the table to put on stickers. We had some foam stickers left over from our "heart pot" activity, and some other cheap stickers that I just let the kids go to town with. When we were done, I had three very ugly, far to gaudy, overly colorful "wreaths" to try and figure out how to hang up. I thought I'd hang them in a row on a big ribbon. It sounded like something Martha Stewart would do. But don't worry, however Martha would do it is apparently not how I did it because mine ended up entirely ridiculous. My boys, with their collective artistic eye insisted what it needed was "bows," like the kind you put on a birthday present. So the poor creation went from bad to worser. I had to put my foot down when the kids suggested hanging some of their dinosaurs from the bottom of the ribbon, as though that, in any way, would make things improve. Or even fit in. Poor us.

So that was our attempt at a wreath(s). It will probably be a few years, at the least, before I gain back sufficient courage to try another.

With good reason.

Obviously.

Story Strips

I have a son who is obsessed with polar bears. He has a plethora of other animals he is obsessed with as well, but for today we focused on the polar bears. I had found a resource on the Sylvan Dell Publishing website with many activities based on the book, In Arctic Waters, so I printed out a few. Most of the "teaching activities" they've come up with are way too advanced for my kids, but they provided a jumping off point from which I could come up with some interesting things for us to do.

The thing my kids ended up liking the best was a little thing I called "Polar Bear Story Strips." I had printed out a sequencing activity from the In Arctic Waters resource page, and we used it to make up our own stories. I cut up all the little strips the website provided and set them out, randomly, on the floor. Then I chose one strip to be the first strip and used the picture on it to start telling a story that I would make up as I went along. After a few sentences, I would chose another strip and continue my story utilizing the picture on the second strip. I continued in this way until all the strips were placed in order, in a column, and I had told a story that included all the pictures in that order.

Now it was the boys' turn. We mixed up all the strips and my oldest followed my example. He chose his own first strip, second strip and so forth and as he chose them he told a story to follow the pictures. It was great! Sometimes he would get stuck with two pictures that didn't really go together very well and look to me for help. No problem, I would just prompt him with a few creative ways to get around it and he would take one of my ideas and run with it. For my younger son, who is also a great story teller, I would just have to offer a little more support. For example, I would ask him, "What do you want to go first?" and he would pick something out and after watching the rest of us do it, he knew that he was expected to come up with a sentence or phrase to accompany the picture. Then he would look at me and I would have to say, "What do you want to go next?" and we would continue in this manner until he had used up all the story strips and told a whole story. After a few times around, both boys could create all their own stories with absolutely no help from me. AND, the best part is, that they LOVED it!

Eventually, we decided to jointly create a story that we had to agree on being our most favorite way to have the strips put together. When we finally got it JUST right, we glued it to paper and hung it on the wall to come back and read whenever we felt the urge.

Heart Pots

Honestly, with all these crafts I've been attempting, I can't remember which ones come from where. Crafts are SO not my forte, as will become obvious to anyone looking at anything I have ever created. My theory about crafts with kids is this: if the kids can't do most of it on their own, then it's not a good craft. Unfortunately, this theory has led to a lot of trial and error for me in the choosing of which crafts we're going to do. We've started many a craft idea, only to decide that it's way too hard for us and scrapped the whole thing. The point is, I've printed out a ton of ideas and tried even more, and morphed 2 or 3 together so often that I'm not really sure who I should give the credit to for some of these ideas. But I know I read somewhere about an idea like this one that ended up working for us.

Here's what we did. On Sunday, we painted 4" pots with acrylic paints in valentine's day-ish colors. On Monday, when they were dry, we filled them up with "sweet soil" aka heart-shaped candies (and some Hershey's kisses). We stuck heart-shaped foam stickers to the ends of wood craft sticks and planted our "flowers of love" anywhere the kids liked them best. We curled sparkly green pipe cleaners around our fingers and added them to the pots as foliage. The end.

I consider these heart pots to be a great success because, as I mentioned, any craft the kids can do mostly by themselves is a success to me. The only thing I think I had to help with was the pipe cleaners. Pretty dang good! Not to mention the fact that we have a new funny joke @ our house that goes like this:

          Kid: "Hey mom, can I eat some of that yummy dirt from my pot?"

          Me: "Sure. You go eat some of that yummy dirt!" 

and then we laugh and laugh and laugh some more 'cause we think we are SO funny!

Left Overs

Sometimes I have a bunch of leftover activities hanging around my house--usually cluttering up my kitchen countertops. When this happens, I have to have a day where we revisit these activities "one last time" before I throw them out or dismantle them. Today we revisited the pot of name soup stuff that's been sitting on my counter for the last week or so, and the bowl of sugar cubes for making "ice sculptures" that has probably been attracting every ant in the country to our house. We also played with some old salt play dough that has been sitting around getting crusty.

It's nice to have these days now and then because they mean little to no prep work for me. I like that. Also, they are pretty casual and the boys get to have some repetition of learning, which I support.

Bad Magic

So a few days ago we had an Ice Day, but I didn't have time to do the accompanying ice "magic trick" that I had totally talked up to the kids. Since it so happened that we were having a "Mom, I'm bored" event in our house today, I decided that it was time to bring out the magic trick.

Sadly, the magic trick was a dud. The website, FamilyFun.com, sure made it look cool, with a picture of a fascinated and amazed child to accompany the directions.

But when we tried it, I could not get it to be fascinating and amazing to save my soul. In fact, I could barely get it to work at all.

What you're supposed to do is float an ice cube in water, lay a string across the top, sprinkle a little salt on the string, wait 5 seconds, and the ice cube-theoretically-will pull right up out of the water stuck on your string (because it has "magically" refrozen there). If you're me, you try at least 15 times with all different amounts of salt, sizes of ice cubes, waiting more or less time, even using different types of string, and you only get it to work once. Then, if you're me, the other kid (who it didn't work for, no matter how hard you try to recreate the victory) throws a fit and is upset for a half an hour. Sigh.

Unsurprisingly, I wouldn't recommend this activity. Just in case anyone wonders. The only magic that was happening in our house, was that I actually captured a picture of our one and only success.

Valentine's Rev-Up

It is the 1st day of February; time to get our decorating on. We don't have many decorations for Valentine's day. Out in the ol' garage I keep individual boxes for every major holiday, and into these boxes go the decorations we have accumulated over the years. For Christmas, we have more than one box, but for poor Valentine's day, we have only a little smattering in the bottom of a single, rather small box. Therefore, I've dedicated the next couple of weeks to Valentine's Craftiness, in which we will make things to adorn our unadorned casa.

First, we pulled out what we've already got, turned on a little "Hot, hot, hot" by Buster Poindexter and His Banshees of Blue (which I consider to be appropriate valentine's music, although I also consider it to be appropriate halloween music...so, who knows?).  Anyway. Poindexter accompanies us while we dance around and hang cupid-shaped window clings and the like.

Then, it was on to the crafting. Today we made a garland. Or maybe it's a banner. I'm not sure. I cut out hearts of red, pink, and purple construction paper. The boys wrote on them and decorated them with their markers. We set them out on the floor and created a lovely pattern. We taped our pattern to some white yarn. Lastly, we hung the yarn across the mantel.

Now it was time to stand back and admire our handiwork. Not bad for us non-crafters. A half an hour of serious crafting and we're left with a nice bit of homey handmade-ness. After Valentine's is over, I may just have to include it in our meager pile within the Valentine's box. We could bring it out again next year, and the next year, and the next, and the next, and the next. Things are looking up!