St. Patricks Day Decor

I finally got around to decorating for St. Patrick's Day, so I thought I'd share it. Most all of my decorations are ideas I found on Pinterest and made my own. (Have I mentioned yet that I LOVE Pinterest?!) First I started with the rainbow background. The professor cut down a 1x4 for me and I painted them to look like a rainbow. I wanted to put a pot of gold underneath it, but I couldn't find one I liked, and honestly I think it would have been too much. I got the idea for the rainbow HERE.

The candles are made from two different types of candle holders I found at the dollar store and glued together. Then I just stuck a candle in it, and filled it with split peas. Once again, found this idea via Pinterest from THIS SITE.

The pictures in the frames were free printables from HERE. The shamrocks I just cut from different patterned papers, glued them to dowels, and stuck them in a canning jar with more split peas in them. I got the inspiration from HERE, but tweaked the idea a bit.

This is the whole thing all pulled together. I added a few decorations from my local craft store to complete the look. I wonder if my pot on the right will be filled with gold once the Leprechauns visit us on St. Patrick's day?

Check out these and many other St. Patrick's Day ideas on my Pinterest Board.

Snow Days

I am from the south, born and raised. My kiddos on the other hand have all been born in the north. This is evident in the fact that they all feel right at home in the snow whereas their mama CAN. NOT. STAND. IT.!! Thankfully, we have had a really mild winter this year, and have seen very little of the white stuff. As soon as those flakes start falling from the sky though, my kids are begging me to let them go out in it and play. Here are a few pictures of the kids playing the last time it snowed. As you may be able to tell from the picture, we have a really great hill for sliding down. (Not that I would know from experience, but the video is proof enough for me.)

Peanut eating snow.

Patty sliding like a penguin.

Penny wishing she could be outside with the older kids.

Videos of Petie sledding down the hill.

Science Fair

This past Thursday night, both Petie and Patty were able to participate in the local homeschool science fair. Last year Patty was able to participate, but this was the first time for Petie. They both had a lot of fun choosing and doing their individual projects.

Petie's project was called "Bed of Nails". Sounds nice and dangerous doesn't it? Perfect project for a kindergarten boy :)

Patty started out doing an experiment called "Bad Cow", but after days of testing we realized the experiment wasn't working due to equipment malfunction. So, of course, three days before the science fair we had to start all over with a new project. Her new project was called "Oil Spill Cleanup: Does the type of water make a difference?" Her project was all about the speed at which oil separates out of salt water versus fresh water.

And...They both won "Most Creative Project" for their age group!! I was so proud and they were both really excited :)

Happy New Year!

Since I've been criticized (playfully of course) by my family for taking down my Christmas decorations before New Years I thought I would post pictures to justify why. It's because this year I decided to do a little New Year's decorating :) New Year's is actually a pretty low key holiday for us. We don't do big parties and we may or may not even stay up to watch the ball drop. For some reason though this year I wanted to decorate for it. (Maybe I just needed a creative outlet?) Who knows, but whatever the reason, I'm really happy with the results.

I would like to have done much more, but it's a start and I plan to add to it each year. I may even stay up to welcome in the new year this time. I personally am ready to bid this past year goodbye and am looking forward to 2012 and fresh start ahead.

Christmas Stockings

I LOVE Christmas! The moment we start pulling out the boxes of decorations and put on the music, I just get downright giddy :) I love the baking and the wrapping, planning our picture for the cards, shopping, etc, etc, etc.... I LOVE IT ALL! One thing I didn't love so much were our cheap fuzzy red and white stockings. How's a kid supposed to know on Christmas morning which stocking is theirs if they all look alike? Every year I vowed to make them stockings that were distinctly theirs, and this year I finally did it. And.... Here they are!

I followed this super easy tutorial I found on Pinterest, and I think they turned out so cute!! I made one for each of the kids and then decided that The Professor and I each needed one that coordinated with theirs. I love that mine is made from all of the different fabrics.

I can finally add stockings to the list of things that I LOVE at Christmas :) Now to make something super cute to hang them on since we don't have a mantle.

Bark, George

Our Preschool book of the week was Bark, George by Jules Feiffer. I know I say this every week, but I just love this book. It's about a dog whose mother is trying to get him to bark. When all that comes out are other animal sounds, the mother takes him to the vet to take care of the problem. It's a great book for repetition and predicting what will happen next. The ending is not so predictable, but quite funny.

I remembered to do our book cut out this week. I cut out and glued an image of George on our book. Peanut colored pictures from here that I shrunk down, cut out, and had her glue in George's stomach.

Peanut did some size sequencing with dog bones. These are in the printable pack found at the end of this post.

Petie, my Kindergartener has started practicing some sight words, so I made some bones with sight words on them that he had to feed to George as I called them out. When they were all in George, Petie "reached deep down in George", pulled out a word, and read it.

Petie and Peanut used these tile word cards from Making Learning Fun to spell out all the characters from the book. Of course they had to turn it into a race. What can I say? We're a bit competitive in our household :)

I made up some cutting strips for Peanut to practice her cutting skills. These can be found in my Bark, George printable pack.

Making Learning Fun has Bark, George calendar numbers that Peanut used to practice numerical order. We only used 0-11 for this.

We also played animal sounds bingo, did some more counting using dog bones, and a few other things that can be found in the printables below. You can download them here.

I realized I don't have any alphabet activities with this theme. I've actually started Peanut on the same phonics program that I'm using for Petie, but at a much slower pace, so I didn't incorporate any of that into our theme this week.

Linking To:

Blueberries For Sal

This week, the book we used in Peanut's Preschool was Blueberries For Sal. In case you're not familiar with the book, it's about a little girl and her mother and a little bear and it's mother that are all trying to get as many blueberries as they can before winter. I was actually quite surprised that with such simple illustrations, and so many words that this book still held Peanut attention each time I read it.

Here are a few activities we did to go along with this book, and you can also get any of the printables we used in our week by going here.

Peanut placed bear counters on any blueberry that had a "b" on it.

I used a picture of the book cover and turned it into a puzzle. Peanut had to line the numbers up in order to put the cover back together.

We looked for things that were blue in magazines and glued them to a big construction paper blueberry.

Here's a little math page I made to go along with our theme. I was planning on using it for my Kindergartner, but Peanut quickly grasped the concept of how to use the greater than/less than symbol, so we played with this for a while.

Here's a little game both Petie and Peanut loved playing. I took 10 red, and 10 blue pom-poms with magnets glued on and stuck them to our filing cabinet. Then, across the room, on our metal board I put a picture of a raspberry, and one of blueberries. The kids had to race across the room, grab one of their berries, race back and place it under the right picture, and race back for more. The first to transfer all their berries was the winner. (By the way, if you haven't seen this tip yet floating all over Pinterest, these automotive drip pans make great magnetic boards, and they're super cheap. I got mine at Wal-Mart for under 10 bucks and it's huge!)

Peanut did this berry shadow match page over, and over, and over again. For some reason she just LOVED this activity. It's funny the things they enjoy that you just don't expect.

This berry patterning page can be found with all the other printables.

We pretended these pom-poms were berries we had picked and Peanut had to sort the big berries into the big pail, and the little berries into the little pail.

I later looked over and saw Penny ever so carefully scooping and transferring the pom-poms from one pail to another with a spoon. :)

I specifically chose this book for this particular week because in our co-op, the kids picked berries, smashed them, and made them into raspberry jam.

I actually realized this evening that we completely forgot to decorate our book cut-out this week. I guess we'll be doing that tomorrow.

I somehow missed taking pictures of them playing the Blueberry Picking Game I made up, but you can find it here with the other printables along with instructions on how to play. We also watched the telling of this story on youtube. You can find the clip here.

Here are a few more links with Blueberries For Sal related ideas:

Teach Preschool has a really fun blueberry pie craft.

Lightning Bug Literacy has some fun ideas as well.

Jolanthe at Homeschool Creations has created (as always) a fantastic set of printables for this book.

Linking To: