Mini-Roller painting!

After our third rainy day in a row, Kenna (28 months old) and I were starting to get a little stir-crazy. We hit the dollar store for some inexpensive fun, and came out with some real treasures! I'll share some of the other things we got later, but for now let's talk about the mini-roller! It is awesome.

A piece of paper, a large dish to pour the paint into, and voila!! Instant toddler fun! If you have an adventurous toddler, brace yourself for paint everywhere- I can see where it would be hard for a normal 2 year old to restrain themselves once you get that rolly tool in their little hands! (I have an abnormal toddler who follows directions and hates to get paint anywhere but the paper. Be jealous.)

The foam roller created a really interesting texture on the paper. We painted three different pieces of paper (next time I'll pull out our giant ROLL of paper and let her paint large-scale!). I wasn't really up for that today, and I also wasn't up for more than one color paint. That didn't matter at ALL to Kenna... she LOVED this foam roller!
Make sure you have a large enough dish to adequately apply paint to the roller... I used a glass pyrex dish, but could have done with something larger.

Birthday Celebration for Quinn

Kenna is two, and everyone has been asking us if Kenna is ready for the baby. "I don't know" is my most honest response. She's two. Does she want a newborn in the house? Not likely. Is she gonna fake it? ha.

Some of the ways we tried to prepare kenna for the new baby was to explain things, like:
*she was going to be a big sister
*baby Quinn was going to come out of mommy's tummy
*Babies cry a lot
...and on and on.

She heard all that, but what did really Kenna care about? Presents. And cake. It is a BIRTHDAY, afterall. "Are you excited about the baby, Kenna?" "YES, we'll get cake. And pwesents." (She announced that the "pwesents" were to be shoes, but that's another subject...)

SOooo, Quinn was born on Father's Day, and Kenna had "pwesents" to open from Quinn, and "pwesents" to give to Quinn. She was pleased about that, but was FURIOUS that a cake hadn't magically appeared alongside the squalling newborn at 6pm. "Quinn needs cake. With her name. I eat it. Can we eat it now??" ( I know, I know. Why didn't I buy a cake and have it lurking in the fridge? Well, I did... but my baby was 8 days late. That cake had long-since disappeared into a preggo lady's belly by time she was actually born.)

The next morning found Bill at Walmart, instructed to fetch a cake that had Quinn's name on it, or else. After 30 minutes of searching for anyone, ANYONE who was "qualified" to write on a sheet cake with icing, Bill concluded that this person did not exist- so, in an act of desperation,he grabbed a sheet cake and a tube of pink icing and headed back home. My only indication that something had gone wrong at Wally World was the near-panicky shout I heard from the kitchen, "How many N's does Quinnlyn have??"

This, my friends, is my handy husband's masterpiece, done out of love for a cranky toddler and her new baby sister. Why yes, it does say,

"Happy Birthday 0th Quinnlyn."

Let me fill you in on this sweet conversation:

Mommy (in her most patient voice): "Look Kenna, it's Quinn's cake. Can you see her name? Isn't that special! Hooray for cake, just like you asked for. Let's help Quinn blow out her candle."

Kenna (in her whiniest voice):"I wanted purple icing. Make Quinn stop crying. I don't want to blow out the candles.I don't like this cake."

Sigh.

Happy 0th birthday, sweet Quinn. Welcome to the world. You were worth the wait.

lowercase b

BLUE starts with b!!!

Lowercase "b" is for blue!!! We painted with blue paint, and talked about our favorite b words. (kenna's are bunny, book, butterfly, and her friend Brenna.) Daddy and Kenna had already "read" her new mail cards and colored on them a bit first thing this morning, so she was excited about more B words when it was time to sit down at the table.

While the blue paint dried, I drew a cute butterfly and let kenna cut it out (Scissors are the highlight of her day!!) Then I pulled out the watercolors and she went to town. She was quite through with blue, though, and this butterfly ended up mostly red.

On to our Tot Trays. Capital Letter matching (worksheet from coah- here's her whole B unit) and our letter tiles. We also did lowercase matching, but those are MUCH harder for Kenna(read: super-frustrating. Therefore, no time for pics- I was busy coaxing her to try and match, instead of throwing the tiles on the floor.)

Tot Tray 2 was sorting B for Buttons. We did this after lunch and before nap. I provided our little sorting tray, cards that spelled out the colors (and were also colored) plus one button on each side. B for Blue and a nice contrasting yellow are the only button choices in her jar. (maybe later in the year I'll have three colors in the jar, but ask that only two colors be sorted... oh the challenge!) I also provided tongs, but she chose not to use them. She diligently sorted the buttons by color, and also found a lot of joy in lining the buttons up around the perimeter of the tray. (Then she wanted to sort by shape like we did yesterday, and I pulled out her muffin tin. I love when she asks for more "learning"!)

Tot tray 3 was sequencing butterflies numbered 1-10. We had a blast with this, and I forgot to grab pictures. We just laid them out in a huge line across the floor. I had planned to let her clip mini-clothespins to each butterfly to represent each number, but just finding the numbers and lining them up was joyful and fun. Isn't it wonderful to be flexible!?

The Letter B

B is for butterflies and beans! This week is our second week of summer, and we're working our way through the alphabet. I wanted to share some of the highlights of our crafts and activities.

Toddler learning is so much fun! Our capital letter B Collage craft was a hit! First we stamped the letter B all over the place on the outline of a B that I drew, and then we got to work gluing.

I gave Kenna a foam brush and some watery glue and let her get to work. The end result was a bit messier than I anticipated, since the ink from the stamp pad sort of ran all over the place, and the dye from the butterflies we made ran everywhere, and the beans were too small for her to "paint" with glue so she ended up painting her entire hand. Lots of mommy lessons learned today. :) Also, about half-way through she decided "sprinkling" (her word) the beans over the paper was a good idea, but there was no glue on the paper so they wouldn't stick... seriously infuriating my toddler.

Beading and Bracelets!

Amusingly, at 2 years old my child LOVES to string bracelets! We use pipe cleaners and little pony beads. We actually did blue and brown beads today on a blue pipe cleaner, with the color words spelled out on cards for her to look at. (That pic was blurry, so use your imagination!)

Buttons!

Buttons start with B! I gave Kenna buttons to sort by shape(2 of each shape). She used a mini-muffin tin to do her sorting. She loves to sort, she loves to pile up her I buttons, and she loves to dump them back out. I presented this activity on the floor on a small hand towel, to keep her in a defined area. I also chose to only provide a few buttons, as opposed to our whole stash. Can you guess what may or may not have happened last time we tried this? LOL!

Dying Pasta

What could be more fun in the texture tub than rainbow pasta?? Helping mommy to dye it, of course!! All you need is some vinegar, some food coloring, butterfly pasta and some ziploc bags.

Kenna plunked some butterflies in a zip loc bag, chose a color, and I squirted 10 drops into a tablespoon of vinegar. We poured that into the bag, zipped it up, and Kenna went to town squishing the pasta around.


Do that five times, and you'll be tired of squishing and out of pasta! I ensured each baggie was thoroughly coated with color, and dumped them out onto wax paper to dry. I hand-stirred them every 15 minutes for a while, so they wouldn't stick together. The colors came out vibrant and really nice. It was easy, non-toxic and now we have gorgeous butterflies for our Texture tub, sorting, and craft projects.

I can't wait to dye some other shapes of pasta. I think we'll probably do some large tubes next- to use for beading/stringing necklaces. :) And then some rice for pouring. And then some wagon wheels... I'm so excited!!

The apple of my eye

Kenna is working on spelling her name, and identifying letters in general. I carried over our Apple theme by writing her name on these cute apple printouts (arg- can't remember where!) and scrambling them up on a mat on the floor. Kenna's job is to reorder them. (As you can see, I actually made two sets of apples- lowercase and uppercase... the lowercase k got mixed in with these. Oops!) We played with these all week. I am going to reprint them on cardstock and laminate them so that we have them to play with during other times of the year in different ways. I made a set of numbers with the apples as well. This activity was easy- pick "apples" (red pony beads) out of a bowl and put them on the cards. One "apple" on the 1, two apples on the 2, etc. I mixed in some white beads to make it more challenging. I could have also given her tongs to make it more fun, but I like watching her use that little pincher grip! I only give her three cards at a time. More than that is too overwhelming and I can guarantee there will be pony beads everywhere.
Today I just gave her all ten apple number cards and we put them in order. We only made it to seven before she lost interest. That's okay!


PomPoms glued to stickyback magnets (idea stolen from www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com), used with this A is for Apple printout from www.homeschoolcreations.com was what I gave Kenna while I fed Little Man. **Both of those websites have enough "letter of the week" activities to keep you busy for a whole month. :)

More pompom magnet fun.
We had a great week playing with, learning about and eating apples!!

Clothespin color matching

This is an awesome tool for matching colors, and a quick DIY project! I went to the hardware store, and picked two each of some paint chips from the paint department. This board is purple, yellow, green, pink and blue. ( A little girly, but not bad! Next one I make will be rainbow!)

I used a cereal box, cut a strip to the right size, and glued down one of each color paint chips. Then I cut and glued a strip of the matching paint chip to some regular-sized clothespins.
Tada! Easy, simple and fun! great for fine motor skills. I leave this game on the table in Kenna's room for when she wakes up from nap.

Kenna loves it, and is so good at the game now that she will purposefully "mess up" the colors so she can tell me how to fix it. LOVE it!

** I made a much harder version of this game without knowing it-I got a long paint chip that was actually 6 different shades of blue on one strip, and made matching clothespins for it. Those shades are pretty different in my eye, but it is WAY too hard for Kenna. That said, if you have an older preschooler- that might just be right up their alley!

A is for Alligator

So we've been focusing on apples and the letter Aa this week, but today we went wild and pulled out some Alligator activities! :) In our Kumon Let's Fold book, I found an alligator.That was super-fun. I love watching her little fingers crease the folds!

Our alligator turned into a frog when we folded it up. Magic!

We made alligator "Mail" and used ASL to sign alligator. We also sang Five Little Monkeys and SNAPPED those monkeys off the tree! We crawled on the ground like an alligator, and then we googled swamp to see where alligators live. While we were on the computer, we did the Letter A activities on www.StarFall.com.

After nap, we worked on the rest of our Kumon books.
We worked on Let's Color (not an alligator page, since we are going in order in that book).

Then we did Let's Cut- cut out a spider web- (Kenna's choice)

We also started Let's Trace- It was Animals at the zoo (hooray for letter A) but she got angry because her green crayon broke so we put it away for another day. Oh, and we would have done
Let's Sticker and Paste but we skipped it because our glue was in "time out" from some misuse earlier...

While I was making lunch, Kenna worked on this Alligator activity. All you need is this printout from www.homeschoolcreations.com (love this site! I borrow/ steal ideas from it all the time.) and some manipulatives. (Pom poms with magnets, glass floral marbles, or Do-A-Dot Markers are our go-to manipulatives.) We could have saved apple seeds for this activity, or cut some out of black foam. I gave her green floral marbles. I only provide enough manipulatives to exactly cover the missing spots, or it gets too overwhelming for my toddler. Sometimes I put them in a little bowl. Sometimes I give her tongs.

I don't have the time/money to laminate most of our activities, so I just put the worksheets in a sheet protector and lay it on a cookie sheet (great when you are need to contain rolling objects, or when you need magnets to stick).


Thursday is usually our Library Day, so we read all of our current books one last time (all focused on apples and gardening this week) and then get books for next week. This serves to keep our book selection fresh, and to allow me to start pre-teaching the next week's theme/letter over the weekend. At 2 years old, we only check out 5 books a week. That gives us lots of time to read each one multiple times. We have gabillions of books here at the house for free reading, so the books we get from the library are always theme based. (unless kenna grips a book tightly and declares "my love it!". :) Today we'll probably also find an Alligator book or two to reinforce our learning.

*I'd love to go to the library on Fridays, but that just doesn't work with our schedule, so Thursday it is!

Apple Activities

Supplies: Red, white, brown black and green paper. Scissors and glue stick.

Today we made an apple craft. We ate an apple, and inspected the core. We explored the color of the stem, the seeds, and the inside of apples.

On to the craft. We cut out a big red apple shape, and I had Kenna rip it in half, horizontally. (YAY! Ripping!)
Then I gave her a white rectangle and told her to riiip each side. (YAY! Ripping!)

We used a glue stick to glue the white core to the apple halves.
Then I let Kenna cut a brown rectangle for a stem, and I cut green leaves while she glued down black seeds. (We counted the seeds and she decided how many she wanted to use. We would have used the seeds from our actual snack apple, but my toddler declared them nasty and threw them in the trash. Sigh.)

Easy and fun craft! The ripping makes the apple look like it's been munched a bit. Plus, it's good for toddlers who aren't using scissors yet. :)

Pillowcase dress, take 1

My incredibly crafty husband went to Goodwill and bought a pillowcase. Then he made some bais tape and whipped up a pillowcase dress for Kenna! My job was to embellish, and since I recently found the YoYo love, I couldn't resist adding them to this sweet and simple dress.

Then I decided to make a matching hair clippie- with another yoyo of course! I even whipped out my button maker, and covered a button with a little of the pillowcase fabric. SO cute! :)

Lowercase A

Today we worked on the lowercase letter 'a'. I used the outline of a lowercase a for us to practice writing. I held her crayon with her and we wrote it about ten times. I put dots to show where to start and stop her crayon, but she wasn't in the mood for that today. We reviewed the uppercase A and looked at our artwork from yesterday.

We colored a lowercase "a"and Kenna showed off her amazing circular coloring skills.

We used a red crayon, but that's only because she was feeling cooperative. Don't feel irritated if your toddler insists on making your "red" apple blue. Kenna lost interest in coloring really quickly (she's really more into painting these days, but I wasn't up for it at 7am!) so we moved on to adding leaves. I had some green tissue paper on hand, so I quick cut out some leaves and she dotted a little glue for me. She recognized the scraps as leaves, and we signed "leaf" and "apple" and "red" and "A". I showed her a picture in our encyclopedia of an apple with a leaf and stem on it so she could see what we had recreated. ooohhhh...

Onto "mail". We made an apple card today, and in honor of the start of summer, I pulled out our NEW markers! I've never let Kenna use markers before, and I'm sure that by the time the summer (or week) is over she'll remind me why, but until then... marker fun has begun! I wrote "apple" on the front of the card with an illustration, and on the back of the card I wrote a capital and lowercase Aa.

Today we read The Apple Tree by Lynley Dodd, and learned how an apple grows. (It has a weird ending, but I really liked how it shows the stages an apple tree goes through.)

We also did sequencing:

I printed off some apples from filefolderfun.com onto cardstock. We spent quite a bit of time scrambling them up and then lining them up big to small. And small to big. And finding which one was bigger. FUN times. We also counted them and pretend cooked them in our kitchen. Two year olds have great imaginations!

The Letter A

A is for APPLE!!

Today is the first day of SUMMER vacation!! Kenna and I are starting off a new round of Letter of the Week, and this time, I've decided to post a few of our ideas. Kenna is 28 mos old now, and I am going to try and keep all activities geared towards 1-2 year olds. We also do themes each month, and I'll try to post some of those activities as well. (All the while keeping in mind that I am 39 weeks 2 days pregnant today, and also have a 9 month old son to keep track of!)

Introduce the letter:
We talked about the letter A and signed it. She's a whiz at signing her letters, so that was easy and confirmed that we both knew what we were talking about.


Writing:Using a letter A outline I printed, we practiced writing an A. Then we traced it a couple more times for fun. Then we traced it again. And again. I used dots to show her where to start and stop the crayon. I held her hand for about 5 attempts, and then it was on to the infamous" DO MYSELF."

Stamping: Next we stamped a capital A stamp all over an A that I drew with a Sharpie. (We also stamped all over the table, and our face, and our little brother...) I love those giant washable ink pads- I got mine for $5 each at Hobby Lobby, and they are perfect for little people! The A stamp is part of an alphabet stamp set I bought a million years ago on clearance.


Cutting: Scissor time! Kenna is a whiz at scissors now, so I let her cut out the A shape. She did a pretty good job, and I tried not to be a control freak about it. (Tape can fix anything, don't forget!)


Lastly, I gave her a bottle of glue and let her squeeeeeze glue all over the back of the A. (first time with this... normally I give her a small bowl with a puddle of watered-down glue to use with a paint brush.) We really glued that A down, smooshing the paper with fingers, hands and elbows. (Great motor skills at work here!)

Other activities:
We read 10 Apples up on Top by Dr. Suess after nap and shared a Red Delicious apple for snack.

We made it through our first Monday! First day of summer school was a success!

I am planning to buy a binder so that we can make an alphabet book this year and save all of our artwork. I'm thinking three ring notebook with clear page protectors. Any other ideas?

Garden Carrots

In April, Kenna and her Daddy planted lots and lots of seeds. They planted lettuce, radish, and carrots in a special raised bed that Kenna could take care of all on her own. She's been watering, weeding, and watching this little patch for many weeks! It has been really sweet to hear her talk about her vegetables growing, and the green leaves, and having to wait. And wait. And wait.
We've been eating lettuce for several weeks, and that has been exciting. She loves knowing we're "eating her garden". But today was super-special- today we picked our carrots!!

We have learned soo much about vegetables this month! How they grow,where they grow, all about seeds. We learned that carrots grow IN the dirt, and that you can only eat the orange part. She ate a carrot right there, out of the ground, and ended up sleeping with the carrot top. So sweet. She loves her garden! We're going to pick radishes this week, as well- but I bet she won't like those nearly as much. :) The rest of our garden went in a the beginning of May, and should be coming up soon- can't wait!