Monsters!

I'm no artist, but this was a fun and silly glue activity for Kenna and I.  I drew heads in different shapes, added bodies and arms.  Kenna told me what shape mouths and noses to draw.  Then I gave her a bowl og googly eyes and a bottle of glue.  I told her mpnsters can have lots of eyes! 

Monster matching:  Got these erasers at the Dollar Tree. I lined up matches on our dry erase board, and Kenna used a marker to draw lines between each match.

Sorry- camera died and I resorted to my cell phone...  After we played it this way a few times, I added a twist. I lined up erasers on one side only, and drew squiggly lines to the other side. Then she had to follow the lines and put the correct matching eraser at the end of each line. (does that make any sense?) It was fun!

And of course we made Frankenstein's Monster! I found a tutorial online and we whipped one up with a toilet paper roll, a do-a-dot marker, and some googly eyes.  We looked at pictures of him online,and we spotted some other decor in the house that features Dr. Frankenstein's Monster!  :)

I have a few more montster activities planned before Halloween gets here, so be on the lookout! It's my favorite holiday! (You should see my house, all decorated and scary-like. I have more rubbermaid bins of Halloween decor than I do of Christmas. And that is saying a LOT. )

Ocean week!!

Our family spent a week at the beach! I know it is a little late in the season, but eventually you'll be looking for ocean activities, so here they are. Here are some of the fun things we did on our awesome family vacation. I packed a HUGE tub of activities for Kenna and her cousins, since I figured a few rainy days or long afternoons would need some indoor fun. I wanted to mainly focus our work on ocean animals, but brought a few off-theme items as well. I actually brought a lot more stuff than we completed (cause the beach and the private pool took up most of our time!), so I think I'll sort the rest of the activities back into our letter of the week files i.e. stuff on whales can go in W, and pull them out as we go.


Painting- the girls and I went and sat on the beach and observed the sunset.  It was fabulous!  Then we came in to paint our own sunsets. The whole concept of using colors from the sunset to replicate what they saw may have been a bit over their heads, but they really got into it! Watercolors were our medium of choice, but I forgot watercolor paper so we just used plain paper. The art came out great.


Shell Matching- we went on a nature walk along the shore and picked up some unique shells. The girls loved walking and chasing the waves. They liked finding really big shells. Kenna decided she only liked white shells, and rejected every colored shell I offered her.

When we got back to the beach house, Aunt Kristen helped by tracing 6 of the shells onto index cards. Instant matching game! (since the girls are young, I made sure the shells were really different. If they were older, I would have tried to trick them with more similar shaped shells.)

Kenna got the chance to practice taking turns with someone besides me. She had a great time with this game, and we brought it out several times during the week.

I'm a South Floridian at heart, so finding these clam/mussel/oyster? shells was really exciting! We don't have these on our beach! :)

 It's a clam.  Go with it.
We made blue playdoh to do some ocean activities. It's my favorite recipe. I'll post about it later. On this day, I gave them googly eyes and told them to make some ocean animals.  As we got started, Aunt Kristen found some skewers in a drawer and we added them to the fun. (we chopped off the really sharp points first.)

The skewers, the googly eyes and the blue playdoh was very inspiring. They got to work right away making all kinds of interesting creatures!

 It's a narwhale.  Go with it!

A school of fish!

After I finish unpacking, I'll post some more of our ocean week activities. I'm exhausted!

Babyfood jar lid memory game

I pulled out our fun memory game again this week, and we have had so much fun with it! A few months ago, when we first made it, Kenna was only able to play successfully if there were 3 matches out at a time. Now, at 31 months old, she is able to play with all of the game pieces- 8 matches at a time!

We play by standard Memory rules, and it is great practice taking turns, only flipping TWO at a time, and keeping the lids in place when you flip them back over. Whew- that's a lot of hard rules for a toddler! The only rule of the game we don't follow yet is this: if you make a match, you go again. I think that would screw up all of our practice with taking turns. Plus, I could run the board pretty quickly with only 8 matches! ;)

How I made it: I got the printables from HomemadeByJill,though there are tons of memory game ideas all over the blogosphere these days. Wepainted the jar lids one rainy afternoon. Kenna did most of the painting work. I didn't prime first, and I didn't acryllic seal afterwards (read: lazy). So the paint is scraping off the lids, but it doesn't bother us! I let Kenna glue the pictures down with white school glue, and unfortunately some of the ink ran, so a few pictures are blurred. Again, we don't care! (I ended up making another set to give as a birthday gift, and with spraypaint for the lids, and less glue for the pictures, and a bit more attention to detail- and they came out awesome!)