leaf rub and flower pressing

Fall is officially here and this week we did some fun fall activities.  For science the kids gathered leaves and drew their favorite find in their journal.  Their math activity for the week consisted of them counting and sorting their bag of leaves.  For some Friday fun we did a leaf rub and pressed the flowers that we used for our flower experiment a few weeks ago. 

Hannah working on her leaf rub

Abigail creating her leaf rub

placing the flowers inside the book

Letting go

I have always enjoyed doing crafts with the girls. I guess I first noticed my need to control when we were working on one of our Christmas crafts. They made wreaths out of paper plates, one of our favorite holiday crafts. Let me start by saving that at the beginning you have to "help" because they are not capable of doing it on their own. As we made our Christmas wreaths I noticed it really bothered me if a sticker was put on upside down or if the glitter didn't go where I thought it should go. So, not wanting to squash creativity, I tried to "guide" as they made their creations.

The new development at our house is... that the girls are now old enough to create on the own, that is right without Mama's help.

February brought the great holiday of Valentines and I love to make CUTE homemade Valentines to send to the grandparents and give to Daddy. In the past I have always done really cute pictures with their hand prints. I mean frame worthy not just fridge art. I take great pride in these crafts. So, you see my delima here. To help, guide, interject, suggest or not to help, guide, interject, or suggest. Tough choice for me! I took the high road, some of the time with a fake smile on my face, and let the girls do all the creating on the own.

They decided they wanted to start with a website that we use for "school" to make the card. They were asked to choose words to string together a necklace that would have a Valentine saying on it. Then after it was printed they were supposed to color it and trace the letters to sign the card. I will be really honest, it was hard for me to mail them, they were not as "pretty" as I like. So, sorry to the receivers if you were a little disappointed when you opened the envelopes. And also, I will work on Letting go!

F week

We just finished our "F" week. We had a Fun fun with school this week! Learned capital and lower case F, read Fall book and Frog books. I thought that Fish would be our theme but I found way more Frog books on my bookcase, so Mama made some changes. Our favorite book was, A Frog in the Bog, by Karma Wilson. * you can take a peek inside at http://www.amazon.com/

Besides being a really cute story it is also a counting book. So I used it for out Math activity yesterday and today. Here are some pictures of our activity really fun and the girls loved feeding their frog today after lunch. I am sure the frogs will be hungry for days :)

First step is to create frog puppet with opening in the mouth.

Puppets complete.




Then, I went online and clip art and found pics of all the bugs that Frog eats, roughly cute them out, and glued them to index cards so they would be more sturdy. I let them dry over night and then cut them out again. The bug making step was a little time consuming but worth it for the excitement my kids had.

Abigail counting her bugs.

Abigail counting and sorting her bugs. I found it very interesting that she sorted them. She did this all on her own with no direction from me. Her little brain at work, so neat to watch! :)

Hannah counting her bugs. She wanted to keep all of them in her hand until she laid them down. She laid them all down in one straight line. Another little precious little brain at work :)

Taking a break from counting to watch Sister feed her Frog. I was glad to see that Hannah did not change her method when she saw the way that Abigail was doing hers. Yeah for independent thinkers! :)

Hannah feeding her frog.

Abigail feeding her frog one of the 5 snails.

I am so glad that I get to watch them learn!! :)

Thank you card craft

It is official Abigail's thank you cards for her 4th birthday are finally finished!

Last year our theme was balloons so she colored the balloons on the front of the cards. This year I really thought that she was capable of more and wanted her to take part in the project. After some thought this idea came to me in a vision :)

1. I printed the cards, to go along with the theme, on the computer like all I always do. But instead of writing everything out I left blanks.




2. I then used clip art and found images for all the gifts that she received and other key words.




3. When it was time to assemble the cards, Abigail cut out the images and then used the glue stick to apply glue to empty lines and put the appropriate picture in the blank.




4. She then chose stickers to describe each friend and placed them in one blank.




5. When all finished she signed her name by gluing her cut out name to the bottom of the card.

We had fun and I think they turned out really cute! I hope you enjoy especially if you are expecting on in the mail :)

P.S. sorry now finished product will be posted yet. I don't want to ruin it for MeMe and MomMom whom I know read the blog. I will update pics later