Good Clean Fun

I have to admit, I feel kind of stupid for not having thought of this earlier.

Our kids LOVE washing dishes!  To the point where it's kind of a hazard sometimes because they'll move a chair to the sink and start throwing dishes in, glasses and knives included and run water to almost overflowing. 

Look at cute little Baby Micah washing dishes!!!!  I can't believe this kiddo is going to be 5 on Monday!

 Occasionally, we'd give the kids a separate bowl of soapy water to scrub stuff, but it never occurred to me to fill our water table with suds, until yesterday!

Oh man did they have fun! 

Liliana could have played in it for hours!  I cut her off eventually because we needed to eat but she asked right away when we could play in the "soaps" again.

 I used Johnson's Baby Wash to make the bubbles for two reasons.  1-  It's tearfree.  2-  I had done a couponing deal on it when I was pregnant with Micah...27 cents a bottle at Target!  What a deal, right!?!?!  Plus I'll be having more kids, so I probably need like 30 bottles or something, right?!?!  Wrong!  We went through maybe 3 or 4 bottles and the rest are being used to make homemade bubble solution or being donated to crisis nursery centers. 

 

If you don't have a water table, you can easily do this same activity by filling any old Rubbermaid tub or kiddie pool with soapy water.  We used an attachment on the hose to shoot the water really fast into the tub to get the foamy effect.

Smores Pudding Parfait

I'm on an anti-boxed food campaign right now.  I buy things like pudding mixes, thinking we'll make it and then they sit in our cabinet for months on end until I make it out of obligation or get rid of it or even worse, move it thinking we'll eat it at our new house.  Since I have the time to cook from scratch, it's generally healthier, and a lot of times cheaper- we've been a lot of that.

This homemade pudding recipe is almost just as easy as the boxed kind and my guess is you've got everything in your cabinets for it already.

Homemade Chocolate Pudding

Mix together in a large microwave safe bowl (I used a 4 cup Pyrex glass measuring cup).

1/2 cup white sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Pinch salt

Whisk in:

 2 cups milk

Microwave 3 minutes.  Stir.  Microwave 2-4 additional minutes, one minute at a time until thick and glossy.

Pour in to parfait glasses, cover with saran wrap and refrigerate until cool.  To make it "smores style," when pouring into the parfait glasses, pour a little bit in, then put a big marshmallow in and then pour the rest of the hot pudding mix in.  Top with graham crackers right before serving and serve warm.  The marshmallow will get all gooey and delicious!

Easy, scrumptious, and Liliana approved!

Letter/Sight Word Identification Worksheets

We've been working on the letter A with Liliana.  And by working on, I mean we did the Great ABC Hunt, and we've been pointing it out more often...other than that we've been shoving her in front of the television while we catch up on chores and summer reading.  ;-)  In any case, I made this rockin' worksheet for her to help practice too!  (Let me know if the worksheet thing doesn't work as I've never tried uploading PDFs before, so I can email it to you if you'd like it.)

A Worksheet

 

Worksheets, generally speaking, are boring, so this isn't any plain old worksheet.  She got to use Bingo dabbers to make a circle on the letter A.  Instantly more fun because there was a mess factor involved.

(Have I mentioned how much we love Auntie Jenna???)  Micah couldn't possibly be left out, but letter identification is way too easy.  So I had him find all the words that ended with -at instead and mark them with the dabber.

Here's a copy of his worksheet.

AT Worksheet






Different sizes and different fonts to make it a little more tricky!  They both did GREAT!  Next week, we're going to do O's for Liliana, because she's started pointing them out on her own and -it words for Micah.


This has nothing to do with anything but it's waayyyyyyyyy too cute to not share!

Hope you're all enjoying the last few weeks of summer!!! 

The Great ABC Hunt

A few months ago, someone was playing with Liliana and asked her what color the toy she had was. She went through about 10 colors before the person finally told her. I freaked out a bit. WHY ON EARTH DOESN'T MY TWO YEAR OLD KNOW HER COLORS!?!?!? Then I realized...I never actually taught them to her. Hmmm.... second child maybe?!?! It took just a couple of days of pointing out colors as we played and she had them down flat.

And now we're onto ABCs. Micah knew his ABCs by this point, but Liliana was not interested in sitting and doing learning worksheets or anything and I refuse to try to push something on her because learning should be fun.

So enter the great ABC hunt!

I found a bunch of bulletin board letters at a rummage sale, all for $3!!! I decided to start with A because I thought it would be easy for her to recognize, not because it was at the beginning of the alphabet. I taped the letters up all over the house, half of them were A's and the other half were other letters. I gave her an Easter basket and she went around collecting just the A's. The other letters she gave to Micah.

It was good for her to try to recognize A's in different sizes, colors, and fonts! She did Great!!! She had a lot of fun and now she points out A's all over the place!

If you don't have cut out letters, you could easily do this same game with letters written on post it notes or scrap paper. If you have older kids you could do this with sight words. Like, find all the words that end in -at.

A special reading nook

I LOVE to read! There is nothing like settling in with a great book and being brought away into another time or place. I've always wanted to encourage a passion for reading in our children and have had baskets with books throughout the house so there is always one nearby when the mood strikes.

Our new house has all kinds of fabulous nooks and crannies...it's a hide and seek dream! And I decided to turn one of those nooks into a special reading spot for the kids.

Step 1- Buy a couple touch lights...the LED ones were 2 for $4 at Wal-Mart and I was able to hang them up myself easily.

Step 2- Throw in a couple pillows, lovies or blankets to make it more cozy. I love that their nook has doors on it for privacy, but you could easily add a curtain too.

Step 3- Add books.

Done! It took me all of 2 minutes to give them a quiet spot of their own in which their love of reading can grow.

The long awaited Family Organizing Center

Warning- this post is not for everyone! Not that any of my posts are, but many of you may think that it's extreme to dedicate an entire wall to organizing your family's schedules/paperwork. I could probably use another three walls. :-) An entire family organizing room. Can you even imagine!?! Sigh.....Okay, snapping out of it.

Ta-da.....

Yes, it's not all hanging entirely straight and yes it's driving me crazy too. :-)

The magnetic calendars you'll recognize from here.

Other features of our organizing center include:

•Two cutesy dry erase To-Do lists, one for me and one for Jeremy. These are made by taking an old picture frame, spray painting it, scrapbooking a cute paper to go inside, and writing on the glass with a regular dry erase marker.

•A "mailbox" folder holder for each of our family members. I originally looked for these in the store, but all I could find were plain ugly clear ones and it was like $25 for three of them...and we needed four. Jeremy and I made all of these out of one $10 sheet of particle board and two 99 cent bottles of paint. Plus we have enough of the particle board left to make an awesome mailbox like this for Liliana for Christmas.

By the way, Micah is very disheartened that he has not gotten any mail in his "mailbox." When I get the mail from outside I divvy it up and usually it's all for mommy and daddy. During the school year, he'll put his folder in here but right now, he's been stuffing his bath towel inside because it drives him crazy that it's empty. And my attempts at giving him pretend mail for in there hasn't worked. So if you'd like to mail the kiddo something, it'd be much appreciated. Message me for our new address.

•A chore chart- this isn't something I was planning on putting up. I was trying to avoid the whole laminated-clip-art-looks-like-little-kids-live-here thing. But Micah insisted that he could not possibly help with chores without his chore chart hanging there. I'm hoping to redo this into a cuter something or other eventually.

•A menu board- done in the same style as the To-Do lists. My mom joked that most people who just planned out a menu for the week would consider themselves organized. I will say that we definitely don't adhere to it as much as I'd like to, but usually we end up making all of the meals, just mixing up the order.

•And finally, a little holder thing that has the pieces for the magnetic calendar and some pens, tape, etc. so I can fill out any forms I need to from school and put it right back into Micah's folder. Funny story- I was so excited to find this awesome holder thing at Goodwill for only $3! Score! Then a week later I saw it at Ikea for $2 new. Whoops!

So there you have it. We're officially organized. I will say that the thing we're enjoying the most is probably the To-Do lists. I keep finding little things throughout the day that I need to remember to work on when we get a chance. It's great to jot them down and put them out of mind for the moment. And Jeremy seems to work really well when he has a list of what he needs to do. Not all husbands do well with that, but he appreciates knowing exactly what I need of him and the satisfaction of being able to cross it off the list when finished.

Obstacle Course!

This is a GREAT activity to do on long snowy winter days stuck inside the house, and it turns out it works for long way-too-hot summer days stuck inside the house too!

Grab anything and everything you can use to do something physical with...(think hula hoops, jump ropes, masking tape put on the floor in a line, folding chairs with a blanket draped across them to make a tunnel, couch cushions, brooms held sideways as a limbo stick, you get the idea).

Line them up in any order. If you don't have a great big space, you can make the course run throughout your house, in different rooms and down hallways.

Show your kids what to do...hop off the kitchen chair, do a somersault to the couch cushions, hop on one leg onto each couch cushion, crawl under the blanket tunnel, do a silly dance and tip toe along the masking tape line. Keep it short at first and then you can add things on as they get bored.

After they've played for awhile, let them rearrange and come up with their own course. They'll love being the boss! Liliana's involved swinging while singing.

We are very blessed to have a large space with lots of large motor type toys for this kind of thing...we have a mini trampoline with bar, cube climber with slide, crawl through tunnel, swing and gymnastic rings in our basement. Liliana is a VERY physical child and plays with those types of toys more than anything else, but you can improvise with this idea with anything you have in your house. Creating the course is half the fun!

Check out Micah showing off his mad gymnastics skills...

This is also a fun thing to do outside and you could even incorporate water into some of the activities to cool off!