Merry Christmas!

graphic From the Pond 

I would like to wish my family and friends Merry Christmas. We love you and miss you all terribly. I pray that your holidays are family filled. Love you guys! Thanks for everything.

Where is my Baby?

It has been a few months since Kaleb's last hair cut. There are many reasons for this but it was finally driving me nuts that he had to look through his bangs so he could see. I talked my husband into taking him for a haircut with the promises that he would NOT bring him back with his head shaved.

Kaleb left as a baby....

and returned a little boy.

Where did my baby go?

Christmas Dance

Isn't she beautiful? She danced her night away. Thank you Aunt MJ for the dress, it was awesome. She was the prettiest girl at the dance.

Sonlight Week?

This week hasn't really gone as expected. After a terrible week of illness, we picked up my DS from the airport and everything else pretty much went to the wayside. No school this week, I decided to take the week off and enjoy having my older son here. We have been baking cookies, making Christmas ornaments, wrapping presents. I feel kinda guilty but I have let it go. I think we can afford to enjoy a week off.

J making her famous reindeer cookie. Everyone in the house fought over this one reindeer cookie. I only made one since it is so big. In the end, I think J won.

Kaleb decorated cookies for the first time. He is a minimalist, just a few chips or sprinkles. I believe he ate more than he decorated.

I brought out the pony beads and pipe cleaners for an easy Christmas project. We made candy canes, wreaths, snowflakes.

I gave Kaleb a dish of beads and let him work on his own ornament.

He really just wanted to play with the beads.

But he did string some beads onto a pipe cleaner. Well, that is pretty much the extent of our schooling this week. We just did fun stuff and stayed up late watching Christmas movies. It was nice to be able to take the week off and recoup. Hope your week has been stress free.

Tot Tuesday

I gave Kaleb J's lego bin. I don't normally let him have this bin for obvious reasons. Today, he kept very busy....scooping and pouring all of the legos into little containers and such. Who needs rice?

He found a sand shovel and put it to good use.

Legos - a great toy as long as you don't step on them! 

Christmas Week

Our week was full of santa, elves, trees, and reindeer. We had fun while reviewing different concepts. Here are some of the activities we worked on.

Sunday: It was a yucky Sunday day and the kids wanted something fun to do. I had recently found a blog post where someone made a Christmas play mat from an old shower curtain. (sorry can't find the link) But then I found this cute Christmas printable play mat from Mr. Printables that the kids could color and use for their cars and such. It is a hefty file to print out, 21 pages but I used the fast draft setting on my printer.

I taped it together and we spent a couple of hours coloring the mat. It is super cute and it can be used for a Christmas play mat. J is asking me to make houses to complete the village.

Monday: Our theme for the day was Santa.

J practiced reindeer counting by 5's with this free printable that I found at Kindergarten Faith.

J worked on grouping tens and tallies with the free printable I found at Teaching Fabulous Firsties.

J practiced her syllables with a cute Christmas printable that I found at Primary Reading Party.

J has been asking about writing a letter to Santa. This is the first year she has asked this, so I found a free fill-in letter that we worked on from A Modern Teacher.

We read about St. Nicholas and J learned a new sight word - here- by stamping it in the interactive sight word reader that I found at Kinder Craze. For lunch, we watched St. Nicholas Veggie Tales for lunch.

Tuesday: it was candy cane day.

J worked some candy cane math problems with cane counters. This would have been a great hands on experience if we had real candy canes but they aren't available here. So we used the candy cane clipart as counters. I found this printable from Lil Country Kindergarten.

We worked with our sight words and made candy cane words. I had her read a line of sight words then create one of the words she read using the candy cane letter pieces. I found this printable from Karen Langdon's TPT shop.

Our art project was fingerprint candy cane ornaments for the tree but J did not want to get her hands dirty. So she just painted the candy canes.

Wednesday: was reindeer day.

J and I worked on a easy reader named Who Do You See? by 3 Dinosaurs. It is based on Brown Bear by Eric Carle. It has all of the names of the reindeer including Rudolph.

J then made a reindeer paper garland. On each of the reindeer, she wrote their names using the easy reader as a guide.

Sorry for the washed out picture, but these turned out cute. This idea was found at Easy Child Crafts.

Our last reindeer craft was a reindeer cone with fuzzy antlers. We stuck these on our tree.  The idea came from Education.

The rest of the week was spent trying to fight off whatever germs were in our bodies - yuck! We had a terrible time of it and we are still trying to recoup.

Sonlight Week 14

Sonlight week 14 has brought us the end of the Dolphin Adventures series,

We read about Solomon and learned about godly charateristics in bible.

Our mystery letter, after a two week vacations, was the letter C. J is working on her C page.

C is for cow, J is learning to draw a cow.

J has two new sight words - do and what. She is working on a mini book for the sight word do.

J is working on her -ig word family.

J working on her handwriting. Kaleb not too far behind.

J practicing her reading. She is working really hard at reading.

We were doing really well until sickness hit our house. I am afraid it was all downhill after that. Kaleb had some virus/stomach thing and needed his mommy. So we moved school downstairs and worked in between/around the baby. Pictures were limited - sorry. I was impressed with J's flexibility - she was working on math in the kitchen, we were reading in the living room, Explode the Code on the table. We moved about the house and she was okay with it. Kaleb's sickness spread like wildfire among us. We ended taking the rest of the week off to recoup. May your week be sickness free.

Escapee

There aren't many words that are needed to describe this....Look what my tot can do now!

Yay, me!

The Christmas Cafe

 A couple of years ago, I was fortunate to find a Little Tikes kitchen here for a decent price. It was used and definitely loved, missing a few things but it was great for our apartment. After a while, though, playthings tend to get forgotten or little used but I decided to change that. I stocked our play kitchen with felt sweets that I had either found or bought from Ikea. I included the gingerbread man cookies that I made for my tot bag and some snowman ornaments that never made it to the tree. I added a fake candle, a tablecloth, pipe cleaner candy canes, table and our Christmas Cafe was born.

We made a sign and set our table for business. J was the owner and she was all too willing to serve us. I helped her develop a picture representation of the menu so she could remember what we ordered correctly.

J is serving our drinks with a smile. The Christmas Cafe only serves treats with coffee, hot chocolate, and tea.

Kaleb loves the "sugar" from the sugar bowl.

The gingerbread cookies were popular as well. We dipped them in our pretend hot chocolate.

They played at this all week. Anyone who visited the house just had to pay a visit to the Christmas Cafe. This was a great way to breathe new life into a toy that has otherwise been somewhat forgotten. We definitely had fun. If you are ever in town, please join us at the Christmas Cafe.

Tot Tuesday

One minute he was sitting at the table, coloring with markers on a huge piece of paper.....then next minute he was gone. Where did he go? He took a purple marker and disappeared. I didn't know he had the marker, I thought he was playing. Well, he WAS playing, just not like I expected.

The purple monster...this is the smile he gave me. I have a new artist in the family!

You gotta love this face. I am glad this was washable marker and not permanent. That would have been a mess! Kaleb keeps me on my toes!

Snowmen Week

Another weeks of Christmas fun and our topic was snowmen/snow. We worked all week on some fun snow activities.

I pulled all of the books that I had with the subject of snow in them. Most of them are not Christmas books but they are all good books. These are the books we read throughout the week.

I found a simple measuring exercise from . J used her inter locking cubes to measure each snowman and wrote the measurement on the worksheet. She then colored and cut out each snowman for a snowman family to hang up in her room.

J worked on a easy reader - Making a Snowman. She had to cut out the elements of the book and add them to the pages.

I found some cheap plastic cups and made simple snowmen which I programed her sight words on the back. We then played a game using the snowmen cups.

J used the felt snowballs that I made a long time ago and knocked down the tower of cups. She then had to read each cup correctly to keep the snowman. If she didn't read it correctly, it went back into the pile. Kaleb had to join in the knocking down fun. These cups are so cheaply made that they probably will only last the week. But it was fun and good sight word practice. J kept begging to play more.

I made a batch of snow dough but I was really disappointed with the outcome. I am not sure if it was because the ingredients were different here but it just didn't make as much as I thought and it was extremely messy. We had to move to the balcony and when we were done, we had to change our clothes. The recipe came from the Imagination Tree.

J made a name snowman. Kaleb made one as well. I let him color it with markers and he had a ball.

We read about mittens and made a mitten shaped book. I love making little books, we have a whole basket full of little books that we read over and over again.

J made a silly snowman ornament (pattern link below). These turned out cute and were simple to make. The idea and template came from How Stuff Works.

J also made a silly snowman for our front door. We just used three mini paper plates, some paper, and pipe cleaners. This was a variation from I Heart Crafty Things.

I think my favorite snowman craft was turning our fridge into a snowman. This was fun to make. We just used construction paper and sticky tack. It is really cute. The idea for the snowman fridge came from Adventures at Home with Mum.

J's Pollock version of a snowman which turned out cute. My house is finally getting decorated for the holidays with all of these art projects that we have been doing. It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

J practiced her math using marshmallows. We worked on snowman math and she wrote her own addition problems then she ate the snack.

We also played a snowman game from Education. It was an easy game to put together, with a paper die and parts of snowmen cards. The object of the game was to have the most completed snowmen when the cards were gone.

Lastly, we had snowmen pancakes for dinner one night and a snowman ice cream dessert, no pics though. We are all snowmaned out. Next week, we start our generic Christmas week which we will cover reindeer, Santa, candy canes, you name it. Hope your week isn't too frosty (ha ha, sorry for the pun).


Links

worldsapart my pinterest board of snowmen activities, tons of stuff here.

We Give Books a link for online snowman books. We give books is a free site that you join and for every book you read, it donates a book.

We Give Books a link for snow based books including one from Jan Brett - The Three Snow Bears.

PreKinders has a snow play dough mat free printable.

Education has a great printable snowman family that your child can dress and color. J just begged me to print it out so she could play with it.