|
|
We marked the beginning of the Christmas season by putting up our Christmas tree and making a paper chain. I originally intended the chain to be long enough to go around our tree, but the kids lost interest. We embellished it a little with our heart-shaped hole punch. We only own this one hole punch, but if you own more I’m sure you could ,ake all sorts of fun designs. We’ll probably add on to our chain as the days go by.
There are plenty of educational concepts you can build into making paper chains: counting, pattern recognition and sequencing, fine motor skills, colors, textures, measuring how many links tall people or objects are…
Still looking for an advent calendar for your child? Check out this free coloring advent calendar from Activity Village!
I found this Debbie Mumm fleece remnant at my local fabric store and turned it into warm pants for my little girls using some existing pants as patterns:
I cut Emma’s out on the fold so that I had one less seam to sew (the outer leg seam) and to keep more of the pattern intact (I wasn’t trying to match the pattern along seam lines).
I have a few more remnants I bought on the same shopping trip that I plan to do the same thing with. I’ll make some for Johnny, too, out of less girly fabric. =)
Today I am thankful for family, health, a warm home, good friends, and my husband’s job. And for these wild turkeys, which entertain my children by wandering through our yard from time to time.
Looking for crafts? Here are a few favorites of mine:
Thank you to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post! I enjoyed reading about what works in your homes, and I’ll be saving many of your tips for future use in our home – especially since what works in our house one day does not always work the next.
Team Mom recently sent us one of the new K’NEX Sesame Street Neighborhood Collection Building Sets to review. We were sent the Police Station Building Set, and Johnny in particular has enjoyed playing with it. He was very excited to see the Elmo character, and he now calls this his “Memo” toy.
Our set came with a good number of pieces, which Johnny loves to use to build towers. The blocks are compatible with Duplo blocks, which made me happy since we have a bunch of those. The set we were given to review came with an activity sheet, including step-by-step instructions. Emma enjoyed following these instructions, and I think they are a nice stepping stone to the sometimes complex instruction sheets that come with construction sets for older children. I also liked that the activity sheet included a variety of things to build and ideas of different ways to use the set. The recommended age range for this set is 2-5 years, and I think these sets do have the potential to engage most children within that age range.
K’NEX is holding a video building contest, and you have until December 7th to enter. The top ten videos will be featured on their website, and the winning video will receive $1,000 worth of K’NEX toys! Go here for details.
This was our first time playing with a K’NEX product – do you have any that you enjoy, or do you remember playing with K’NEX as a child?
Every once in a while, somebody asks how I do what I do with three young children. Here’s an attempt at an answer:
- You don’t see what I don’t do. I rarely cook meals that get more than one pan dirty (we eat lots of soups and casseroles), my house is never spotless, and I don’t do many academic activities with my children. I very rarely go to a store of any sort more than once a week.
- I’m a pretty mellow mom. Not a personality trait I would have given myself before children.
- I was raised by an very mellow mother, and she is the single largest influence on me when it comes to deciding how to parent my children.
- My mother once told me that, in her experience, if she spent a couple hours with her young children in the morning focusing on them, she got some time when she could do what she wanted in the afternoon with few interruptions because the children would play together cheerfully. Best advice I’ve ever received.
- I have more than one child. They play together for hours without expecting me to entertain them.
- My children play together really well. This is in large part due to their personalities and the fact that they are close in age, but I also refuse to tolerate fighting. Toys that get fought over get given away to children who want toys enough to not fight over them. Same goes for toys that don’t get picked up. Each child does get a few toys that are “their” toys that they are not expected to share unless they want to.
- We have tile floors everywhere in the house except for the bedrooms and playroom/family room. This makes crafty messes easy to clean up.
- I find that my children are less likely to start dumping out toys just for the sake of dumping out toys if they have spent some time doing something creative earlier in the day.
- I rarely turn on the TV to entertain my children, although there are times when I am very grateful for its existence. This means that I need to find other ways to engage them so I can get stuff done. Craft activities work very well.
- I like crafts and my kids do too. Both Emma and Johnny are happily entertained by a few sheets of paper and markers/crayons/pens.
- Emma never draws on things she isn’t supposed to – except for herself (and sometimes Johnny). Johnny only does when he’s in a particularly bad mood.
- I don’t worry about making “pretty” crafts with my kids. For young children like mine, I feel like it’s all about the experience of making something, not the end result.
- I don’t schedule crafts or activities. I’ve tried that, and in our house it doesn’t work very well. Instead, I keep an ongoing list of ideas of things I want to try or make and then pick one based on our collective household mood on a given day.
- I’m a pragmatist, not a perfectionist.
- I stay away from crafts that require a lot of prep, and work the cleanup factor into the equation when I’m deciding whether or not to try an activity. I don’t mind uncooked rice because it’s easy to clean up, but you won’t find glitter in my house because it sticks. To everything. Maybe when the kids are a little older…
- We save the messiest activities for when Daddy is out of town, because I tend to clean those up completely only after the kids are in bed for the night.
- I have a HUGE support network: the best husband ever, nine siblings, two parents, all four grandparents, my husband’s three surviving grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, and some fantastic friends. Since these people are spread across several time zones, there’s always someone I can call, and all are sources of inspiration. Plus, I have blogland, where people come up with fantastic ideas of things to make and do and comments brighten gloomy days.
What are your tips and tricks for doing what you do?
The CSN Toys and Games Online store is offering 20% off all of their The Young Scientists Club brand science kits, including the award-winning Magic School Bus Collection, from Monday (11/23) through one week from Tuesday (12/1). Just enter discount code YSC20 at checkout. These kits cover a wide range of topics, from physics and biology to chemistry and ecology. The kits are designed for children aged 5 and up (check individual kits for recommended age ranges). CSN is offering guaranteed delivery by December 24th for many of their online toys, as well as an extended Holiday Return Policy for orders placed through December 30th.
CSN stores is sending us the Magic School Bus: A Journey into the Human Body kit. I will update this post with our opinion once we have received the kit. I’m a fan of the Magic School Bus books, so we’re looking forward to trying out one of the kits!
Update: My kids LOVE this science kit !They really enjoyed putting the stickers on the full-size human body poster. Anatomy is one part of biology that I think you are never too young to learn – particularly since children memorize with such ease. They are a little young for most of the experiments, but they enjoy doing them anyway. I think this kit would be most enjoyed by a children aged 6-9.
MATERIALS:
- Enough fabric to wrap up your laptop (as if it were a gift) twice
- Enough quilt batting to wrap up your laptop once
- Scissors
- Thread
- Sewing Machine
STEPS:
1) Cut out two strips of fabric large enough to cover your laptop with extra for your seam allowance and extra at the top (to create a fold). Here is my fabric, with the laptop inside.
2) repeat with a single layer of quilt batting. Here is what your three pieces should look like:
3) Stitch the quilt batting to the wrong side of one of your sheets of fabric. Here’s what mine looked like:
4) Here is what your two pieces of fabric should look like now:
5) Stitch the sides of both pieces of fabric shut, right sides together, to form an envelope – with the same amount of extra fabric left over on the top of each envelope. Here is what mine looked like:
6) Turn one envelope right side out. I chose to turn the envelope with the batting attached right side out.
7) Place the envelope you turned right side out inside of the other one, so that the right sides of the two envelopes are facing each other, like this:
8) Stitch the raw edges together, leaving an opening along the top of the envelope flap for turning right side out.
9) Turn right side out and hand-stitch the envelope flap shut the rest of the way. Or, skip this step by top-stitching the edge of the envelope using your sewing machine. I sewed mine shut by hand:
Insert your laptop, and fold the flap into the opposite edge to create a neat little package:
Ta-da! A gift that works for guys as well as girls (although I doubt many guys would appreciate this particular fabric). You can turn it so the “quilted” side is facing in; I couldn’t make up my mind which way looked better. You can also make the quilting look much nicer. This was my first attempt at machine quilting anything, so I just stuck with random straight lines, which I’m not actually sure that proper quilters would even define as quilting, but I didn’t know what else to call it…
Questions? Let me know in the comments. Don’t be intimidated by all the steps; I made this this morning in well under an hour, with three “helpers” and in spite of stitching it together the wrong way the first time. If you don’t have a laptop, my children think this makes an excellent dress-up hat.
The One2One Network recently sent us an episode of Busytown Mysteries, a new Richard Scarry stories based Cookie Jar TV show. I didn’t grow up reading many Richard Scarry books, but I did recognize the characters. Emma and Johnny both loved the two 11-minute mysteries we were sent to review. Johnny found the second mystery (involving a dragon) terrifying, but he still wanted to watch it. I liked the logic of asking “who, what, when, where, why, how”, and I really liked that they went to the library to do some research in the dragon mystery.
Both Emma and Johnny enjoyed the free online game, although Johnny is too small at 23 months to play it on his own. Emma is a pretty computer-savvy not-quite-four-year-old (she mastered the scroll wheel at 5 months, probably thanks to the months she spent sitting on my lap while I edited my doctoral dissertation), so she had no trouble figuring out how the game worked. Your child can choose to be one of six different characters. Emma’s favorite part of the site was choosing her character’s car.
The park portion of the game has a movie theater where you watch clips from the show. I found it a bit odd that each clip ends just as the characters begin to solve the mystery. There is a counting game you can play at the wharf, as well as a garage where you can customize your car and an art gallery for creating masterpieces. My favorite part of the online game was the country, where plants could be planted in the garden and garbage could be sorted into different recycling bins. I would have liked to see the addition of a compost bin in the recycling center. You can gather baby butterflies to return to their mothers (a matching game), as well as bits and pieces to use to create a collage. I really like both the butterfly and collage idea. However, I was a little disappointed that, when you get to the collage-building and butterfly-matching parts of the game, you aren’t given the butterflies and collage pieces you collected, but are instead presented with a seemingly random assortment. I also felt that the butterfly game was a bit too complex – sometimes you had to sort through dozens of screens of baby butterflies to get a match, to the point where it occasionally felt more like a Vegas slot machine than a matching game. I was very excited to see that the online game was supposed to be available in French since I’m trying to raise my children to be at least partially bilingual, but when I tried clicking on the links to the French version I just got a black page.
Visit the interactive website here, and find out when Busytown Mysteries is on in your neighborhood here.
|
|
