Muffin Tin Monday

Circus Fun!!

This weeks Muffin Tin Monday theme was "Circus." I had fun planning this weeks muffin tin and Emily really enjoyed EVERY part off it. I was SO excited!!

Emily colored a clown coloring page from FamilyFun while I got her lunch ready.

Emily's Circus Muffin Tin Lunch

Top row: Mini Corndogs, Unpopped Popcorn a.k.a. corn (Emily can't have popcorn yet), multicolored lollipop cookie

Bottom row: Animal Crackers, Clown Hair a.k.a. tri-color rotini, Clown noses a.k.a. cherry tomatoes from our garden


I had fun making some circus themed toothpicks. I got the printable from FamilyFun. I got the Mini Corndog idea from Michelle at Delightful Learning. They were SO yummy!

We made these cookies last night. I knew I wanted to make the ever since I saw them on Funny Days with Mommy and Maddie! This was the perfect time for them :0)

Emily loved everything!

TOTSchool

Our week in TOTSchool.

Emily is 2 1/2 years old!

We made new crayons out of our old crayons! Emily enjoyed peeling the labels off of the old crayons and then breaking them up to fit into the star shaped muffin tin.

We did our first stART project.

Emily and I read Just How Long Can A Long String Be, by Keith Baker and then we made these fun yarn bowls.

For our Open Ended Art project we made sun catchers out of crayon shavings. Emily was able to peel more crayons for this project. She also liked sprinkling the shavings onto the paper to make a pretty design.


Aunt Jennifer came over and made some fun water toys out of kitchen sponges. We found this project idea in our Family Fun Magazine. Emily had fun playing with the sponges while she was waiting for Aunt Jennifer to cut them up.


Emily put Juliettes little newborn diapers on her babies and wheeled them around. She loves pretending to be a mommy!


Emily used some of the extra sponges to do this activity that I found on this blog. I didn't think she would really be that into it, but it turned out to be the favorite of the week! She asked to do this almost every day since she first did it.

For our Unplugged project we did body tracings. Emily loved the idea of tracing Juliette and coloring her in. After I hung up the Juliette tracing I needed one of Emily so we could see the difference in their size. On Emily's we labeled the different parts of her body.

Our favorite books from this week:

• Wiggle ~ Doreen Cronin
• The Three Pigs ~ David Wiesner
• A Fly Went By ~ Mike McClintock
• The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear ~ Don and Audrey Wood
  
  
  Check out the great things that others are doing in their TOTSchools by clicking the button on the top of this page!!

Unplugged Project ~ People

Emily and Juliette's People Tracings

This weeks Unplugged Project theme is "People". Emily loves having her hands traced so I thought she would think it was fun to trace Juliette. It would also be a fun project for us to save and remember how tiny she was. It also turned out that yesterday when we did the project Juliette was exactly 7 weeks old!!

I laid Juliette down on a long piece of drawing paper and traced around her.

Emily is helping her arm stay in the right place in this picture.

Emily was able to draw her face and color in her outfit.

She did a great job on the face...but it didn't show up in the photo.

I traced the pencil outline in marker so we could see it better. Emily actually enjoyed coloring her in!

Now it was Emily's turn!

After I hung up the picture of Juliette I thought we needed one of Emily so we could see the size difference.

Emily colored in her body and drew her face. I also worked with her to label some of the different parts of the body. (Head, Fingers, Legs, Feet, Belly)

Look at that face! Emily was so proud of her work. I love how they look on the wall. These will be such a great memory of how little my girls were :0)

Juliette's Body Tracing

Emily's Body Tracing

Check out all the other fun Unplugged Projcets at Unplug Your Kids!!

stART ~ Just How Long Can A Long String Be?!

**Edited to show finished final project**

A Story + Art = A Great stART!

Welcome to stART! I hope that you will enjoy our book and art project and maybe even share your own too! For an explanation of stART click here.

While we were at the library at the beginning of the week I found the book Just How Long Can A Long String Be?!, by Keith Baker on display. I read it and I had to take it home to share it with Emily. I was also so excited because I had the perfect project filed away to do along with this book!!

Emily's String Bowls

I saw these in my August Family Fun magazine and knew I wanted to try them with Emily. This was a fun project for us to work on together.

I cut 80 1 yard pieces of yarn before we started, however we used a smaller ball than in the magazine so I had a bit leftover.

Emily covered the string in glue and I helped her squeeze off the extra.
I used a whole 4 ounce bottle of glue.

Emily and I covered half of a ball with the pieces of yarn.

Emily realized it was more fun to pick the dried glue off of her fingers and I worked on covering the ball. Emily decided to put a piece on every once in a while...I think so she could get more glue on her fingers to pick off!

Our almost finished bowl!! Now we just have to wait for it to dry. The magazine recommends letting it dry over night.

***Ours is still wet. I will post a finished picture as soon as all the glue is dried. I think I may try putting it out in the sun...if the sun decides to shine today :0)

Our yarn bowl is finally dried!!

It actually came out really nice. It just took over 24 hours to dry. I think we will be trying this again one day with some smaller balls.

stART!!!

A Story + Art = A Great stART!!

We love reading all different kinds of books and doing projects in our house. A lot of the time we are inspired to do our projects based on a book that we have enjoyed. I thought it would be fun to share some of the books we are reading and the art projects that we do with them.

Each Thursday I will post my "stART" project and if you have a book related art project that you did during the week I would love it if you joined us and linked up!

If you would like to participate:

• Read a book with your child
• Do an art project to go with your book
• Post about it and add a link back to A Mommy's Adventures
• Leave a link to your post on the MckLinky

I hope we will all be able to share some great books as well as some fun art projects to go along with them!

Open Ended Art ~ Yellow with Crayons

Emily's Crayon Sun Catchers

This weeks Open Ended Art theme is Yellow with crayons. We already made our own "new" crayons so I decided to continue using up our restaurant crayon leftovers to make these Melted Crayon Sun Catchers with Emily.

Emily helped me peel the label off of the crayons.

I grated them with a cheese grater and put them is separate glass bowls. I was originally using my plastic apple sauce container cups that I love using for Emily's art projects, however there was so much static electricity from grating the crayons that the shavings were sticking to the plastic way to much.

Emily sprinkled the grated crayons onto a piece of folded wax paper. I put a piece of white paper under it so she could see the design she was making better.

When she was finished with her design I folded the waxed paper over the top of it and covered the waxed paper with the piece of computer paper and then folded all of that into a dish towel. Finally I set my iron to the cotton setting and moved it over the towel.

** I definitely recommend using an old towel that you don't mind throwing away. My first attempt at this ended up with heating the iron way too high and letting it sit too long and the wax melted out onto my towel...oops!!

When we were finished I taped them to the sliding glass door in the kitchen to let the light through them. Emily was very impressed! I can't wait to try these again.

There is a little yellow left in the center!!

This one came out much better!

I did not let the iron sit as long and I checked it much sooner.

This project was a little bit messy, but it was totally worth it. Emily had fun making a design with the crayon shavings and was even more excited to see the finished product.

Star Crayons

A New Life For Old Crayons!!

We have a huge stash of crayons that Emily has received when we go out to eat at restaurants. I keep them in a container but never really need to use them because we have our own stash of nice new Crayola crayons (They are the only ones we buy!). When I was teaching first grade, one of our Earth Day projects was for the kids to bring in something they recycled. One little boy made crayons for each child in the class by melting down all his old broken ones. I loved this idea and decided to give it a try with Emily!

Emily helped me peel the labels off of the crayons.

We broke the crayons into smaller pieces and filled our star muffin tin.

They are all ready to go into the oven.

I baked them at 225 degrees for about 15 minutes. I kept checking on them and took them out when they were all melted. After I took them out we had to wait patiently for them to cool off. I think we waited for about 2 hours. Then I popped them out of the mold and they were all read to use!

Our finished crayon stars!

Emily enjoyed testing out her "New" crayons.

It's Juliette's Turn!!

Baby Fun

When Emily was little I was always looking for things to keep her smiling and entertained in between feeding and naps. The library had lots of different books that had poems, songs, games and other activities to do with babies. So I headed back to library for a refresher course on baby fun!!

Baby's Fingers

This chant is from Games to Play with Babies, by Jackie Silberg

While I said the chant to Juliette I touched the parts of her body that were mentioned as I named them. She was smiling throughout the game!!

Where, oh where, are baby's finger?

Where, oh where, are baby's toes?

Where's the baby's belly button?

'Round and 'round it goes.

Where, oh where , are baby's ears?

Where, oh where, is baby's nose?

Where's the baby's bellybutton?

'Round and 'round it goes.