stART ~ Dinorella

Welcome to stART! I hope that you will enjoy our story and art project and maybe even share your own too. All I ask is that you link back to A Mommy’s Adventures somewhere in your post so that others can see all the other great projects that everyone shares too! The linky will be open all week.

Check out the  stART tab in my navigation bar where you can find our past stART projects.  All the books that we have read and did a stART project for are listed in alphabetical order.

 

This week we read Dinorella, by Pamela Duncan Edwards.  This is Prehistoric Dinosaur version of the fairy tale Cinderella.  It is a great example of alliteration and would compliment any dinosaur or D themed study!  Emily enjoyed this book and was very excited to make her own Dinorella after we finished reading this story.

I thought that it would be fun to make a paper plate dinosaur and after reading this book I knew exactly what we were going to do…make some adorable Dinorella Paper Plate Dinosaurs all dressed up and ready for the Dance.

First Emily used a Do-a-Dot paint marker to dot a paper plate pink.

Next, she cut all the way around the inside of a paper plate.

From the edge piece she cut 4 leg pieces.  Then she cut the leftover piece in half.  To use one half for the head and the other for the tail.  I shaped both of these pieces to better resemble a head and tail for her.

Emily glued the pieces together to look like a dinosaur.

Now for the really fun part…dressing up Dinorella!!!

Emily added white pieces of white tulle for the dress and black foam for the top.  Then she glued on Sequins & Spangles for the diamond necklace and earrings.  She used yellow dot stickers for the hair and a wiggly eye.

Emily’s Dinorella all dressed up and ready for the Dance

Wordless Wednesday ~ Apple Picking

We brought our little red wagon with us and went apple picking together.  Emily is an apple picking pro by now and Juliette could not wait to get out of the wagon and at those apples!  The funniest part of the whole trip was Juliette pulling an apple so hard that when it came off of the tree she landed right on her bottom.  She just looked at us and smiled, still holding her apple.

  We had a great time together picking apples with our little family!!

Here are some of the recipes we use all our apples for:

Apple Bread

Apple Fritters

Mini Carmel Apples

Apple Pumpkin Muffins

Coupon Clipping is…

 …great for practicing cutting!

Every weekend we get the paper and look through all the store circulars for great sales and then clip our coupons.  One day Emily asked if she could help too.  I gave her all the coupon pages that I did not need and then let her look through them and clip her own coupons.

This is a great activity to practice using scissors and it also teaches or at least exposes them to coupons and saving money, not to mention it is fun to do too.  Emily was so excited that she was able to cut coupons just like Mommy she even saved them in her pocket book to use when she was playing store.  Of course her favorite coupons to clip are the ones for Chuck E. Cheese!!

 

Check out other great ideas for Tots and Preschoolers:

Having Fun Learning

Our Week Having Fun Learning Together!!!

Emily is 43 months old and Juliette is 14 months old

This week we had a great time doing all different types of activities.  Emily said that she wanted books about cats so we went to the library and got a stack of books about cats.  Then of course we did some fun cat themed activities too!  Juliette has been joining in so much more.  She had a great time doing art project with us this week.

Emily did a C-A-T Letter Find, Sort and Graph where she practiced many different math skills.

When I saw this idea on Kingdom First Homeschool I knew Emily would love it.  I wrote some letters on our chalk board and then gave Emily a paint brush and water and letter her trace over them to erase them. 

We played Cootie…

…and Dr. Seuss’s Super Stretchy ABC Game.

After reading Cookie’s Week, Emily made a shape cat.

 

Emily colored this leaf Emergent Reader from Hubbard’s Cupboard and was so proud of her self for reading it.  She took it out all week to read it to anyone who would listen!

My friend made these pattern worksheets for the girls.  Emily really enjoyed finishing the pattern.  When she was finished she said she wanted to do more.

We also had to make some yummy cupcakes after reading If you Give a Cat a Cupcake!!

 

Tiny TOTSchool

While Emily was coloring Juliette kept pointing to the markers.  I gave her one and she started scribbling all over the paper.  She also loved putting the cap back on the marker.  Unfortunately, after a few minutes she decided she wanted to put the marker in her mouth and she looked like she had pink lipstick all over her face.

So later we tried…

Juliette loved creating water pictures.  I gave her water and a paint brush and she went right to work painting her blue piece of paper.

Juliette liked filling her shape sorter bucket.  She discovered that if you take of the lid it is much easier to put the shapes in :0)

After Emily finished tracing over the letters on the chalk board, Juliette helped her cover the whole board in water.  Both Girls had a great time working together.

I took out our large buttons and let Juliette fill an empty puffs container with them.  She put every single one in and then smiled as she dumped them all out!

 

We went to the library for Mother Goose Time.  Juliette and I sang songs and did some finger plays.  We read a book and then played with all the different toys and children.  Juliette found the phone and held onto it the whole time, just like Emily used to do.

        Juliette did her first art project.

Our favorite books from this week:

• Cookie’s Week ~ Cindy Ward
• If You Give a Cat a Cupcake ~ Laura Numeroff
• When Coco Was a Kitten ~ Deborah Niland
• Have You Seen My Cat? ~ Eric Carle
• Kitten (See How They Grow) ~ DK Publishing

 

Check out the great things that others are doing with their children by clicking these buttons!!

C-A-T Letter Find, Sort and Graph

While I was looking for something in the basement I came across a box of all my teaching posters.  When I saw this bar graph one I knew that Emily would have fun using dry erase markers to create a graph.

1.  I found all the C-A-T magnetic letters that we had and hid them in our rice krispies sensory tub for Emily to find.

2. After she found all of the letters she sorted them.  I used pipe cleaners linked together to form a circle for her to sort them into.

3.  Next, Emily placed the letters on the bar graph chart that I had from when I was teaching 4th grade.  We compared the number of letters and talked about which had the most and which had the fewest.

4.  Finally Emily colored in the chart with dry erase markers.  She took off one letter at a time and colored the square.

The finished graph.  Emily was so proud of her work that as soon as Daddy came home she told him about it!

stART ~ Cookie’s Week

 

Welcome to stART! I hope that you will enjoy our story and art project and maybe even share your own too. All I ask is that you link back to A Mommy’s Adventures somewhere in your post so that others can see all the other great projects that everyone shares too! The linky will be open all week.

Check out the  stART tab in my navigation bar where you can find our past stART projects.  All the books that we have read and did a stART project for are listed in alphabetical order.

This week we read Cookie's Week, by Cindy Ward.  This is another one of Emily’s most requested books to read at bedtime.  It is a simple story about the naughty things, like knocking a plant of the window that a cat, named Cookie does each day of the week.  This book is wonderful for teaching many different concepts such as cause and effect as well as days of the week.

For our art project Emily told me that she wanted to make a cat.  I thought that it would be fun to make a shape cat since we had a shape themed Muffin Tin Monday at the beginning of the week.  It is always fun when we are actually able to tie everything together really nicely like that :0)

First I cut out all the shapes and had everything ready for Emily before we started.  I cut out:

• 1 Large Black Oval
• 2 Black Triangles
• 2 Smaller Pink Triangles
• 2 Small Black Ovals
• 1 Large Black Circle
• 1 Small Pink Heart
• 1 Large Black C Shape

Emily listened to my directions to find the shapes that we needed.

Then she glued them together.  I gave her very general directions and let her place things where she thought they would look best.  When I cut out the shapes and had it waiting for her I actually had it laid out differently.  I love how she made hers look though :0)

She drew the face with white crayons…

 

…and colored in his fur with brown, grey, black and orange crayons.

Here is Emily’s Shape Cat.  She said his name is Jay Jay, just like Aunt Jayme and Uncle Jonathan’s cat.

Stick It

This is one of the first activities that I did with Emily when she was a baby/toddler.  She was not that impressed with it, but this is just another example of how different my two little girls are because Juliette LOVED it!

I taped a piece of clear  contact paper on the tray of Juliette’s highchair and gave her pieces of paper from our scrap box.  I showed her how to put the pieces on to the paper and how they stuck to it.  She got to work right away, she put them on then pulled them off and moved them around.  This project is also great fine motor skill practice.  It  is also one of the first activities that she has spent a really long time working at and it thrilled me to pieces!

Once she was finished I pressed the contact paper onto a piece of construction paper and cut around the edge of it.  We chose yellow since according to Emily that is Juliette’s favorite color.    

Styrofoam Plate Sewing

Emily enjoys watching her grandma and me sew.  She can’t wait until she is able to create her own sewing projects too.  So I thought that this would be a fun way to practice, it is also great for developing fine motor skills. 

 

First, I cut a long piece of yarn and taped it to the back of a styrofoam plate, as seen in the picture above.  Then I threaded a blunt tip yarn needle and demonstrated how to poke the needle into the plate, pull it through and come up the other side.  For this activity I did not pre poke the holes in the plate, I told Emily that she could do it wherever she wanted around the edge of the plate.   

Muffin Tin Monday ~ Shapes

This week for Muffin Tin Monday the theme is SHAPES!  Emily absolutely loves when her food is cut into different shapes.  I have a growing assortment of cookie cutters and am getting very good at free handing other shapes with my kitchen shears.  I have to admit I also love how special food looks when it is cut into a different shape than it usually is.

When I was trying to decide what I would include in Emily’s Muffin Tin Meal, I realized this was going to be a little trickier than normal since we have not gone food shopping in close to 2 weeks.  Then I remembered the hear shapes waffle iron and knew we had to have a Muffin Tin Breakfast!

Top Row:  Triangle Pumpkin Spice Waffles, Syrup in a circle cup, Heart Pumpkin Spice Waffles

Bottom Row: Star Shaped Apple Slices, Cheerios and Square Shaped Apple Slices

…with a piece of Rectangle Raisin Bread on the side :0)

  I still think it is so cute every time Emily reminds me that she needs a picture with her Muffin Tin.

And the winner of the Easy Lunchboxes Giveaway is…

…Comment #36

Congratulations

to  Sarah from The Ramblings and Adventures of a S.A.H.M!!!

Thank you to all who entered this giveaway be sure to check back soon for some more fun giveaways!!

**A very big Thank You to Easy Lunch Boxes for sponsoring this giveaway**

I will be emailing you shortly, if I don’t  hear back from you within 48 hours another winner will be chosen.

Having Fun Learning

Our Week Having Fun Learning Together!!!

Emily is 43 months old and Juliette is 14 months old

This week was very exciting because Emily started a preschool program that she will go to for 2 days a week at the same place where we did a Mommy and Me two year old class last year.  Emily was so excited about her first day of  school and couldn't wait to see her teacher again.  In addition to this program I will continue to do our pre school at home and with our friends too as well as Music at my friend Sarah's house and the art group that I host at my house.

Emily on her first day of school!

 We used our new rollers to paint on large sheets of paper during art group

   

Emily and I made goop and she loved pressing her magnetic alphabet letters into it.

After reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears Sarah had the girls practice following directions as she gave them the steps to make these adorable shape bears.

My friend found and printed out these bear pattern worksheets and we used my counting bears with them to practice completing the pattern and 1 to 1 correspondence.

To go along with the Three Bears book we also did another pattern and cutting practice activity.  Emily had to cut out the pieces and then glue them to complete the patterns.

The girls decorated bear shaped brownies for a yummy snack.

We read about apple orchards and made a cute apple sun catcher for our stART project this week.

 Emily couldn't wait to test out the new cones that we got.  I set them up in a line and she ran in and out of them.  She did this until Juliette came in and decided to move all the cones into the other room!

Juliette discovered our garden and helped me pick a bunch of cherry tomatoes.  

 Juliette really enjoys music class, she especially likes sitting on the parachute and popping bubbles!

While Emily was working on her projects, Juliette played with the other Tiny Tots, here they were exploring the fridge farm!  It is cute to see how much they interact with each other now.

Check out the great things that others are doing with their children by clicking these buttons!!