This weeks theme for Muffin Tin Monday is Favorite Foods. We just went food shopping and I had some of Emily and Juliette’s favorites on hand for today so everyone was very happy about Muffin Tin Monday today!
Both Emily and Juliette ended up having the same foods for lunch since Juliette wants everything that Emily has!!
Emily’s Muffin Tin Lunch
Top Row: Cucumber Slices, Grapes and Mandarin Oranges
Bottom Row: M&M’s and Macaroni and Cheese
Emily enjoying her lunch.
Juliette’s Muffin Tin Lunch
Top Row: Cucumber Pieces, Cut up Grapes
Middle Treat of M&M’s
Bottom Row: Mandarin Oranges and Macaroni and Cheese
Juliette loves her Muffin Tin Lunch…she actually ate every last bit of food, I was in complete shock when I only had to help her with the last few pieces of Macaroni and Cheese!
Emily is 47 months old and Juliette is 18 months old
This week we had a baking play date, music class, a snow storm and art group. With a lot of playing and having fun while learning at the same time.
Emily was very excited to add some more sight word cards to her sight word ring.
Juliette continues to follow Emily around and want to do the things that she does. I also noticed that she enjoys playing with the kitchen set. While Emily was sleeping she played cooking with me. She pretended to pour and stir and eat all different things. It was so much fun to play with her :)
Emily had fun baking Pumpkin Muffins at Sarah’s house.
The girls worked on file folder games while they were waiting for their muffins to cook and cool.
For this game they had to find the missing letter.
For this game Emily practiced matching.
For this game she practiced matching colors.
I walked into the living room and found Emily reading with her LeapFrog® Tag Reading System. She LOVES that she can interact with the book and it is great when I am not able to be right with her. You can check out my Amazon Store to see the other books we have (btw- I get a very small percentage of the purchase of anything from this store or the links in these posts).We took out our collection of Mr. Potoao Heads and Emily had fun making all different creations.
I gave Emily our magnetic letters and she decided she would make the whole alphabet.
She also had fun using the letters to spell our names.
For our stART project we read Snail Trail and made an open ended collage inspired by Matisse.
We got another 12 inches of snow this week so we were able this Paint Snow. This was a great open ended art activity as well as fine motor skills practice and color mixing too. Oh yeah and A LOT of FUN!!!
Emily loves her Tangoes Jr. game. She wanted me to take a picture with her completed level 2 card, which she did all by herself.
TOTSchool
Juliette had fun playing with her friends while the girls baked when we were at Sarah’s house.
Juliette also loves the Tag Reading System. ABC Animal Orchestra is her favorite. She is able to click on the pictures and listen to the different sounds all by herself.
Juliette joined in on our stART project this week. She loved the glue!! During Art Group, Juliette had fun playing with her friends.
Our Favorite Books from this week:
Snail Trail ~ Jo Saxton
The Mitten ~ Jan Brett
The Hat ~ Jan Brett
Good Night, Moon ~ Margaret Wise Brown
Check out the great things that others are doing with their children by clicking these buttons!!
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 by either adding my button or a text link, so that others can see all the other great projects that everyone shares too! The linky will be open all week. Be sure to stop by and visit the different links…every week there are so many different and fun book and craft ideas!
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 enjoyed reading Snail Trail: In Search of a Modern Masterpiece, by Jo Saxton. This is a very simple children’s book that is written in rhyme shows a variety of modern masterpieces. Emily, Juliette and I followed a cute little snail through the book on a hunt for a Modern Masterpiece that is based on him. As we turned the pages we saw a different pieces of art work, until finally at the end there is Matisse’s The Snail. Emily enjoyed looking at different pictures and I liked that I was able to tell her about each one. Although there are no titles or descriptions on each page, at the end of the book their are photo credits which give the artist and name of each piece. I thought this was a fun way to introduce Modern Art to Emily and Juliette and a great opportunity to have her work on some of her own art that was inspired by Matisse. The last page explains how Matisse used cut or torn paper to create the collage and shows a picture of him in his wheelchair working. I asked Emily if she would like to create a collage of her own just like Matisse did. She was all ready to do a project and got right to work.
The last time we talked about Matisse I showed Emily some of his artwork on the internet and then she made pictures that looked very similar (you can see her project here). She did a great job, but this time I wanted it to be her own idea so she was able to do anything she wanted. Armed with a lot of pieces of scrap paper and scissors she went to work.
Emily’s Finished Matisse Inspired Collage
Of course Juliette saw paper and glue and Emily working on a project and she wanted to try it too. So here is Juliette’s Matisse Inspired Collage.
First she added a lot of glue,
Next, I helped her tear some pieces of construction paper to put on the glue.
When I saw this recipe for Whoopie Pies with Pink Filling in our February 2011 Family Fun Magazine I knew we had to try them. I have been thinking about what treat Emily is going to bring to school to share with her class on her Birthday. I thought these would be fun and different than the cupcakes that we would usually make to bring in. When I showed them to Emily she totally agreed. So of course we needed to bake them and taste them!
Emily was able to do a lot of dumping, whisking and mixing. As she helped with just about every step of making the Whoopie Pies.
One they were all ready both Emily and Juliette helped put them together. We didn’t have any red food coloring so Emily decided we could make these green and bring pink ones to school for her Birthday.
Emily approved!
Juliette snatched up a whole Whoopie Pie and took a bite before we could stop her!
Whoopie Pies
(From Family Fun Magazine, click here to see the recipe and pictures for each step)
Ingredients :
CAKES
2 cups flour
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup softened butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
FILLING
½ cup softened butter
1½ cups confectioners' sugar
1 cup marshmallow crème
1 teaspoon vanilla
Red food coloring (optional)
Directions:
Heat the oven to 350°. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. In a glass measuring cup or small bowl, stir together the buttermilk and vanilla extract.
In a large bowl with a hand mixer set at medium speed, beat the butter and sugar until evenly blended, about 1 to 2 minutes. Add the egg, increase the speed to high, and beat until smooth and creamy, about 1 minute more.
Pour half the fl our mixture into the butter-sugar mixture, and beat at medium speed until combined. Add the buttermilk mixture and continue beating until just blended. Add the remaining fl our mixture and beat again.
Use a spoon to place a heaping tablespoon of batter on a prepared cookie sheet. Add more mounds of batter, evenly spacing them, until there are nine on each sheet. Slightly flatten each mound with a spoon.
Bake the cakes one sheet at a time for 10 minutes (they should be moist and spongy). Let them cool on the sheet for 2 minutes, then carefully transfer them to a rack to cool completely. Reline the sheets and scoop, shape, and bake the remaining batter.
Using an electric mixer at medium-high speed, beat all the filling ingredients except the coloring in a medium bowl until evenly blended, about 2 minutes. If you want to color the filling, fold in drops of food coloring until the desired tint is reached.
To make each pie, spoon and spread a heaping tablespoon of the filling onto the bottom of a cake, then gently press another cake on top.
This weeks theme for Muffin Tin Monday was Big and Little, Short and Tall. Both Emily and Juliette enjoyed their muffin tin lunches today.
Emily’s Muffin Tin Lunch
Top Row: Trail Mix with lots of small treats like Craisins, Cheerios, Baby Goldfish and Mini Chocolate Chips, A mini blueberry muffin and some mini penne with sausage and peppers.
Bottom Row: Some slices of Avocado, American Cheese and Apple Slices
Juliette’s Muffin Tin Lunch
Small chunks of Avocado, Small cubes of Pumpkin Muffin and Small Slices of Apple.
This egg poaching tray was the perfect size for Juliette’s muffin tin lunch. I found them at the dollar tree and they came in a two pack!
We had another snow day and I thought that painting some snow in our nice warm house would be the perfect activity for today!
Emily’s friend braved the snow to come play and this kept the girls busy and having fun for a while, which is always the mark of a great project in my book :0)
First I put a layer of snow in a cookie tray and patted it down for Emily and her friend. Then I filled our paint cups up with some liquid watercolors (the best paints ever) and some water. These watercolors are very concentrated so for this activity diluting the paint was perfect. I was going to use food coloring but I was out of red.
Emily used the dropper to color the snow on her tray.
I think the smile says it all!
After she filled the tray with color I filled up a bowl with snow and we added it on top of the colored snow. It was fun to watch the watercolors spread out and color the new snow. I thought I took a picture but realized I didn’t after I washed all the snow down the drain :(
This activity was a great open-ended art project and fine motor skills practice too.
Check out other great ideas for Tots and Preschoolers:
Emily is 47 months old and Juliette is 18 months old
This week we played a lot of games. Both Emily and Juliette are still enjoying all the new toys that we received for Christmas. Juliette is joining in on a lot of the activities we do now. She loves reading books and playing with Emily and we are able to do a lot more now.
I put glue on the paper for Juliette and she covered it with the different collage pieces. Emily worked on her collage all by herself. She really liked these Crayola Twistables Slick Stix. They are really creamy and glide across the paper.
Our Winter Sensory Tub has been a big hit all week. There had been a lot of practice tonging, scooping, filling and dumping.
Juliette loves markers and usually scribbles with them at least once a day.
Emily working on her Care Bear workbook. She matched the opposites, circled which had fewer and which had more. She also practiced listening to directions.
We made some Whoopie Pies. Juliette slept through the baking and woke up just in time to help us ice them!!
Emily and Juliette both love playing Zingo . We have played it almost every day this week. I was shocked when I realized that Juliette is actually playing the game. I originally had her on my lap and figured I would just let her help me put the tiles on the card. To my surprise, when a tile came out that I needed she grabbed it before me! You would think it was a coincidence, but she continued to do it. She would get so excited when a tile came out that she needed. It was even more amazing that she does not even seem to be looking at her card and studying it. I love that we have a game that all 4 of us can really play together!!
We got our nephew a remote control car for his birthday and Emily, Juliette and Daddy had a great time playing with it. (Yes, that is my nephew in the bottom right hand corner playing with Emily’s Camera, while the girls take over his car!)
Emily and her cousin played Trouble. This game is great for number recognition, counting and one-to-one correspondence. Both kids really enjoyed playing it…the pop-o-matic bubble definitely makes it a lot of fun to play!
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Juliette’s Finished Matisse Inspired Collage 
I think the smile says it all!
Animals ~ Roger Priddy