Vv is for Volcano

Today we made a Volcano! We cut a cup in half and taped it on top of a ball of newspaper. Then we flattened out modeling clay around it to form a volcano. Ok, so it's not the best volcano shape in the world, but a 3 year old and a 4 year old made it, so we think it's FANTASTIC!!

After it had a nice shape we added two tablespoons of baking soda and 4 tablespoons of vinegar (you could add in some red food coloring, but we were out). Then watch it foam out.

Oh and we just happened to put ours on a plate and it worded out really well because it caught all the liquid.

It was really neat to see! Look how excited Lyssy was!

Sweet Valentines

We FINALLY started making some Valentine cards today! With the party and the travelling, there was just no time until now. I put pretty much all the craft supplies I brought with me on the table and we started creating! I thought they would really like the conversation heart foamies to put on the cards, but they really could have cared less about them today (they'll love them tomorrow!). Both kiddos were really into the buttons, so we glued a giant heart on the paper and put buttons on the glue. It turned out very cute! So of course, I HAD to just one of my favorite sayings on the inside of the card!!

Look how intent Lyssy is as she works!

I think they ended up making at least 15 cards, 10 of which are these cute button hearts.

The GREAT thing about these Cards is that they can be made for any occasion.

Velvet Vv

Boy was it difficult to come up with something for the letter Vv! Thankfully, I had an ugly velvet shirt that I would Never wear that was happy to be of assistance! We made Velvet Vv's!! I just cut the shirt into small pieces and let the kiddos glue them onto the letter Vv.

Lyssy was very proud of her work!

And Aidman used WAY too much glue!! But did a good job writing the letter Vv.

Vv

This week we are learning about the letter Vv. Here are our plans:

Art:

- Glue velvet on letter Vv

- Veggie prints

- Valentines cards

Science:

- Visit Veternarian

- Make a Volcano explosion

Math:

- Graph favorite veggies

- Count/sort vehicles

- Count candy conversation hearts (Valtentines)

Cooking:

- Vegetable Soup

Movement/Outside:

- Play volleyball

- Vacation!! We rode on a plane to TN!!

Red is for LOVE!!!

We are a few days late on muffin tin monday because of all the packing, but we got it done today!! I'm glad it worked out for us to do it here to because Granny REALLY loved it!!

We had, milk in a red cup, red and pink jelly beans, strawberries, beets, heart shaped ham sandwich, and tomato slices. It was a very LOVELY lunch!

You can tell that Pryssy Lyssy LOVED it!!

We are HERE!!!

We are HERE!!! We got to TN yesterday afternoon. The kids LOVE airplanes and we had such a fun time flying. We are here to help my grandparents since Pa just had knee reconstruction surgery. He is doing well and getting around better than I would have thought, but he is in alot of pain and can't sleep at all. Granny is good too, but she is very tired from taking care of Pa.

Other than the fact that there isn't much to do here, I LOVE this area. The view is breathtaking!!! These pictures are all taken from the back patio.

The kids LOVE it here because there is five acres for them to run around on AND they get SO much attention!! Granny and Pa are constantly talking and playing with them. That leaves mama alot of time to cook and get things done without the kiddos being at my feet.

Of course we are getting lots of learning time in too. Granny just thinks it's so great all the things that we do together, and I can't help but to feel proud (that's what Granny's are for though, making you feel good about yourself and what you do).

Tea Party Fun

Here is all the FUN things we did at Pryssy Lyssy's Tea Party!

Of course we had tea, muffins, finger sandwiches, sconces, fruit, and CAKE!

We decorated goodie bags and filled them with fun things.

We made our own bead necklaces!

And we had a dress up station! My sister made these CUTE little tutus, and I borrowed a bunch of outfits from a local dance studio that my friend works at, and I got a bunch of stuff at the Dollar Tree.

Needless to say, the kiddos had a GREAT time with all the fun activities.

Tea Party Decor

I LOVE planning fun parties for my kiddos. Today was Prissy Lyssys's 3rd Birthday and we had a tea party. It was ALOT of fun to plan and decorate for! I am super TIRED now, but it was well worth it!!

Here is a canopy to transform our backyard into a tea garden.

I went ahead and had the tables ready for the kiddos. It was set just like any fancy tea house, except for the fact that we used paper plates.

I made these CUTE tissue paper flowers for the centerpieces.

I must say that I impressed myself with the cuteness of this! I really did LOVE it and hope everyone else did too! And aside from my "Grown Up" fit (like the one a 3 year old would throw) this morning when the wind kept knocking down my canopy, the day was wonderful (thank God that Eric figured out a better way to do the canopys and the wind cooperated for the party!).

You Have a Brain!

This same thing was said no less than five times today.

Pryssy Lyssy is copying something that Aidman has said...

Aidman- "STOP copying me, you have a Brain!"

Pryssy Lyssy- "No I don't."

1st Haircut

Pryssy Lyssy LOVES going to the hair salon to watch Aidman get his haircut (he has to go often), and for awhile now she has wanted to get her hair cut too. I promised her that she could get it cut on her 3rd birthday (since it was FINALLY growing), so she has been so excited for her birthday to roll around. All day she's been saying "I take my haircut today".

My Bald Beauty on her 1st Birthday!

She's got some hair on her 2nd Birthday.

Here she is getting her hair done at "Mommy's Salon". As her usual self, she was shy and nervous at first, but as the haircut progressed she got more and more excited and proud.

Look at that head full of freshly cut hair on her 3rd Birthday!!

Milk, Milk, and MORE Milk!

We did this project two weeks ago, but my kiddos are STILL talking about it so I wanted to post it here.

We had been doing the letter Mm this week, so naturally we went to the Library and got all the Mm books that we could find. For some reason Aiden has LOVED this book called The Milkman, we've read it over and over, so doing some milk projects sounded like a good idea.

We started off with this milk experiment:

Materials Needed:

Milk

Shallow Baking Dish

Food Coloring

Liquid Dish Soap

Instructions: Cover the bottom of the dish with milk. Add a few drops of food coloring to the milk (do not stir) and then add a few drops of liquid dish soap. Watch what happens to the colors!!!!

My kids LOVED this project!! We had to do it with every color of food coloring that we had!

milk

milk and food coloring (do not mix)
add a drop of dish soap (no mixing needed)

Next I took out every type of milk I had (evaporated milk, condensed milk, powdered milk, box milk, and whole milk). We talked about all the differences and tasted each. We also talked about and tasted different things that are made from milk (sour cream, yogurt, cheese, ice cream).

Then since I didn't just want to waste all those open cans... we finger painted with the condensed milk! Just add a little CM to small cups and a drop or two a food coloring to each cup. Then let the kiddos finger paint on paper. The funny thing is that they didn't want to mix the colors so they just licked their fingers in between dips, YUM. It was alot of fun for them and the gooey sticky texture was very different from normal finger paints. Of course they had to be washed up very well afterwards.

No doubt that we also just HAD to make milkshakes since we were talking about milk!! Actually ours were more like smoothies since I don't have any ice cream. They each added to the mixer; frozen fruit, a little honey, and milk. It made a very nice treat!! It was just a MilkTastic Day!!

T-ball

Whoot Whoot! Aidman had his First Ever t-ball practice last night. He LOVED it! Now these are all 3 and 4 year olds so it is just instruction t-ball, but you could NEVER tell Aidman that. He went to the store and got a brand new pair of cleats and a new bat that he is so proud of. When he arrived at practice he walked right up and introduced himself to Coach Kelly and jumped right in. They just focused on throwing and catching the ball and running the bases at this practice. Aidman was quite upset that he didn't get to use his new bat, but Coach promised that they would next time. It was a fun night!

So Jealous!!

I have always LOVED living in Florida! But recently I've been seeing all these blogs that are doing so many fun things with their kids in the snow and I'm so Jealous!! Of course I wouldn't want to deal with the snow all the time, but I am very sad that we can't experience some of the fun of snow. We are actually headed up to TN next week so I'm praying that it snows and stays on the ground while we are their on our 2 week visit, keep your fingers crossed for me!!

Ok now to make some of you who are knee deep in snow jealous!! This was last week! A beautiful sunny day at the park in JANUARY!!! We were wearing pants and a light sweater jacket (mostly because of the wind).

Qq, Dd, Mm, and Ww Art

I promised that I would post some of our letter of the week work. Today we painted on the letter Qq using q-tips. The kiddos LOVE painting with q-tips and had a really good time. As you can see Prissy Lyssy chose to completely cover her Qq.

Here are some letters (that were STILL hanging on the fridge) from the last month.

For the Letter Dd, we used bingo dobbers to make Dots.

For the letter Mm, we made Mice by putting fingerprints on the letter and then drawing on ears and a tail with a pencil.


For the letter Ww, we glued on Wagon Wheel pasta.

Good Morning Sunshine!

I have been doing Muffin Tin Mondays with my kiddos for a while now, but this is the first time that I have a blog to post about it! WOOHOO!! We LOVE MTM and Thank Michelle over at Her Cup Overfloweth for all the fun MTM themes!

Today's theme is YELLOW! We thought we would add alittle sunshine to this dreary morning by having a YELLOW breakfast. We had pineapple chuncks, yellow bell pepper, pineapple juice, eggs, buttered and white cheese grits, homemade jarred apples (made by Gran Gran).

It was a YUMMY breakfast!! My kids LOVE grits, they each had 3 servings of them! BUT they hate bell peppers. I have tried every color bell pepper because I LOVE to cook with them, but my kids will not touch any of them. Sigh, oh well.

Hearts Aplenty!

Well, we are a few days late this week for Sandy's Book Feature Friday. What can I say... it was a VERY busy Friday. And I actually think I found this idea on Friday and I just HAD to use it!!

We read several of our Valentines/Love books and then made these REALLY cute heart shaped animals. AidMan REALLY got into cutting hearts. He LOVES to cut! Prissy Lyssy had so much fun gluing the hearts together, she actually ended up creating some items on her own like a heart flower. I was very surprised how easy this project was for them, they pretty much just looked at the pictures on the computer and then created the animal they wanted to make. Mommy also had a superfun time making these!!

Some books we read were: The Day it Rained Hearts, The Best thing about Valentines, and The Night Before Valentines.

Our Wall of LOVE!!

We really liked this weeks project! It really made a great decoration for our kitchen wall!!

Qq

This weeks letter is Qq!

Here are our plans for the week.

Art-
-Paint with q-tips on the letter Qq
-Glue fabric squares to a paper making a Quilt
-Make a Queens Crown

Science-
-Questions- ask the kids question about themselves (science ???s)

Math-
-Measure liquid with a quart size picture
-Sort coins and find the quarters

Cooking-
-Quiche
-Go to Dairy Queen!

Movement/Outside-
-Quack, Quack!! Act like a Duck
-Move quickly and quietly
-Be a Quarterback! Throw a ball around

Books/Songs-
I need to look through our books and we will probably do a book project with one of them.

Hopefully I'll get some pictures and post more details later in the week.

Letter of the Week

So we have a letter of the week every week. I have tried so many times to do lessons with my kids and every time have ended up failing. We really do TONS of child lead stuff around here and we go to lots of playdates, so fitting in "lesson plans" was really hard. I think ALOT of the problem was that I made to plans too extensive!

So at the beginning of this year I decided that we REALLY needed more ABC work, but I knew that unless I made it fairly simple for myself then it wouldn't get done.

We start the week by listing and writing the letter. Then we draw everything we can think of that starts with the letter. Then, whenever we have a free moment in the day we do something on ours plans. Nothing is at a certain time or on a certain day. Each week we do SOMETHING that starts with the letter in each category: Art, Science, Math, Cooking, Movement/Outside, and Books/Songs.