Halloween Party

Last weekend we had a little family Halloween party. It was so fun and Ellie was very excited about it! She invited her friend Abby over and our best friends came over but they are all like family so we still called it our family party. Ellie helped decorate, cook the food and come up with a few games. Our menu consisted of:

spider web dip - Mexican dip

eyeballs - grapes mixed with strawberry yogurt

bat wings - chocolate and peanut melted in crescent rolls

witches brew - punch

Cheese pizza - I don't remember what we called it

Dirt and worms - Chocolate pudding, oreos and gummy worms

Mummies - Crescent rolls, ham and cheese

Pumpkins - Bagels with orange cream cheese

We also played a few games:

witch, witch, ghost - duck, duck, goose

pin the cat on the witch

hot and cold

and the big hit was bobbing for apples

We had such a good time and Ellie is still talking about it.

Wordless Wednesday - Fashion Show Birthday Party

Roller Art

The girls and I did a fun art project inspired from here. I bought some cute foam Halloween stickers and 2 rolling pins from the dollar tree and had the girls put stickers all over the roller. After all the sticker were on we put the roller in the paint and then rolled it on the paper. It came out like this which was not quite right so I went back and actually read the directions and realized that we were supposed to water down the paint so mine looked better but still not quite right.I was going to try again but they were done by this time but we will definitely be doing this again and next time I will add a little more water.

Wordless Wednesday - Fair

Nutrition

Nutrition was the theme last week in our About Me studies. We had so much fun with this topic!!Several of the activities came from this great blog.
Monday:
Chris was off so we didn't really have school



Tuesday:

• Introduced the girls to the food guide pyramid and talked about each category


• Sorted play food into the different food groups - I laid out different colored construction paper that coordinated with the different colors on the pyramid for the food groups. Ellie did so great with this and really enjoyed it.


• Made a healthy snack - I can't remember where I saw this idea but it was not my own - Take a piece of bread and cut off the crusts and roll it flat, put peanut butter over the whole piece and then add long slices of apple, roll up like a sushi roll and enjoy
• Made a big pot of stone soup outside. We went on a nature walk in the morning with some friends at the greenway and collected lots of rocks, acorns and such and we used all of those goodies for our soup. We used the tops of acorns as bowls to eat our pretend soup. To bad Emily didn't get the memo to not really eat it!!!! BARF!

Wednesday:

• Read books (Good Enough to Eat and Gregory the Terrible Eater)


• Cut up apple and strawberries to make fruit prints (not a big hit with the girls but I liked it!!)
• Talked lots about what food is healthy and what food is not and eating the colors of the rainbow


• Made an apple dessert - OK not very healthy but at least it had apples:) It went along with our topic on eating sweets in moderation. That is how I justified it. Let me just tell you that this dessert was so yummy!!!!

Thursday:

• Re-read our books
  
• Went on a grocery store scavenger hunt


• Planned out a healthy meal using all of the food groups. We really enjoyed this because it gave us a chance to look through cook books.


• Made another healthy snack from Paula Deens cookbook that a friend suggested. The recipe was to take apple slices and spread peanut butter on one side, add a layer of cheddar cheese and another apple slice on top.


• Talked about the importance of trying new foods

Friday:

• Set up a grocery store and made shopping lists. This was a huge hit with both girls even if there was some fighting over the cash register:)
• We surprised daddy with a "fancy" meal that we planned out the day before:

Roasted Chicken, quinoa with sauteed mushrooms and onions, and sweet potato fries with chocolate covered strawberries and bananas. We all tried quinoa for the first time, which was yummy and Ellie also tried mushrooms for the first time. She really liked them.

I was so impressed with how much the girls wanted to help cook and Ellie set the table all by herself. Dads place setting had a ladle for a spoon and a huge fork used for cooking:) She also picked out every bodies fancy outfit. I spared you those pictures!!!!

Alphabet Box

I recently saw an alphabet box on this blog and knew that I wanted to make one. It is just a screw organizer and I printed letters to put in the front of the drawers and now I just need to fill it up with little trinkets. Hopefully I will be able to find most things around the house. Don't have a clue as to what to put in the X drawer but I am sure I will figure out something. I think this will be such a fun learning tool with lots of possibilities!

Cooking Monster

I have created a little cooking monster:) Emily started helping Ellie and I in the kitchen about a month or so ago and to say she loves it is an understatement!!! Anytime I am going into the kitchen to make food whether it is lunch, dinner or snack I hear the little pitter patter of Emily's feet and she is yelling HELP HELP and then I hear the sound of her pulling a chair up to the counter. We have been making lots of new recipes lately and she is loving every minute of it.

School

Well once again I skipped a few school posts. A few weeks ago we focused on the letter T and turtles. I found some great books at the library on turtles even though Ellie's favorites were the Franklin books we already own and I also borrowed several turtle puppets which was fun. Our friends joined us for school some that week and Ellie loved that. We had a turtle snack, which I saw on another blog but can't remember which one, and Ellie's favorite activity was make thumbprint turtles. Ellie also practiced cutting measuring different items with the unifix cubescoloring a scarecrow putting the acorns in order (largest to smallest), and working with her bottlecap letters. Emily drew on her magnetic boardput coins in her piggy bank, played with the felt board, and played with stickers.We went on a long nature walk in the woods and Ellie played a long time with a granddaddy long leg spider. Lets just say his legs weren't so long after awhile:( The highlight of that week though was a science class that Ellie participated in. She had a blast!!

This past week we started our About Me theme. I traced the girls bodies and then we colored them. Ellie also traced her dolls body and we talked about our different body parts. We gave baby Kate a bath to show how to keep our bodies clean. To finish off the week we threw Baby Sara (Ellie's baby doll) a birthday party. We did this last year too and Ellie has never forgotten it. We played games, blew up balloons, had snacks, danced and of course had cake (Melissa and Doug wooden cake). It was a lot of fun.

A Cute Book

Recently the girls and I checked out The Big Green Pocketbook from the library. Ellie loved it and we read it over and over! It is about a girl who spends the day running errands with her mom. The little girl takes an empty purse with her and by the time they come home her purse is full from gathering things on their errands. Ellie and I decided that the next day that I have lots of errands she is going to take an empty purse to fill.

My Weekend At Home

I thought I would show everybody some of the things my sister and I worked on over the weekend. Over the next few weeks our theme is "About Me" so we worked on making file folder games and lapbooks and a few activities dealing with that theme.

Feelings lap book. Carisa from this blog made this and put all of the printables on her blog to share. How awesome is that?

Body Works lap book. Everything for this came from Homeschool Share.

Flip book came from First Palette. I thought it could be a fun way to talk about how God made us all different.

This file folder game about your five senses came from here

We also made these cute clothes with the upper and lower case letters on. She can use them for lots of activities but I think she will enjoy hanging them on a clothesline and matching the upper and lower case letters. I have seen this idea on several awesome blogs but for the life of me can't remember which ones. Sorry!

We also did a little crafting with our new Cricut. I can't say enough great things about this machine! It is so easy to use (except the Wild Card cartridge :) ) and fun! My creative juices still haven't started flowing yet but I know the possibilities are endless!! We made these cute BOO frames for the mantel. The idea came from here. Could her ideas be any cuter? We also used the Cricut to cut out freezer paper stencils and I made Ellie a spider shirt for Halloween and a reindeer shirt for Christmas. I was disappointed with the spider shirt because the pink paint had sparkles in it and it just didn't cover well so the paint is just to thick but Ellie still loved it!!! She saw it and said "WOW, is that Anansi the spider?" and I said "It sure is!!"

Weekend at Grandpa's

Chris and the girls went to his dads for the weekend and they had soooo much fun!!! I don't think either of the girls were ready to come home but I was sure happy to see them. Here are some highlights from their weekend:

What did I do all weekend? I spent time crafting with friends and my awesome sister stayed with me this weekend and helped me make some new school activities. We also shopped, ate out and slept late (not really for her but for me it was sleeping late)!! It was a well needed, well appreciated weekend but glad to have them back!