Easter Activities

We have had a lot of fun with our Easter activities at school this week. Here are some of the activities that we have done:

I love the resurrection eggs and I printed and laminated the story cards to go with them here


Draw the other side of the egg to match the first side

Sound eggs: Put two alike items in the eggs and match the sounds

Read Make Way For Ducklings. I love Robert McCloskey!!

Draw your own chick. I got this idea from here. Put the number eggs 1-30 in order. I printed these from here.

Finish the pattern eggs printed from here

Some of the other fun activities that we have done but I didn't get pictures of are:

Draw a bunny dice game

Match the eggs from Make and Takes

Made jelly bean jars from here

Easter worksheets from Teacher File Box

We still have one more day of activities to do and there are so many other activities that I wanted to do but we just ran out of time and I ran out of steam:)

Hot Dots

I have never been a fan of flashcards until now. Why now you may ask...well now I have a Hot Dots Pen so these flashcards that I bought at a consignment sale for $1 can be turned into this: and Ellie can work on these independently. Have I mentioned how much I love this pen? Oh yeah, I did here didn't I:)

Just in case you were like me and didn't quite understand how this pen works I will give a quick explanation. I bought the Make Your Own Hot Dots and it came with a sheet of dot stickers listed as HOT and several sheets of dot stickers listed as COLD. You put the cold dots by the wrong answer and the hot dot by the correct answer and then when the right answer is picked the pen turns green and says different things like "Correct" and "Great Job" and if the wrong answer is picked it just beeps or says "Try Again".

Ellie's Birthday Present

I wanted to make the girls one of the cool table tents like this one and this one for Christmas but when I went and looked at buying a card table I realized that it was too small for the girls to play in comfortably so I forgot about the idea. Well then I came up with the idea to make it under Ellie's bed because she has a loft bed. She is not playing on it for hours on end like I had envisioned but she does love it. Her favorite part is the mailbox because it opens and closes and she also likes the window because I sewed mesh into it although I don't think you can tell from this picture. You can kind of see in the picture but she has a little sofa in there and her little Melissa and Doug kitchen (one of my great Goodwill finds) and cool lighting of course.

Tot School

~Emily is 26 months old~

Tot school went pretty well last week! Here is what we did:

Fitting wooden blocks into the box

Drawing on a chalk board with water. She loved this but I am sure it is because big sister was doing it too.

Playing with colored sand, empty containers and sea shells

Painting with water

Putting apple jacks on a skewer. I got this fun idea from Activity Mom.

Playing at the parkRiding her bike. She has gotten so good at pedaling her bike! It is so cute to watch but we still need to work on the steering a bit:)

Workboxes - St. Patrick's Day

Our theme for workboxes last week was all things St. Patrick's Day including rainbows and leprechauns. I was excited to do this theme because normally we don't really celebrate St. Patrick's Day because it is the day after Ellie's birthday and after having everyone over and cooking and cleaning I am just too tired to plan any fun activities. This year I was able to plan and it was really fun. We started off by reading lots of books and talking about St. Patrick himself. The books we read came from this recommendation. The rest of the boxes included:


Shamrock file folder game printed from here: Color the letter R for our alphabet book using color changing markers. The R printout came from here.Leprechaun grid game from hereRainbow scratch off sheets from Lake Shore LearningLetter R pin punch from hereColor by number rainbow printed from hereUpper and lower case alphabet rainbow match from hereMake a fruit rainbow for snack. I took this picture before I filled the other pot of gold with Nutella. YUMMY:) This idea came from Family Fun magazine.We made green lemonade by mixing yellow lemonade with blue food coloring. I got this idea from here.We did an experiment using food coloring and milk to watch the colors swirl around. It is really cool and easy. Add milk to a shallow dish and then add a few drops of food color. Dip a toothpick into dish washing liquid and then dip it in the milk and watch the colors swirl. We made a leprechaun trap using a box and paper towel holder. We lured the leprechaun in by making gold nuggets with rocks and gold glitter.

We didn't catch a leprechaun but they did leave us some chocolate gold nuggets, a mess in the living room and green toilet water, silly little guys!

Ellie's Birthday Party

This is the first year that Ellie has had a friends party. Normally we have all of our family over to celebrate but this year she wanted to have a ballet party so we had her party at a local dance studio. I have to say it was so nice to not have to clean, plan and get ready for an at home party. I hope everyone had fun and I know the birthday girl did!

Sisterly love
Tumbling TimeOne of the few things I had to bring was cupcakes. I found a tutorial to make this cute topper from here and I didn't have pink sugar/sprinkles so I just sprinkled jello on it and it worked! See how tasty they were!!

Ellie is 5!!!

I just can't believe my sweet baby girl is 5 today. For some reason this is such a big birthday to me. There is just no way she can be 5 already. When I was getting all sappy with her this morning she told me not to worry because she would always be my baby and she would stop growing for awhile and that cheered me right up:) Ellie is so much like her dad it is not funny! She can tune people out like no one else but is also so sweet and compassionate not to mention funny (she gets that from me : ) )! I love they way she is so appreciative of the little things I do for her. She says thank you for making dinner most nights and thank you for making school fun most school days. I just love that! Ellie, mommy loves you more then you can ever imagine!!!! Happy Birthday baby girl!

Before I Was Your Mother

This was a last minute find at the library the other day but I just love it! Honestly, I like it better then the girls but I still recommend it!!

School Things I Could Live Without But Don't Want Too

I have several school tools I am loving and wanted to share. Here is my list:


Elmer's Glue Pens. I love these and Emily LOVES these. They are so much easier to use then a bottle that can be hard to squeeze and a glue pen that can be goopy. It fits there hands so well but just be prepared to go through a ton because they are so easy to use that they are gone in no time. Luckily, they have them at the Dollar Tree!



My laminator. It is a GBC Heat Seal and now that I know Sam's has 200 laminating sheets for $20 I have been a laminating fool:)
My paper cutters. I have a small one, a letter size one and a big industrial one. Believe it or not all use all 3 of them often but I didn't have to pay for any of them. One was given to me by my sister, one came with the laminator and the last one my husband found who knows where:)


I just got this a few weeks ago but Hot Dots Pen. I originally learned about that from here (she gives a good explanation)but you can make just about anything into a flashcard/ multiple choice work. Ellie loves it and I love that she can check her own answers!!!



Based off Sue Patrick's recommendation I got a continuous ink system (this isn't the one we got) and to say I am in love is in an understatement. We purchased it new on Ebay. We still haven't completely got the color ink to print the colors exactly right but the b&w works awesome!! I think I could print non stop for a year before running out of ink.


Let me know if you have any questions about anything listed and I would love to hear what school tools you love!!!

Penguins

I have been meaning to post about our penguin activities for a week now but life has been busy:) I could not believe how many fun penguin printables and activities I found on other blogs and sites!! I love the Internet. Anyway, we had a lot of fun learning about these cute little guys. Here are some of our activities:

Reading lots of penguin books while eating goldfish of course!
Playing a penguin grid game from here (such an awesome site)

We used the printables from here to make words ending in at

I made a little sensory tub of cotton balls and the McDonald's penguins. Both girls enjoyed this.

Penguin dot marker pages from here

Learn to draw a penguin. This great idea came from here

Matching penguin colored hats to the right penguin

Making penguin puppets. I used Ellie's penguin as the circle time leader the next day and the girls loved this. They directed all of their questions etc. to the penguin. I really thought Ellie would think this was silly but she surprised me!

We also painted the bottom of our feet black and white and two of our toes orange and made really cute penguins out of the footprint. I didn't get any pics because I had a 4 year old and 2 year old with paint on their feet so you understand! If you want to see the finished product check out this site where I got the idea.

We finished off the week with the movie Happy Feet and these yummy treats. They were tasty. I got the recipe from here. Basically it is an Oreo dipped in dark chocolate with white chocolate bellies and orange chocolate feet and beak.