Favorite Games

Ellie and Emily both love to play games and I love that Emily is old enough to take turns and understand how to play for the most part. Here are some of our favorites.

What are some of your kids favorite games?

Baked Peanut Butter Oatmeal

I have been in major baking mode lately. I have tried several new recipes lately but nothing to write home about until I made this yummy oatmeal this morning that came from here! I really liked it especially with milk poured over top. Let me know if you try it!!


Peanut Butter Baked Oatmeal
3 cups quick cooking oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter, melted
2 eggs
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup peanut butter
Mix all ingredients together and stir well. Spread in a greased 9×13 pan. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes. If you like it a little crunchy on top cook for a few minutes longer. Serve with warm milk poured over top. Enjoy!

Emily's Chores

Emily has wanted a chore pack like Ellie's for months. In the mornings when Ellie would clip on her pack Emily would ask where her chore pack was and I do mean every morning. Well this past weekend I finally made her one. She was so excited Monday morning. Honestly she was more excited then if it was time to open presents. She was running around squealing and showing us over and over. I only put one chore card in it each morning because she is too young to switch her cards around like Ellie does. Here chores are:
Monday: water plant
Tuesday :wipe down table after breakfast (she started doing this by standing in the chair and when I came back in the room she was on the table cleaning)

Wednesday: help mom load the washing machine

Thursday: dust the living room
Friday: help Ellie clean the playroom (I am sure I will spend this time refereeing all of their disputes)

She is so excited to be apart of our chore time and I hope it lasts:)

Spring

We are enjoying Spring so much and spending lots of time outside. We took 2 weeks off from workboxes and have just spent lots of times with friends and playing. I have also taken a little break from blogging. It hasn't helped that Emily has mucked up the camera with mud so I can't take any pictures. I always want to add pictures to my post:) Anyway, hopefully I will get the camera back in working condition soon and we are starting back with our workboxes tomorrow.


In other news I ordered Happy Phonics a few weeks ago and I am so excited to get started. I think it will be so fun because it is just lots of games!! There is a lot of cutting and putting together but luckily I enjoy doing that sort of thing. I am also almost done with our circle time board that you are seeing all over the blogs. I will post about that soon!

Nature Bag

The girls and I are going on quite a few nature walks lately and they always want to bring things home with us. I decided to make them an over the shoulder nature bag so I don't end up carrying all of their finds!! I followed this easy tutorial and it was really simple. I purchased a pair of cargo pants from Goodwill and cut a section of the leg off that included the cargo pocket. I stitched the bottom and hemmed the top and sewed ribbon for the strap and viola! We played with our friends recently in the woods and when we were in the car she pulled out several earthworms from the pocket. I was thinking of putting colored pencils in the pocket so we could sketch nature pictures.....silly me!!

Doesn't it go great with her PJ's???

Easter Weekend

We had a great Easter weekend even if the girls over dosed on junk and were not on there best behavior (I am being nice). We spent some time at church enjoying crafts and an Easter egg hunt, we had fun dying eggs and getting dressed up (believe it or not my girls really think getting dressed up is fun) for church on Easter. I wanted to get some cute pictures of the girls in there Easter dresses but that is easier said then done!!! The first few turned out like this:

but then I got a few of these:

and I was happy! Hope everyone had a wonderful Easter!

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:)