Days of the Week Craft - www.PlayAlongWithUs.com

My husband and I just recently launched Play Along With Us, a brand new YouTube channel for kids that's fun, funny, educational and doesn't suck. 

Have you even SEEN the crap out there that people poop out and slap the label "KIDS" on it? It's embarrassing - and sometimes flat out insulting!

So we're aiming to change that. 

Check out www.PlayAlongWithUs.com

So far we have launched a few videos, ranging from the Abc's to Old MacDonald's Farm. Another Play Along video's focus is learning the Days of the Week. That's a concept I have struggled with teaching (and maybe I tried to avoid it and hoped that she would just learn it on her own). There's a small handful of decent songs or activities I found on Pinterest that you can try to use to help teach them the correct sequence of days. Really though, other than pointing to a calendar and chanting the days of the week, there's not a lot of options. 

Enter Play Along! 

Palmer came up with a catchy song and ridiculous scenario on the YouTube video to visually show the days of the week in their appropriate sequence. 

We also came up with a corresponding craft of our own that incorporates color matching, word recognition and fine motor skills. 

(Oh, boy that sounds so official!)

And, the beautiful thing is this is all you need!

2 copies of a color swatch, 7 clothespins, a sharpie, glue and scissors

I grabbed 2 copies of swatches from 5 different colors because making the Week Chart different colored was appealing to me but you can make it a little easier on yourself and just do one color palate! 

If you're making them colorful: Choose which color you would like to start with. I chose blue so the first square (Sunday) is blue. Next I cut out a green square and glued it onto the second square (Monday) of the blue swatch. Then I cut out a red square and glued it onto the third square (Tuesday). Continue cutting and gluing squares to your heart's content. 

If you're sticking to one color palate: look at how beautiful the colors are and skip all of the aforementioned work.

Then take your second copy of the color swatches and cut out a sample of the matching color squares you previously cut and glued. Glue these samples to the clothespins. 

Finally, write on each clothespin the day of the week that matches the color sample on the clothespin and the color square. (Beginning with Sunday and ending with Saturday.)

I emphasized the beginning of the names of the days because they are often shortened and labeled that way but that part is totally up to you!

Once the glue is dry, match them up! See how many different games you can make with it! 

Done!

Easter Bingo - Free Printable!

Maybe it's just us but this family loves Bingo. We found a Halloween Bingo game from The Crafting Chicks
that we printed out and played almost through Thanksgiving. We used it as a way to dish out our Halloween candy a little more gradually.

So, why not implement the same thing for Easter candy? Not that you need a reason for a good game of Bingo, though. Feel free to save and print the images for yourself! Just make sure you print an extra one out for calling cards. Happy Easter!

Card 1

Card 2

Card 3

Card 4

Toilet Paper Roll Bunnies

We made these a few years ago with a toddler friend of ours using two toilet paper rolls and scrapbook paper (oh, and the ever essential googly eyes).

At the time they were both 2 so I did the cutting and most of the glue work but they enjoyed decorating them and it kept their attention for a solid 10 minutes so that's a win!

I thought they turned out pretty gosh darn cute.

Recycling doesn't get much cuter.

Marbled Milk Paper

It's springtime so, naturally, we're a little obsessed with rainbows and color.
I've also been desperately trying to find easy crafts that I already have the supplies for to keep my 4 year old busy.

In comes Marbled Milk Painting to save the day!

Thank you to babble dabble do for the idea!

Materials needed:

Milk (I use almond milk)

Dish soap

Q Tips or Toothpicks

Food coloring

Watercolor paper (Unfortunately, we did not have watercolor paper so I used regular ol' computer paper which didn't turn out quite as pretty)

Tray/Shallow dish

Step 1: Cut your watercolor paper to a size that easily fits in your dish/tray. (Keep the trimmed paper nearby, you'll want to work quickly once the colors are swirled!)

Step 2: Pour roughly 3 - 5 tablespoons of milk into the dish. (Enough milk that a thin layer covers the bottom of the dish.)

Step 3: Add drops of different colors of food dye in the milk around the dish.

Step 4: Add drops of dish soap around the food coloring. The dish soap will start interacting with the colors!

Step 5: Use a Q Tip or toothpick to start swirling the colors.

Step 6: Before the colors get too mixed together (like above...) dip one of the sheets of paper into the colors. Press gently. Lift and set aside to dry. Repeat!

We're going to do this again with watercolor paper - it will definitely turn out even more pretty!

Christmas!! (Preschool Style)

To catch last year's ADVENTure, click here!

It is, literally, the most wonderful time of the year. 

To start the Christmas extravaganza off, here's a list of our favorite Christmas books we're reading!

• Mo Smells the Holidays by Margaret Hyde (book applicable to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Years)
• Asleep in the Stable by Will Hillenbrand
• Who's Getting Ready for Christmas by Maggie Kneen
• That's Not Santa! by Leonard Kessler
• The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden
• Santa's Favorite Story by Hisako Aoki
• Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett
• Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett
• Bear Stays Up for Christmas by Karma Wilson
• The Friendly Beasts by Tomie dePaola
• Llama Llama Holiday Drama  by Anna Dewdney
• I've Seen Santa! by David Bedford
• Santa Comes to Little House by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
• The Golden Christmas Treasury by Rick Bunsen
• Thank You, Santa by Margaret Wild
• The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg
• The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore (I love the one we have illustrated by Bruce Whatley)
• Animals with Baby Jesus (That's one we made from 1+1+1=1's Nativity printable pack!)

We began the month out with a ton of material from 1+1+1=1 (which totally confuses my brain when I read it). This link here is the rundown of the plethora of printables, activities and exercises she offers that are different than many other's I've found.
From the above link there is a Nativity Pack we're having a lot of fun with!

Doing exercises like this

and this

 and making up size comparison games.

This nativity pack also included a graphing game that we actually had a lot of fun with! I know, "graphing game" sounds like a horrible way our junior high math teacher tried to fool us into thinking math was fun. It wasn't junior high and it was fun. Try it!
   

This was Bella's victory pose.


This is not really a preschool craft or activity but Bella helped me make it so...I guess it is now!

I've plugged Oopsey Daisy so many times and guess what? I'm doing it again. She had these action cards similar to some Halloween ones of hers that we really enjoyed so I had to use those again.

You can print yours out HERE.

The 4 of us squealed and laughed playing with these so, naturally, I highly recommend them!

These alphabet mazes were also a good time killer and helped with our introduction to lowercase lettters!

Christmas trees!

Somehow I thought my 11 month old could help me make her own tree. She was bent on destroying her sister's instead.

Bella loves the books Gingerbread Baby and Gingerbread Friends both by Jan Brett so after reading Gingerbread Friends one afternoon we made some of our own.

PS: Jan Brett offers coloring pages for her books at this link here!

Christmas play dough!

We made this play dough using Teaching 2 and 3 Year Old's recipe. It calls for added peppermint extract, glitter and vanilla extract. Genius!

Dude. Ok. I think the songs with little actions to them are cute when kids do them but I feel like SUCH an idiot doing them. But Bella really enjoys them so, alas, I broke down. Here are a couple that we've been singing this month:

(sung to the tune of Row Row Row Your Boat)
(hold hands in pairs facing each other, just like in Row Row, but pretend to be in sledges whooshing through the snow!)
"Christmas day is coming soon,
Santa’s on his way!
Bringing toys for girls and boys,
On his magic sleigh!"

(sung to the tune of Are You Sleeping?)
"Christmas Pudding, Christmas Pudding,             (hold an imaginary bowl)
Nice and Hot (blow)  nice and hot, (blow)                   (blow on the hot pudding!)
Sprinkle on the sugar, sprinkle on the sugar,     (sprinkle imaginary sugar)
Eat the lot!  Eat the lot!  "                 (pretend to eat it & rub your tummy!)

ADVENTure 2013:
Last year our advent mittens were a serious hit with my then 2 year old. I bought the mittens at Hobby Lobby for a whopping $3 and added activities and other fun things to do each day to the back of them. With the introduction of the Kindness Fairies this year (mentioned below) it changed up some of our mittens so I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out!

Day 1: Watch a Christmas movie with egg nog! 
This girl. I tell you. She loves her some egg nog. We watched Santa Paws (lucky us) and had to ration the egg nog throughout the evening. It was a wonderful start to the Christmas season!

Day 2: A note from the Kindness Fairy, Floriella
Floriella had left her note for Bella that morning and when Bella returned from preschool she went down to get her Day 2 mitten and found Floriella with another note attached to her mitten! It read something like, 'Let's do something nice for the family today!'. I don't really know that that actually happened but it was a nice idea.

Day 3: Make something special for breakfast!
That morning we made Eggnog French Toast with a recipe I found from Adventuress Heart. It made for a cozy, festive morning :)

Day 4: Make a treat for a neighbor!
So, maybe I took an easy out here, but we have to make as many dozens of cookies as we can for a fundraiser for Bella's preschool. So we decided to put our efforts into making them for the school instead of giving them to a neighbor, which, maybe isn't the most generous thing to do to spread Christmas cheer...but it will make the school some money so, that's Christmas cheer, right?

Day 5: Take treats to daddy's work!

Day 6: Follow the clues to a special surprise!
Oh boy, Bella followed the clues to a new fairy friend, Brilliana!

Day 7: ...I've lost the mitten and have no idea what we did.
Yup.

Day 8: Write a letter to someone!

Day 9: Make a card for someone!

Day 10: Follow the clues for a special surprise! Watch a Christmas movie!
Mom fail: I totally forgot to set up the "clues" to introduce the new Kindness Fairy. Bigger mom fail: it didn't dawn on me until after I finished reading the mitten. She gasped and started looking behind her where she had found a note the first time. It's then I had to fess up and say I forgot to get things ready. Her face melted and she let out a cliche "Awwww" of disappointment. And then, ever so quickly, I exclaimed, "Ohhhh I just read the wrong part!" and peeled off the "fairy clue" note I had taped over last year's "Watch a movie" action. She cheered and we ran up stairs. Phew.

Kindness Fairies:
We're also doing something different this year: we've introduced Kindness Fairies thanks to The Imagination Tree. It's an alternative to the Elf on the Shelf that encourages small, daily acts of kindness. That's not to say the Elf needed an alternative, necessarily, but let's just face it: he's a little creepy. And this way I don't have to buy an elf.
I love the playfulness of the Elf but don't care for anything else about him. I was going to have Bella's stuffed animals pull similar Elf shenanigans until the Kindness Elves were introduced and, oh, how perfect, I had 5 fairy ornaments I was going to surprise Bella with anyway. Thus, the Kindness Fairies will be making their appearance throughout the month!

First up was Floriella, who left a note and fairy dust for Bella to wake up to:

The first thing Bella said was, "What is all this glitter?" The next thing Bella said was, "I didn't do it..."

And there she was!

The next day, Floriella played a game of Honey Bee Tree with some of Bella's friends.
Jewels the monkey won.

She also had a note for Bella encouraging her to do something nice for someone at school that day. Bella told me she didn't do anything, though, even though I said Floriella would love if she did. Oh well, we'll try again.

  Also, she flew to daddy's work on a unicorn and wrangled a nasty dragon. She may be sweet with a side of hoaky but she can kick some tail. (Wow. Shameful pun.)

On one of her ADVENTure mittens, she was instructed to follow clues upstairs where she would find a new fairy friend, Brilliana! (BTW, I didn't actually name these fairies. Their names are on their boxes. Shh.)

When we came home from preschool there was a note on the garage door saying the fairies needed help! Bella found them up in the fan!


And then they got into our cookies we got from preschool. Geeeez.

Chillin with Ariel.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving! Preschool style! Go!

On November 1st I dug through my scrapbooking paper and plastered a Thankful Tree on our front door. It probably goes without saying because most people have seen a variation of some sort of this, but the idea is to place a leaf  on the tree for each day of the month representing something you're thankful for. I was really looking forward to trying this out this year because I've seen all kinds of versions of this. 

However, parents of children over 2 know about these "rebellious seasons", if you will, that children fall in and out of. We've been coasting drama free for months so I knew it was coming. But, day 2 of the Thankful Tree was the beginning of yet another phase of No's, sassy attitude, snobby disposition, etc. So, getting her to even tell me something she's thankful for is a chore leaving our tree looking not only naked but pretty ungrateful. 

I say all that to shred apart any kind of idea that this house is a crafty and adorable little seasonally appropriate paradise where children happily glue googly eyes to anything and prance around singing our new holiday songs with visual aids flailing around in the air. Oh, no. Oh. No. 

If I looked like a creepy dead hand, I would probably be pretty ungrateful too.

She was interested in making a toilet paper roll turkey, though. 

 I'm plugging my favorite blog's resource again, so here it comes. Oopsey Daisy's Mommy School packet about Thanksgiving had lots of cute printables, games and songs. One that was a HUGE hit was the Turkey Hunt! I printed off the provided turkeys, laminated them and taped them around her room. When I called her in she lit up with excitement - so worth it!

Isla even found one! 

I can't help but collect leaves when it's autumn. I never do anything with them except leave them laying around the house to crumble and clutter, which is weird. But not this year! This time we used leaves we collected to make a turkey with leaf feathers! 

Finally. A use for my obscure collecting habits.

My husband had the genius idea to use a leaf to create his beak too. Props and applause, husband. I like it.

The Mommy School packet also provided a book about Thanksgiving Colors that we laminated and hole punched to clip onto a...I don't know what that's called. Binder ring? Whatever, you've probably seen one before. What I love about this is it's one of the few things I can actually include my 10 month old in playing with and my 3 year old can read it by herself. Awesome. 

Blogger keeps uploading this upside down. Lame.

 Once again, the Mommy School packet provided another fun game for us to play - T riddles! I probably assembled them the hardest way possible, but it worked. I cut them out, laminated them, then hot glued the clue card and the picture card to the front and back of  a piece of cardboard. 

During this activity, the totally sassy and rebellious 3 year old teenager appeared again. The goal was to go through my (excessive) pile of magazines (because who has time to READ) and cut out pictures of food we would see at a Thanksgiving meal. It was an opportunity to work on our scissor cutting skills, learn about nutrition and portion size, blah blah, all good intentions. 

She refused to acknowledge that I was talking to her for a little while and when she finally answered my question of, "What the heck is the green food item up there and is it a fruit or vegetable", she said it was popcorn which she then said was a fruit. If she really thought that it was popcorn and that popcorn was a fruit, then ok, a lesson on food is needed and great. But she was a twerp about it. You just know your kids and know when they're being a smartass. (Sorry, sometimes that's just what they are.) So, I wasn't amused at all.

For her grand rebellious finale, she insisted that a giant plate of turkey was all she wanted, needed and was going to do. WELL. SCREW portion control and the food pyramid. Any other day I would have said, "Hey girl, I don't blame you! Now fill that plate with gravy and let's go!" but today was not that day. Because today wasn't Thanksgiving. And I was mad. So, here's a picture of our heaping plate of L-tryptophan.

On a lighter note, here's a coloring page I found somewhere a year or two ago! 

You should be able to save this image and then print it off if you're interested in coloring it!

Another game Mommy School had to print out was a letter game called Gobble, Gobble Game.  Sounds kind of lame but Bella really loved it, which is what matters. :) The way we played it, we each took turns drawing a turkey and if you could identify the letter and the sound it made then you could keep the turkey. The person who had the most letters at the end of the game wins! (And gets a piece of Halloween candy.) The twist in the game is that there are some turkeys that just say "Gobble!" and when that turkey is drawn, everyone has to run around the room acting like turkeys. Like I said earlier, you feel super dumb doing that but your kids laughing and genuinely enjoying every bit of it is totally worth it. 

To get the game, download the Thanksgiving packet here!

This isn't Thanksgiving related but Bella has been needing to work on her teen numbers so I made a number maze (using our kitchen tiles as a guide) to help her learn the sequence between 10 and 20.

This also isn't technically Thanksgiving related but it's a fall-ish counting dice game we used to distribute our snacks for snack time. You can get it from The Measured Mom along with a lot of other fall math activities.