Tot School: Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is such a fun day to celebrate with kids!

My husband and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day at all, which is fine by me;

however, I do want Sweet Pea to know what the day is about and why.

I still want to make it special for her, but I didn't want to spend money. My desire was to spend some really good quality time talking and making things special for our Love day.

Mother Goose Time to the rescue! 

Every month we get a Celebration Kit in our monthly box that helps us celebrate the holiday/season of that month. Enter in our Valentine Celebration Kit!  We used this kit for several days last week spreading out the activities and adding some more to celebrate the day of love.

On Monday, we met up with a bunch of our homeschooling and stay at home moms and had some fun craft time making our little LOVE BUG Headbands and then we made our own strawberry jam! 

(I couldnt take pictures since I didn't have permission, but here is Sweet Pea's creation)

After making the headband, we placed 3 strawberries and a little bit of sugar into a sandwich size bag. All the tots worked on their smashing and poking skills as they created their own strawberry jam, which they then placed on some homemade bread!  It was a delicious and fun snack! 

You could take it a step further and use a heart shape cookie cutter to cut the bread before spreading the jam.  Some kids did this, but not Sweet Pea.  Once that bread was in her hand, it was to her mouth... she doesn't mess around with food! Ha! 

On Tuesday, which was Valentine's Day, Sweet Pea and I worked on making Daddy a card using some of the supplies from our Celebration Kit.  We also used the Heart Stamp Mother Goose Time sent as our monthly shape stamper...Perfect!

As soon as Daddy walked in the door from work, Sweet Pea started hollerin, "DaDa card! DaDa card!"  It immediately put a smile on his face.

Growing up, breakfast for dinner was always such a special treat.  So that's what we did to make the day a little more special and different without spending money.

Sweet Pea LOVES to help in the kitchen, so she worked hard on stirring the pancake batter together with a touch of pink food coloring for just a little more pizzazz!  I used a 1/4 measuring cup to pour the batter into a heart shape.  We served our pink pancakes alongside scrambled eggs with cheese, smoked breakfast sausage, heart shaped bacon for daddy and me, and strawberry milk thanks to Nesquik!

 

To end the day, we did one last activity out of our Valentine Celebration Kit... a letter heart matching game.  Sweet Pea is into matching... in fact, she likes to match her bows and socks to what she is wearing that day! This activity was really easy for her, but she still enjoyed it.

At bedtime we read a few of our favorite LOVE books.

What a wonderful way to celebrate without spending more money on stuff!
Next month the Celebration Kit is on St. Patrick's Day and you can download it here! All you have to do is fill out the form!  It's a FREE download!

Happy Celebrating!

Tot School: Snow Day in Texas

I live in the Pineywoods of East Texas. It doesn't snow here.  In fact, I believe the last time we had snow (which was absolutely beautiful) it was 2009... let me see if I can find a picture....

Here we go.  These are colored pictures that are completely unfiltered.  That snow was like God had placed a beautiful fluffy blanket completely untouched across our town.  It was breathtaking.

That was 7 years ago, and it has not happened again since.  In fact, yesterday the temperature was about 78 degrees, but dropped about 50 degrees overnight. Get with the program, Texas.

Anyway.... my girl has never seen nor touched snow, and who knows when she will.  This whole week we focused on The Woodland in out Winter in the Woods unit.  I skipped the lessons on Pine trees and Pine cones since we live in the Pineywoods, and we focused on the 3 topics we never see around here:

Icicles, Snowmen, and Snowflakes.

The first thing Sweet Pea and I did during Snow Week was make SNOW using this recipe card provided by Mother Goose Time! 

I made a half batch which was plenty for me and my girl and she had a blast packing it into her 1/2 Tbsp to make half snow balls.  

 

It held it's shape well and even was cold to the touch!  It was a mess, but nothing 30 seconds with the vacuum cleaner couldn't handle.  Look at that cheesy grin!  Totally worth the mess for the memories.

We then made a snowflake in our Invitation to Create.

Coffee filter, watered down blue finger paint, glue, glitter, and a pipette.  

I always attach her coffee filters to water color paper.  If you take the filter off before it dries completely, it leaves some of the most beutiful abstract images on the paper.  I didn't remove the coffee filter this time. 

If your child is able to handle scissors, I would first suggest cutting the snowflake and then proceed to paint.  We did not cut ours. 

She worked on her fine motor skills squeezing the pipette to get the paint on her snowflake.

After the paint, she added glue and glitter! 

She decided she wasn't done with the paint and added more... in fact towards the end, she just dumped all that was left over her work.

 

Beautiful! I love getting up close shots of Sweet Pea's artwork.

The last thing we did during our Snow Week was build a snowman!  Our Little Goose Guide had suggested an activity called "Dress the Snowman" which was a felt activity of changing out what the snowman would wear.

Instead, I set out a tray for Sweet Pea to dress her snowman permanently with glue.

Before Sweet Pea took her nap, I read the book Snowmen at Night...twice.  She really loved the book and hidden pictures.  There are paperback versions for less than $6.00.

While she napped, I put this Invitation to Create together and placed it on her table. In her tray, I placed sequins, jewels, googly eyes, pom poms, buttons, and ribbon cut so Sweet Pea could make scarves if she wanted.  I used my cricut to cut several 3 different sized circles.  I was hoping she would build lots of different snowmen, but she only built a few.  

See that snowman with the heart?  When I turned him around, he looked like this!

Isn't that amazing!  I don't know if she planned this or what, but the way he came together is absolutely perfect! 2 green eyes, a straight nose, a red circle mouth and a heart right where his heart would be in his chest!  I was floored when I turned her work around and saw this!

To top it all off, our public library talked about Snowmen on Wednesday at our story time and had a craft set up for us to make paper plate snowmen which Sweet Pea is pointing to below. 

Even though the temperatures here would never allow for snow this past week, we absolutely loved all our snow activities provided by Mother Goose Time!

Crafting with Kids: Baking Soda Clay Ornaments

Every year I choose a special ornament that goes with something special that happened that year to add to our Christmas tree.  My mother-in-law did this and wrote the dates on all my husband's ornaments from his childhood and when he and I got married, I wanted to carry on the tradition.

This year has been an especially hard year for us and trying to find an ornament has proven quite difficult.  While scrolling through Pinterest, I found the answer to my dilemma...

make our own ornaments! Perfect. And with all our Mother Goose Time supplies, this would be fun, easy, and hopefully a family tradition!  

It started with this Pin (follow it for the BEST recipe...pure white clay goodness!)  

 

Once we made the clay and added a few drops of Peppermint Essential Oil to our recipe to trigger all the senses, we gathered our supplies, including our letter cookie cutters and shape stamps from Mother Goose Time.

Sweet Pea and I would make balls of clay. Afterwards I would press them flat with the bottom of one of our glass plates.  This allowed for a great circle shape that was equal in thickness and smooth in texture.  Sweet Pea would then get to work with her stamps and cookie cutters.  

We really wanted an ornament that was an "A", since Sweet Pea's name starts with "A".

Do not forget to use a straw or toothpick to make some holes to lace ribbon into your ornament!

Our ornaments needed drying time, so I put them on a cookie sheet and placed it on the counter for a few days, rotating them to help with the drying time.  The recipe made a ton of dough that keeps when wrapped in damp paper towels and in a plastic ziploc bag with hardly any air in it.  

It's sitting on my counter now, a full week later.  

Sweet Pea loved doing this activity so much that the next day she asked for her "White Playdough" to make some more ornaments.  So we used our "O" cookie cutter to make some wreaths.

After a few days of drying, it was time to paint our ornaments.  I put some red, yellow, and blue tempra paint into some cups for Sweet Pea and she grabbed her paintbrush. 

Mother Goose Time has given us so many opportunities to paint and work on fine motor skills, especially in their Invitations to Create!  I was so impressed with Sweet Pea's painting technique as she held the paintbrush.

     

Finger painting always wins out eventually, of course! 

After the ornaments dried, I laced some ribbon through the holes and put some glitter glue on the star.  I painted the "O" green and added embellishments to make our wreath ornament.  The pine cone pressing that Sweet Pea added to the "O" made the ideal texture for the wreath.

All of the ornaments are so beautiful on our tree and they are perfect to commemorate something great that happened this year:

all the learning, painting, and fun my girl and I have had with Mother Goose Time.