Making Fake Snow (Since December Brought Spring Temps)

If it won't snow we will just make our own!!!!  That is what I decided on one warm December day a couple of weeks ago.  The kids were going stir crazy because they were cooped up due to all the rain.  And I was completely over the insanely warm temperatures we were experiencing so we made SNOW!!!!  It was super simple, fun, and MESSY!!!  The recipe is cheap and easy; you take 2 parts corn starch to 1 part hair conditioner and mix away:-)  Enjoy!!!!!

Building Blocks PE Class

Building Blocks PE is a wonderful class that my kids absolutely love.  For just $5 per kid per class the wonderful PE skills they learn are a steal.  Check them out on their FACEBOOK page for more details about upcoming classes and locations:-)  The schedule has changed up a bit for summer but will be back to normal in the fall.  You can also follow their class schedule on our Facebook page for TAG Families- Knoxville.  This class will be part of our Monday co-op at Deane Hill Rec Center starting in the Fall.  I am going to post some pictures below from the class and then include a bio about the class's instructor Laban Propst.  This class is great for all children including children with special needs. 

Laban Propst is a pediatric exercise physiologist who earned a Master’s of Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  He is the creator of the Building Blocks program and has over 15 years of experience working with children.  While pursuing his Master’s degree, Laban uniquely focused on how exercise and motor development activities could be used to improve children’s development and overall health status.  He has also earned two Bachelor degrees, one in Physical Education and another in Exercise and Sport Science. 

Laban has developed and implemented programs for children at all developmental levels.  In collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Psychology department, he implemented his Building Blocks program for children on the Autism Spectrum as part of their widely recognized DREAM Camp.  He has also developed training programs and activity guidelines for teachers and childcare providers.  Most recently, Laban designed developmentally appropriate activities for Cherokee Health Systems’ Project Diabetes grant in Knoxville, TN. Laban’s passion is working with any child who can benefit from his experience and expertise. 

Laban continues to develop his Building Blocks program and has expanded its services to the field of therapy.  Where traditional therapy methods may fail, Laban uses exercise (exercise therapy) and motor development activities to help children with disabilities.  While in NC he implemented Building Blocks for children with severe cognitive, physical, and/or medical disabilities at Gateway Education Center.  Often children who participated in the Building Blocks program improved much quicker and improved skills or function at a higher level than expected from traditional therapy.

Laban’s mission in life is to improve the health and development of children and implement a new and exciting way to provide therapeutic services for disabled children.  From providing a superior physical education program to helping a disabled child improve development across multiple domains, Laban continues to help children every day.

Super List of 10 Sensory Ideas

Sensory skills are a big part of our homeschool experience.  We have came a long way in three years but we still benefit from the sensory activities that the kiddos love so much.

Activity 1- Cloud Paint- this is one of our all time favorite activities, it was also one of the very first messy, sensory activities we did in homeschooling. The awesome texture of this paint made from Elmer's school glue and shaving cream is just tons of fun!!!

Activity 2- Pumpkin Pie Play-Doh- this is a a great activity.  We tend to make this particular scented play-doh in the Fall but it will make your house smell wonderful all year long!!!

Activity 3- Erupting Pumpkins- Here is another Fall activity.  We do this one each year and the kids love it!! It is a bit messy so if possible I would do it outside, and the smaller pumpkins work better!!

Activity 4- Shaving Paint Leaves- you can do this activity with any shapes and any colors.  We did it in the Fall so we chose leaves. This activity is another messy one but it is so neat!!

Activity 5- Peppermint Play-Doh- Love this scented play-doh...perfect for Christmas!!!

Activity 6- Cookie Cutter Salt Dough Ornaments- This is a two day activity... Day 1 you mix, roll, cut out and bake the ornaments.  Day 2 you can paint them:-)  We do these every year also.  Granted the kids get distracted from the Christmas theme sometimes but that is okay.

Activity 7- Kangaroo Dot Painting- This is a great way to work those little fingers and to teach patient.  Q-tip painting is a great OT activity.  We did these for a marsupial unit study we were working on.

Activity 8- Ponybead Suncatchers- these are beautiful but tedious work for little hands.

Activity 9- Shapes and Art- This activity covers so many areas.  Art, Sensory, Fine Motor, Shape Review and of course FUN.  There are endless options of things you can create in this activity.

Activity 10- IceCream Dough and Rainbow Sprinkles- We love, love, love this activity.  It is so fun and it smells so good.  You can also make strawberry and chocolate icecream dough.

Critical Thinking Review.....Math Analogies Level 1

     This review is for Math Analogies Level 1 (which is for grades 2-3) a product from The Critical Thinking Company . This company offers over 150 different products covering all grades and subjects and I have used a couple of them previously.  I love their products but Math Analogies was not a huge hit in our house.  I love the concept and think that it 100% benefits the kiddos.  I was surprised at the analogies my children struggled with and also surprised at the ones they just sailed right through.  There is no doubt that this product encourages critical thinking skills (did you see what I did there) but for our house it was just a little too dry.  I had a hard time getting the kids to do it and usually they jump at the chance to work on their computer based school.  

     On the plus side Math Analogies Level 1 is a steal at only $6.99 for the Windows download so even though the kids aren't crazy about it I wouldn't hesitate to purchase it.  If I get them to work on it a couple of hours a week then I would call it a success because it requires them to think in ways that our everyday schoolwork does not.  I believe that one of the most important parts of child development that is overlooked is teaching our children to think in a variety of ways.   This product definitely covers a different way then what kids are used to and that is always a plus.  Problem solving skills are so important in our day to day existence and The Critical Thinking Company does a great job of encouraging those skills with this product.  Most kids will probably love it mine are just picky...they need lots of animation and color to keep them engaged.  

     I used this product with my both my 1st grader (he is advance in Math) and my 2nd grader (he's right on level).  My 2nd grader typically struggles more with his school work then my first grader as a general rule but on this product he excelled.  The analogies just seemed to click with his brain (proof that he is an out of the box thinker).  My 1st grader did wonderful it just didn't come as natural to him and I don't think it had anything to do with his grade level.  He excels at his daily work and tends to get "stuck" when I present anything a little different then what he is  accustomed to.  We plan on continuing to use this product for both the boys and will continue to make future purchases from The Critical Thinking Company.  

     Be sure you check out this company on all their social media.  Doing this is a great way to keep up with changes and special announcements that they make.  Plus it helps them no they have support and we want them to know that so they will keep offering these top of the line products!! Like their FACEBOOK page.  Follow them on TWITTER and of course PINTEREST.

    Please go check out the Schoolhouse Review Crew's  main post so that you can see what everyone else had to say about this company and their products.  My fellow reviewers are their to offer you a look into the same product as me Math Analogies Level 1.  And they can also give you a chance to check out other great products such as; Alphabet Song Game,

Math Analogies Beginning, Math Analogies Level 2, Editor in Chief Level 1, Editor in Chief Level 2, Pattern Explorer, and World History Detective Book 1.

    

Pajama Day at the Muse

Friday was Pajama Day at The Muse of Knoxville.  We hadn't been to this location since it was The Discovery Center.  They had lots of new exhibits and activities.  The kids all had a blast and they looked super cute in their pajamas.  This was a fun field trip with TAG Families-Knoxville.  We will definitely be returning to the Muse soon.

12 Months of FUN IDEAS!!! Start Your 2015 Out Right!!

To celebrate 2015 I am putting together a blog post of ideas that will last you 12 months.  These ideas are for your personal life, cleaning life, cooking life, parenting life, fun life, and homeschool life.

Personal.....There were tons of suggestions for 12 months of dates but this one was my favorite.  She put together some super cute date nights that cost very little!! So go learn how to set these up and you will guarantee at least one night a month for just you and your love even if you can't sneak out!!
12 Months of Date Nights

Cleaning....it doesn't matter how many plans and/or schedules I try for this it still seems like I'm playing catch up all year.  I'm going to share some neat ideas and hopefully you'll have better luck then me;-)
12 Months of Deep Cleaning
12 Months of De-Cluttering Charts
Cleaning and Organization Charts

Cooking.....If you are anything like me you spend a lot of time during the year cooking.  With 5 kiddos eating and a Husband I can never have too much food so I'm always looking for tips and new recipes.
12 Freezer Meals
Small Snack and Lunch Ideas for 12 Months

Parenting.....Sometimes okay all the time parenting is hard.  It doesn't matter how good our intentions are or how well we plan everything out there is always room for improvement....well in our house anyways;-)
15 Great Parenting Tips
Each Kid is Different....Maybe Parent Them Different

Fun.......One thing I have learned is that everything is a little easier when you're having fun.  I am lucky that my Husband is great at making us smile and laugh as often as he can:-)
 How to Have Fun on Your Kid's Level
Minute to Win It Games
12 Outdoor Family Fun Games


Homeschool....There are sooooo many ways to have fun during homeschool.  That's actually why we love homeschooling so much!!! The following are just some ideas that I found neat.
12 Months of Sensory Bins
12 Monthly Learning Calendars
12 Months Around the World
12 Months of Handprint Art
12 Months of Sensory Dough
12 Months of Calendar Songs

Salt and Watercolor Fall Leaves

We celebrated the 1st day of Fall with a new art project.  This was probably one of our favorite activities so far.  We used black glue to outline a printout of leaves.  You may be able to buy black glue somewhere but we just made ours.  Take a bottle of school glue that is about half empty, add black paint until it is about three quarters of the way full then shake.  Once you finish your outlines they will need to dry for at least three hours (we left ours overnight).

The next step is to use watercolor paint and paint your leaves.  Be creative and remember leaves in the Fall have lots of different color variations.  As you finish each leaf and before the watercolor paint drys sprinkle it with salt. 

When they are completely dry you can shake off the extra salt and you are all done.  We decided to cut ours out and glue them to construction paper.  The final result gave us some really neat almost frosted looking leaves.

Cherry Play Doh.......

Making out own play doh is one of the favorite activities at our house.  It feels and smells so much better then the store bought stuff (even if you don't add scents).  For Christmas we usually make peppermint play doh. We will probably do that again but the kiddos wanted red so we made red cherry play doh to start with this year.  Follow the same recipe for the peppermint but add in the red food coloring and cherry oil (I use the flavoring oils you would use in candy) in place of the peppermint.

 

The youngest loves all clay and will play for hours.  This very morning three out of the four kiddos here have been entertaining themselves with our cherry play doh for two and a half hours.  Definitely worth the $2 investment.  Store it in a air tight container or Ziploc bad and it will stay fresh for months!! Enjoy.....

Snow Day (Two Ways to do Paper Snowflakes) and Lose Your Mind

Today I decided to plan our day around a snowflake theme.  After trolling around Pinterest I came up with two activities to entertain us.  3D paper snowflakes and painted (old school) paper snowflakes.  Let me just say that whoever sat down and came up with the 3D paper snowflake either a) has way too much spare time b) has never attempted to do a craft with a child EVER or c) is an evil minion sent here to wreck havoc.  3D snowflake...I mean what was I thinking, it took my three yr old and I ONE HOUR to complete one and we messed it up!!! After much love, patience, and some cuss words (from Me not the preschooler) I realized we were supposed to have six pieces of paper not five.  The good news is from the first snowflake it can only get better.  The 2nd one only took THIRTY MINUTES (believe me that was great) and we used all six sections so it actually looked like it was supposed to.  By the time we got around to the 3rd snowflake I had it down.  It only took FIFTEEN MINUTES;-)  We stopped at three!!! They are cool looking but it might be something I would suggest for middle school kiddos and up.

Of course the kiddos had no appreciation for my uber complicated snowflake art (they are only 6, 5, and 3 after all).  They wanted to just make old school paper snowflakes.  The ones where you hand off white paper and scissors then spend the next 6 months picking up snowflake confetti.  I caved but I had to spice it up a little, right?  So we pulled out the paint and painted our white paper with different shades of white, blue and gray.  Then I went back to Pinterest (it's like a drug) and found some really cool paper snowflake templates. After they dried we (mostly I, the templates proved too complicated for little hands) cut out our snowflakes. They look great and are the favorites according to my boys.

We had a great afternoon of craft time but as a Mom I feel the need to point out a moral to the blog post..."If it ain't broke, don't fix it.".  I get so irritated about candy...yes I said candy.  The powers that be are constantly changing our Reese's, Snickers, and M&M's.  Why??  What is wrong with the originals??  Why do we need white chocolate and mint filled??  Well probably for the same reason I felt I needed 3D snowflakes and painted paper ones using templates....we are a World of one uppers.  It's the mind set of whatever you can do I can do better.  That's great....motivation is what will keep the World going BUT sometimes new doesn't equal better it just equals new.  My advice if your kiddos want to make paper snowflakes anytime soon then throw the copy paper and scissors at them while you load the dishwasher or whatever else you haven't been able to get to during the course of your day.  Sometimes kids need original!!!

Preschool Corner

 My youngest is three and we do lots of neat preschool activities during our homeschool time.  I also babysit my niece (who is three) and my little B (also three).  We do lots of coloring, painting and tracing on a day to day basis.  But since at three years old their attention spans aren't that great I wanted to do a lot of hands on learning. So onto Pinterest I went (click on the link to follow my homeschool board) where I found lots of neat little ideas. 

 

 

 

Above is one of my favorite I took a $1 cookie sheet and wrote the alphabet on it with sharpies.  Then I had a very talented friend of mine make me matching alphabet magnets (she makes all magnets special order and they are all beautiful).  The kids love matching the magnets to the written letters, we have one for Capital/Uppercase letters and one for Lowercase. 

The above activity is great for motor skills also.  I took a mini muffin tin and some pom-poms from the craft section.  The kiddos use tweezers to put them into the muffin slots.  Sometimes we do one per indention and sometimes I have them group the colors. 

 

This is great for learning color recognition.  I simply covered toilet paper rolls in construction paper and the kids sort the matching Popsicle sticks into the appropriate tube. 

 

 

 

 

Our newest activity is shape sorting.  I cut out various shapes from colored foam.  I taped shapes on the front of gallon Ziploc bags and they have to sort the shapes into the correct bag.  They like this one.

One of their favorite daily activities is to play with Thinking Putty.  It is a little pricey but we bought ours a year ago and have played with it for hours per day pretty much each day and it is still just like new!! We all love it; kids, adults, teenagers.  The preschoolers will sit at the kitchen table and play for up to 3 hours, it has saved my sanity more then once!!

To Chore or Not to Chore.....Getting Kids to Embrace Household Responsibility

Chore charts have always been a thorn in my side.  I would make them and by make I mean spend days obsessing over them until I had every single detail the way I wanted.  Then I would call a family meeting to explain the new chore system to the family, hang the chart up AND forget completely about it after the next few days.  We tried reward systems; if the boys finished their assigned chores then they received an allowance or a weekly treat.  But regardless of what I offered the boys would not step up to their responsibility of their chores.  I still spent “chore” time yelling and pleading for chores to be done….in the end I just did them myself.  Eventually I would give up on even attempting to follow the chore chart.

As time has gone on and the boys have gotten older the amount of daily chores in this house that fall to my shoulders and my Husband’s is getting a bit much.  We started slowly trying to encourage the boys to just step up and help when they saw it was needed BUT well if you have kids you know that method isn’t always successful.  Recently during a discussion with fellow homeschool Moms we spent some time going over different chore chart/system options.  One that caught my eye was an all-inclusive chore chart.  For this system you write down every chore that needs to be completed in your house for each specific time frame.  Then you can decide if you wish to offer incentives to go along with the chores.  My Husband and I chose a system that listed chores per day and came up with an earnings chart to use with it.  Whoever completes the chores simply initials the line beside the specific chore and then at the end of the week the earnings are totaled and paid out. The key here is to pay your incentives (cash in our house) as a family, this way each member of the household gets to witness how much the other members are earning.  Not sure about your house but in mine trying to one up a sibling is great motivation ;-)  The best part is that if Mom and Dad do the chores then Mom and Dad get the cash!!  The kids really hate that!!  We are on our 3^rd week and it is working great!! The boys have stepped up tremendously.  If they slack one day and Mom or Dad have to pick up the slack then we do, there is no fussing or reprimanding and surprisingly we haven’t really had an issue with that.  We’ve approached the new chore system with a pretty relaxed outlook.  Some days not everything gets checked off the list but even on the worse days we are still getting way more done then what we typically did.  The house is staying in order with much more ease and so much LESS STRESS for Mom!!!! 

I will put in updates every now and then but I think this is one chore chart that will actually continue to work for us.  I am going to attach a copy of our family chore chart and earnings chart.  Feel free to use/edit how you would like or just check out to give you an example of this systemJ

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

BlogThis! Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Earth Day (crafts, worksheets and Dirt Cake) We love doing outdoor activities and do our best to preserve Mother Nature as we come in contact with it.  I wouldn’t exactly call us a green family but we try.  Go ahead I just dare you to litter in front of my 5 year old….the lecture on personal responsibility and facts about our Planet that follow will be at least 20 minutes long.  We don’t litter in this family…..it ranks right up there with bullying.  Do we recycle no?  No not as a habit…we will if we are out and it’s convenient but at home it confuses me.  That’s not an excuse but I just haven’t set aside the time to set up a system that works for our house yet without causing a big headache.   It’s on our list of future projects.  We did several neat projects on Earth Day even the little ones joined in.  First we made watercolor Earths…not the original idea called for coffee filters but we didn’t have any.  If you are like us and live in the land of the Keurig then you probably don’t either ;-)  I improvised with art paper…it’s thicker than regular copy paper.  We colored our Earth with magic markers and then spritzed with water to allow the colors to blend together.  I placed them outside so they would dry quicker.  I won’t lie the coffee filters would of probably worked better but the effect was still pretty neat and we had a blast (yes I made Earth also…I love new art techniques). After that we had some fun with our dot stampers and some neat printouts.  The older kiddos did a few more complicated color by number worksheets.  Our final activity for the day was a dirt cake.  This is one of my favorite memories from childhood.  I remember spending the night with my aunt and thinking she was crazy to make a big mess in a flower pot and then call it cake.  BUT I remember it being delicious!!  I thought this would be a great Earth Day snack.  My kids thought  I was losing it…they had never heard of it and when I ask my Husband to grab fake gummy worms, a flower pot and fake flowers on the way home he just gave me a blank look.  Our 5 year old was so concerned that he woke up on Earth Day saying “this is the day we have to eat dirt cake, with worms in it…are you sure about this Mom?”  But they should have had more faith in me because everyone had a blast and it is YUMMY!!! Dirt Cake Recipe 3 ½ cups of milk 2 ½ packs of Oreos (crushed to dirt texture) 1 cup powdered sugar 2 small packages of instant vanilla pudding ½ stick softened butter 8 oz. cream cheese 12 oz. cool whip 8 inch flower pot, fake flowers and gummy worms are optional.  You can also make it summer themed by putting it in a sand pail. Mix together the butter and cream cheese until creamy then add your powdered sugar.  Add your milk to your pudding in a separate container (whisking) then let it sit for about 10 minutes.  Whisk the cool whip into your pudding and then combine it with your cream cheese mixture.  Place a layer of foil in the bottom of your flower pot and then add a layer of crushed Oreos.  Alternate all the way to the top between the Oreos and pudding mixture.  Cover the top with remaining crushed Oreos and add your fake flowers and some strategically placed worms ;-)  Enjoy!!! What did your house do for Earth Day? Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) Just Us!! Our family.... About Me Alecia View my complete profile Pinterest per page --> Thanks for Stopping By!! This is a informative blog detailing our homeschooling experience. It comes complete with weekend adventures, arts and crafts, educational activities, and links to curriculum. I am currently doing Preschool, 4th grade, and 6th grade. Back to School Banner 2 Watermark theme. Powered by Blogger.