A Very Berry Birthday Party

Quincy requested a Strawberry Shortcake birthday party.
I told her that since she was turning 5, she could choose 5 friends to invite.
She chose Brightyn, Hannah E., Hannah G., Phoebe, Addison, Baylee, and Leah...which obviously adds up to more than five. I told her to choose only five and she simply shrugged and said, "I did, plus the other friends, and don't forget Reese and Corbin, too. I want them at my party."

Oh well. We ended up with 1o kids at the house, and it was pretty crazy, but they had fun and that's what matters.

I got her a pair of green and white striped tights to go with a pink and red dress she already had, so she could look like Strawberry Shortcake at her party. Minutes before the party, Quincy dressed herself and announced she was Lemon Meringue (complete with the hand mirror, just like her toy Lemon Meringue.) She asked to have her hair braided and then we put yellow flowers on her shoes, since she was sad that she didn't have any yellow shoes to wear. Funny girl.
The girls colored Strawberry Shortcake pictures while the guests arrived. Years ago, I mentioned to Lynda that I had loved Strawberry Shortcake when I was little, and was so excited to see it coming back. Lynda went into her magical Mary Poppins garage and then searched several fabric stored in Boise and gave me a collection of both new and vintage Strawberry Shortcake fabric. I used it to decorate Q's party and it was really cute. I also made the little bunting hanging above the food, a pillowcase for Quincy, crib set and tiny pillow for the baby doll crib that we gave her for her birthday present, and 6 cloth diapers for her babies with the fabric. She loves everything. I'll try to remember to take a picture of the pillowcase, and doll bedding and diapers later. I love that they look like toys I would have played with as a child because they have an old school Strawberry Shortcake on them. Thanks, Lynda, for the fabric! I have been saving it for years, waiting for the perfect thing to make with it. Quincy's birthday was berry-riffic!
I printed images from the Internet of all the Strawberry Shortcake characters and made little cupcake toppers with a craft punch. Quincy's friend chose Raspberry Torte, Plum Pudding, Orange Blossom, Lemon Meringue, Strawberry Shortcake, or Blueberry Muffin cupcakes.

Since the party was so close to dinnertime, we had a lot of snacks for the kids. We had pigs in a blanket, and Quincy chose strawberries, grapes, teddy grams, Cheetos, raspberries, strawberry soda and fruit shaped mini marshmallows. The girls watched a 10 minute Strawberry Shortcake movie, ate, had cake and presents, and played a Strawberry Shortcake Bingo game that I made with card stock and strawberry shortcake images that I found online and shrunk down to 1 inch, then printed and cut out to make stickers and game boards. Every time the girls got a bingo, they chose from Strawberry shortcake lip gloss and nail polish, snack mix, pencils, fruit snacks, bubbles and stickers to put in their party bags. Quincy was a gracious host and thanked each of her friends for coming. She is already planning next year's party. If I'm smart, I'll plan further ahead for that one ;)

For preschool, she took Strawberry cupcakes with strawberry marshmallows and strawberry frosting on them. Her classmates sang to her and she got to wear a paper crown (that she loved so much she slept with it on, at nap time.)

December 4th (her actual birthday) began with Quincy waking up in the morning and asking each of us how we slept. This was quickly followed up with, "Are you going to tell me, 'Happy Birthday,' now? Hey did you know that I am five, today?" I love her so much. She makes me laugh and smile every day. She is super awesome, creative, kind, and unique. And her laugh...oh her laugh! Everyone should get to hear it.

Happy Birthday, Quincy Brooklyn. I am so grateful for you. We love having you in our family and enjoyed celebrating your 5th birthday with you! You are a lovely little lemon scented gem.
I love you very berry much!

Friendly Frogs It's Autumn Time

Book: Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson
I like to have the children count down 5-4-3-2-1 to wake up bear in this book.

Book: Discovering the Seasons: Autumn By Louis Santry
I love this series of books. We talked about all of the things that happen in the Autumn that make it special and different than other seasons.

Book: Red Lead, Yellow Leaf and The Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert

The children enjoyed the illustrations in Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf--The text is a little too advanced for this group. They had fun making a "leaf man" of their own during outside time.

Share: Bring something that begins with letter B

Practical Life: I can wait in line

(Our line leader looks thrilled, doesn't he? Hahaha!)


Music & Movement: “It’s Autumn Time”, “the Leaves on the Trees”, “One By One” using real leaves to hold and make blow in the wind

Sensory: Our "open center activities" all began with a B sound. Books, Babies, Blocks and Beans

Calendar: How many days until Thanksgiving?

Math: Sorting acorns-place acorns in groups of five

Art: Five Leaf Placemats
The children collected leaves, put them in laminating envelopes and sent them through "the magic machine" to make these awesome placemats.

Fine Motor: Letter B WikkiStick template

Gross Motor: Leaf pile fun!

Language: B words (baloon, bike, bear, Baylee, boy, Brian the Bobblehead Baseball player that wears Blue, belt, backpack, brown, bed, baby, book) from sharing day items

(B for Baylee)

Science: We examined items from nature (acorn, leaves, sticks, and a rock)under a magnifying glass and read The Magnifying Glass book and Why Do Trees have Leaves?

Language Arts: Ask the children,

What is your favorite thing about Autumn time?

Why do trees have leaves?

Record answers

Busy Bees-one more (was I really this far behind in preschool posts?)

What Makes a Rainbow?/St. Patrick's Day
Share: Wear Green for St. Patrick's Day!
Book: What Makes a Rainbow? By Betty Ann Schwartz
Book: The Umbrella By Jan Brett (I love her books...check out the website janbrett.com-great stuff!)

Sensory: Taste the Rainbow (no...not with skittles, with fruit!)
I gave the kids little umbrella (U is the letter this month) toothpicks to their fruit with.
The photo makes this look totally gross, but it really was a pretty yummy snack.
red apples, orange orange slices, yellow pinapple chunks, blueberry yogurt dip, green kiwi (that only Quincy was willing to eat...and I think she ate all of it!) and purple grapes.
Science: Color Mixing
I filled canning jars with yellow and blue water, and gave them pipettes to transfer the water into empty jars and create green.

Fine Motor: Cutting paper strips for art
The children were given several strips of colored paper to cut into squares for our sticky art.

Language: U-Words and U art. We added to our list of U-words (underwear, utensil, umbrella...) and then I drew large pictures on sheets of cardboard for the children to color.

Art: Class Rainbow Sticky-Art
A large rainbow is drawn and labeled with colored pens.
I then put strips of double stick tape down in each of the layers of the rainbow.
The children placed colored paper pieces that they had cut up earlier onto corresponding rows to make a giant rainbow. This center was open all day, and each of them took turns adding to the rainbow. They were impressed with the end result. Teamwork!
Art: Watercolors
The kids painted while I read "What Makes a Rainbow" to them. I'd suggest using card stock for this age group. Some of the artwork got a little soggy, but they had fun exploring with paint and colors nonetheless.
Dramatic Play: Brown Bear Brown Bear by Bill Martin Jr
I made (and laminated, of course) silhouettes of the animals from the book and the children acted out the story. This is a good one to act out because the lines are simple and have a call/repeat pattern of lyrics.
Class: "Brown Bear Brown Bear, what do YOU see?"
Child (holding the bear): "I see a Yellow Duck looking at me."
Class: "Yellow Duck Yellow Duck, what do YOU see?"
Child (holding the yellow duck): "I see a Red Bird looking at me"
Class: "Red Bird, Red Bird, What do YOU see?" ...etc

It's the cutest thing ever. I should recorded it.

Busy Bees

Time for a little preschool update.

I am so behind on posting about it that I think I'll just take a photo or two each week and post those with a brief caption, so at least I have SOMEthing documented from our learning adventures. Someday in the dead of winter when I have some time on my hands, I'll go back and fill in everything we did with better detail.

Last week: Brrr! It's COLD outside!
Language: What do you wear in the Winter time?

Practical Life/Fine Motor: Clothesline
I gave the children an assortment of mittens, gloves, wash cloths, socks and knit hats to hang on a giant clothesline that I set up in the living room. It took some of them awhile to figure out how to manipulate the clothespins to open and then get them to close on the line, but they were determined and it was fun to see the "spark" go off in their head when, one by one, they each figured it out. THAT is why I teach. I love those moments. Once everything was on the line, one little guy started stripping down his own clothes to hang. It was pretty cute to see him so serious about getting the work done.

Literature: I revolved all of my curriculum for the day around these two books:
The Mitten by Jan Brett is a great little book about a boy who loses a white mitten in the snow in his way out to play. Several woodland critters make their home in the mitten until finally a tiny mouse squeezes in and tickles the bear's nose. Bear sneezes, and the result sends the animals back into the forest and the mitten flying into the air, where Nicki finds it on his way home.

The author has an EXCELLENT website full of activities and free printable color pages to download. To enjoy it with your little one, go here.

Dramatic Play: I printed and laminated masks of each of the woodland characters in the book, and after reading though the story, we acted it out as a class. Click the pic to enlarge. Like all Jan Brett books, the illustrations are fantastic.
When we got to the part where the Bear sneezes, I was reminded by one little girl that "You're supposed to cover your nose when you sneeze, Mrs. Meg...you are spreading GERMS!" {pardon me}


One Mitten by Katherine O'Connell George is a rhyming book where a little girl loses her yellow mitten.

Gross Motor: One hand and Two hand activities: When the little girl in One Mitten loses her mitten, she thinks of everal activities that can be done with just one hand (waving hello, shadow puppets, etc). When she finds her other mitten, she jumps for joy and claps her hands, then does a series of two handed activities, ending with holding the hand of a friend who wants to play. We took turns doing each of the activities listed, then came up with a bunch of our own. I'm pleased to say that "Noooooo Pushing!" was listed as a two handed activity. My Busy Bees are awesome, I am always amazed at how well such a young group of kids sit and participate in story time.

PreK: Mitten Match

Remember when I made these? I pulled out the letters for each of the kid's names, and the letters we have done in preschool so far and we played memory match with them, pairing upper and lower case letters. It was helpful for these little guys that the colors match too ;). Once they had a pair, they could go hang it on the clothesline.

That's not all we did, but all that I took pictures of. We did a science, a sensory, a math, an art project and a bunch of Letter Cc/Kk activities.

I love my job.

"Hey Everybody, It's Family Night..."

I am willing to admit that I have spent an unhealthy amount of time with the laminater lately.

But what I have to show for it so far are 40 ready-to-go, cut, colored, and laminated Family Home Evening lessons. I have 52 lessons in the drawer, and hope to be finished laminating them by the end of the week. That should be enough for an entire year, since we have FHE once a week, but I got about half of the lessons through swaps with other moms, and therefore many of the topics are WAY above anything that my young kids would be entertained by, let alone understand. But 2 years ago, that would have applied to about 90% of the lessons, so I'm glad I started putting them together and builing a collection early. I'm trying to put together more lessons that are age appropriate for MY little ones, so about half the time I end up creating a lesson that day, rather than drawing from this reserve.

I'm doing another lesson swap at the end of this month (where everyone makes 5 copies of the same lesson, then we trade and have 5 different lessons that are ready to go) with moms that all have really young kids, so all the lessons should be age appropriate and have fun activities for my family. I can't wait to use them. I love Monday nights, and the girls love them too. It is so fun to be able to finally put some of them to use and witness my children benefit from my hard work and preparation!
...and before you call me an over-achiever,

Let me just assure you, right now, that many of our evenings go as follows...
We sing Popcorn Popping
An opening prayer is said by one child, while the other runs in circles around the living room.
We attempt a 5 minute lesson on "reverence" (see line above)
We play a rockin' game of Lucky Ducks together, until Quincy has succesfully snatched enough of the Duckies to make the game impossible to play.
We attemt to coax Q back into the room and give us the ducks.
She giggles and runs away.
Pieces chases Q.
Daddy chases Reese.
Mom chases Dad.
More giggles.
Reverence is long gone out the window.
We have a closing prayer anyway...which is very similar to the opening prayer, but with two children now running around in circles and giggling ... and sometimes a Daddy too.
I get mad that no one is even listening and why did I bother.
Reese reminds me that Jesus is watching me and I shouldn't be so grouchy.
More running.
We end up in the kitchen and eat the snack the girls prepared before Aaron got home...or sometimes just open a bag of chips and onion dip and stuff our faces until our breath is so bad we can no longer stand to be in the same room with each other.
Kids go to bed.
Aaron and Meg bust out the ice cream.
The latest fave? French Vanilla ice cream and Tropicana Some Pulp Orange Juice floats---don't knock it 'till you rock it.

...and THAT is a perfect evening.

"Don't YOU, Forget About Me.."

On Being Prepared: February

February is about paper organization and document storage.

Once a year (usually January), I go through my entire file cabinet and update each file one at a time to prepare for a new year of papers. In each hanging file, I have paper-clipped all the 2006, 2007, 2008, etc. stubs from each bill together and label them with the year. This makes it easy when I open my file for stubs from my electricity bill, car payment, mortgage, or whatever file to see where the new document goes and everything is in chronological order. I go through each file and shred anything that is more than 7 years old (except copies of our taxes), create new files for new bills (like from purchasing three kitchen appliances in one year due to the Black Power Kitchen Revival that happened in 2008), visiting new doctors, etc. I re-alphabetize the cabinet because new things are added, dr's offices change names, and files get removed and replaced in the wrong spot throughout the year. When I'm done, they all look like THIS:
Ooh just looking at that makes me happy. Lucky for me, we had an ice storm and I was able to tackle the file cabinet by pulling out a few files at a time (no more than I could finish and put away in an hour) over the few days that we were stuck in the house.

The best part?
Reese and Quincy were entertained for almost 2 solid hours using the shredder.

This week, I am making photo copies of our identity documents, laminating them, and filing them away with the 72 hour kits. If we had to evacuate immediately, we wouldn't have original copies, but at least we would have SOMEthing (something water-resistant) on paper to identify ourselves with.

Here is a basic list of documents to copy, preserve, and store in a backup location:
Birth/Marriage Certificates
Wills
Passports
SS Cards
Vaccination Records
Insurance Policies
Legal Contracts
A List of Emergency Contacts
Medical Records (Rx information, known medical conditions, allergies, etc)
Banking information

Other suggested (paper) items to store include:
Genealogy Records
Prepaid phone cards
Cash in small bills-who has change for a a $50 in an emergency?
Patriarchal Blessings

If I have time, we'll finally get to those DNA swab identification kits on the kids that I've had hanging around since April.
So there you have February.
That laminater was the greatest gift EVER! Who knew how much use it would get in just a few weeks in our house?!

"A is For Alice, Who Ate An Alligator..."

Got me a laminater last week. I had no idea how much fun I would have with it. Every mothers should have one of these...and anyone who is as OCD as I am should definitely own one of these. I'll be laminating FHE lessons, playdough activity sheets, chore charts, flashcards, and pretty much everything we own all week. It's my new favorite toy.

For Christmas, Reese's preschool teachers gave her the book, "One Mitten", by Katherine O'Connel.
I got a little carried away with the mitten theme and made 52 little mittens out of cardstock, and wrote the letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case on them. Here they are waiting to be laminated. Cute, right?
Now the girls can play a "Mitten Match" version of the memory game. I set up a little clothesline in the living room using yarn strung between two chairs, and after Reese gets a match she got to pin the pair up on the clothesline. I think that next time I will only put out 8-10 pairs to choose from, because it took too long for her patience to work through all 26 alphabet pairs and I wonder if she will remember the letters better if she works with less at a time.
I also went ahead and made a few extra "e's", an extra "m", and a "d" so they can use the little mittens to spell out Reese, Quincy, Mom, Dad, and Baby. I think we'll be using these flashcards a lot in the next year. If I remember, I'll add picks of the clothesline when I upload more pictures.