G is for Gorilla

Another fun preschool day today as we dove into the second week of our A to Zoo Animals theme.  I had planned to do F is for Fox but we only got through the craft before the girls decided they just wanted to play for half an hour.  I was able to rein them back in with the promise of another craft and then we did some of the activities.  I'm really trying to let them lead more and not worry so much about what we do and don't get done.

Littlest really liked the F is for Fox Art activity.  It was similar to one we did a few months ago and turned out just as cute.  I cut out the tail and ears but she had fun shredding the napkin and gluing it on the tail.  She also started doing some actual vertical scribbling for the first time, instead of just drawing circles.  I was impressed.

All of the girls liked the gorilla mask activity and combing the paint on, although eventually they asked for paint brushes.  I need to find a better type of paint for them to use once we finally finish off this horrible stuff I can't make myself just throw out.  It's too thick and gloppy.  With the masks, I noticed that they'd curled a bit after they dried so I ran them through the laminator and then had the brilliant idea that they could use a dry erase marker to add facial features since they had just painted the fur and that was it.  It worked really nicely with the emotion spinner.  Miss M cycled through happy, sad, angry and surprised pretty quickly before deciding her gorilla was happy and wanted to go eat more bugs and berries.

I modified the Gorilla food activity because honestly I was just too tired at that point to pick myself up off the floor and hide the letter tiles.  The girls were just as happy passing the bag around, taking one, naming it and finding the match.  Miss M and I named animals that started with our letters and Littlest made their sounds.  They really liked this game.  I think I may stick it in our file folder box for the month.

We ended our school time by dancing through the entire Dance N Beats DVD for the month.  Littlest is especially enjoying it because there seem to be fewer types of movements and she can pick them up faster in these short songs.  It is super cute to watch.

We are headed to the zoo for Littlest's birthday on Friday so I may make up an animal scavenger hunt based on the ones we have already done (and will do) for fun.  It should be a good time if it's not too blasted hot.  I'm kind of missing the rain from a couple weeks ago...

B is for Bird

Normally we do school on a couple times a week since the girls are so little but this month's theme is so fun and I don't really want to skip any of the days.  We did some of the B is for Bird activities to fill in the time before lunch and the girls loved them.

Miss M ended up modifying the color bird activity.  She saw me cutting them out, grabbed them and the world map from our wall, then started matching the birds to the continents and other objects on the map.  I loved it and let her run with it.  When she had matched them all, she started making up stories about how they were swimming or walking to visit friends on other parts of the map.  She must have played with them for 15 minutes before moving on to something else.  Littlest used them to sort some of the counting manipulatives we have collected over the months.  I laminated mine so they will last longer and thought about taping them to paper plates and having the girls cut out pictures that match the color and gluing them on.  The birds could be removed later without harm because of the lamination.  You could also use sticky tack, post one color a day on the wall above a basket and collect items throughout the day that match the color.

Littlest was smitten with the cute little bird craft.  We got out our alphabet stamps to decorate them with letters.  They both wanted to googly eyes but Miss M didn't want hers on a stick, she wanted to separate birds she could "fly with my hands".  I used a few pieces of double sided tape to stick Littlest's birds together, with the stick between.  She flew around the living room "tweeting" and looking for worms like the robins we've been watching in our backyard.

Just those two little activities kept my girls entertained for nearly an hour.  This is a great theme for keeping kids busy during those hot summer hours.

A is for Alligator

I love the theme for June!  A to Zoo Animals has been so fun and we are only a few days in.  It's also nice because Littlest's birthday is next week and we are doing a zoo theme so I've got some built in, already prepared activities to do with her friends. :)

We started with our Dance N Beats DVDs.  The songs and routines for this month are pretty short so we did six of them in just a few minutes.  The girls really enjoyed pretending to be animals and did a good job of following the simple choreography.  This is a great program for getting them moving and excited for the theme, as a transition between activities and as a way to keep them usefully occupied while I prep things for school or simply get some household chores down.  I personally find them a nice way to stretch and wake up my body without requiring too much sweat or coordination.

After we were all warmed up, we started on our zoo books.  I chose to get them all done in one day so they could spend the month reviewing them (plus, our friend doesn't come every day and I didn't want her to miss any of the pages).  I loved watching the girls draw their self-portraits on the ID page.  Miss M is starting to add more details like fingers and belly buttons.  Littlest has started adding facial features and hair.  I need to go through all our art work that I've saved in the curriculum boxes and put together a timeline showing the progression from simple scribbles to recognizable forms.  I think it would be pretty interesting.

With the books, I noticed that they were hole punched on the right side and only once.  I thought this make it a little difficult for the girls to use so I double punch ours on the top and added two rings.  You could use yarn or even a twist tie.  This makes it a little more like a flip book and they seem to like it.

The alligator puppets were a little tricky but a big hit.  I showed the girls how to fold their plates in a triangle and they cut out the faces (I helped Littlest do the curves but cutting is vastly improved from a few months ago).  Then we glued the faces over the plate, covering it completely before we folded the rest of the face down to make the eyes stand up.  I cut out the zig zag paper scraps for teeth and they put the glue along the inside rim of the plates and placed them.  It worked pretty well.  There's no pocket for their hands but they just hold them by the fold and snap them open and shut.  As soon as their puppets were done, they started chasing each other around and looking for food to chomp.  I love listening to the stories they make up on the spot.

I introduced the ABC book that came with this month's materials.  We are only reading the page the coordinates with the letter(s) we are doing that day.  I scattered the letter tiles on the ground and they hunted for the ones in their names.  I might need to make extra tiles so they can make their full names and possibly have their own sets (Littlest is getting quite territorial and Miss M always has been) to play with.

Our final activity for the first day was the alligator nests.  I hid paper eggs with different numbers of dots around the room and Miss M drew a numbered egg from her nest and matched it.  She then decided she needed a bunch of boy alligator babies, wrapped all the paper eggs in her blanket to keep them warm and took the bundle with us to Costco.

Water and Rainbows

We started our week with learning about the water cycle and rainbows.  My girls are still pretty young so we didn't go into a lot of detail but had fun doing the activities outlined in the Teachers Guide.

We started with the bilingual book, coloring each page.  Miss M is getting more detailed, using multiple colors and trying harder to stay within lines or at least color blocks.  Littlest still isn't really "coloring", she likes to draw circles of various colors but she is starting to add facial features to those the circles, which is fun to watch.  After they colored, I had them show me which page was number 1, 2 and so on and we assembled their books to be read later with Daddy.

For the Puddle Jumping activity, I made a new game based on what they had come up with because I thought it would hold their attention a little longer.  I made ten puddles out of blue paper and numbered them.  I made a trail around our living room that led to our circus tent or "rainbow".  We used one of the foam dice that we received with our materials and the girls took turns rolling it, counting the dots (I counted for Littlest while she touched and tried to say the numbers) and then they hopped that many puddles until they reached the rainbow.  They played this for 15 minutes, easily.  Littlest is starting to be able to leave the ground when she hops now, so it was very exciting for her.  Miss M made up variations where she hopped from puddle to puddle while counting in Spanish or backwards.  It's one we will do again.

They loved making the Rainbow Dancer craft.  Miss M cut out her rainbow colors (although she got frustrated and upset a couple times when she accidentally cut into the next color but I showed her how we could fix it with tape) and did most of the construction herself, except the stapling.  I gave Littlest a piece of construction paper with wider spaced lines to practice cutting on because I thought it would be more developmentally appropriate and I didn't want her to maul the rainbow strips.  She actually did pretty well, holding the scissors up more often and squeezing instead of simple tearing with the scissors.  I put tape on the color strips, then named a color for her to hand me, which we put on the plate together.  She got all of the basic colors (I didn't even try to test her on indigo) and was very proud of herself.  When they were done, they chased each other around the downstairs while Miss M chanted "Rain, Rain, Go Away!"

We enjoyed these activities and they've been timely since we have had rain for a good part of the last couple of weeks.  Hoping that changes sometime soon but looking out my window, that doesn't seem likely...

Beavers and Alligators!

We started our Bubbles, Boats and Floats theme this month.  I predict that Littlest will love it for all of the water play ideas I am sure we will encounter.

We started off by learning about rivers and beavers.  We sat in our imaginary boat and sang "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" about eight times with requested lyric changes (i.e. "when you see a crocodile/lion/alligator/dinosaur, don't forget to scream"--at which point, they all scream).  Then we did a fun group activity to help them work together to keep our ball in the blanket "river" before they decided it was more fun to bounce it out as hard as they could.

The art project was pretty fun.  I drew a river outline for Littlest but let the bigger girls do it themselves.  They tore up their own pieces of tissue paper (luckily I had some extra tissue paper because they really enjoyed this part, as well squishing it up really tiny) and glued them on themselves, even the not-quite two-year old.  They weren't interested in adding sand (which I was secretly grateful for, not being in the mood to clean up sand) or sticks to their pictures but they did draw in quite a few details, such as the sky, sun, plants, fish and turtles.

We had an extra friend with us on Monday and the big girls were a bit distracted playing in our circus tent but I used the fishing game to help Littlest work on her colors a little more.  I had her chose a shape link from a bag and match it to the appropriate fish.  When she tired of that, we counted them and made one long chain while I named the different shapes of each link.  It was a fun and really easy modification to the provided activity in the Teacher Guide.


The beaver puppets were so cute!  I let the girls place the pre-cut pieces on their bags and decorate them as desired.  They immediately began role playing with them, pitching their voices differently to speak for them.  Littlest even did her best to join in with the big girls with cute puppet.

That was it for the first day, they were much too excited over their puppets and getting to play together to do more school.

Later in the week, both my girls were quarantined with colds (courtesy of Daddy spreading contagion) and not feeling very chipper but Miss M request that we do an art project so we pulled out the Alligator unit.  They were both super excited about making the A alligators.  I drew teeth outlines for them to try to cut out but the tracing paper I used was really tricking and kept tearing so I ended up doing it myself and letting them tape them on as desired.  Littlest wanted to use all the eyes, so she did (after Miss M grabbed at least two for herself).  Miss M was so excited about her alligator that she took it to her playgroup on Friday to show everyone.

I modified one of the other activities by printing off a cute alligator coloring page and then having them try doing a rubbing to mimic the texture of alligator skin.  I found a bumpy box that they could color over but one of those large green Lego bases would work really well, as would sand paper.  If it hadn't been raining, I would have had them use the patio.

We finished up our brief school day by learning a couple cute alligator songs on YouTube and then they reverted to being cranky and sick.  Thankfully, they seem to be getting over it and we should have a good time exploring this unit more next week.

Sweet Bees

Daddy is out of town and so is our friend so this week was a little less structured as I just concentrated on surviving with the littles all by myself for the first time.

The honeybee and bumble bee lessons were really fun.  We started the honeybee lesson by talking about characteristics and practicing making ABCD patterns with our patterning blocks from the teacher materials for the month.  They enjoyed coming up with different groupings of blocks and talking about what was the same and what was different about them.  Not only was this a good pre-math activity but it was awesome for language development as well.  I had to help them choose to move on to another activity because they were having so much fun with this one.

We sang our opening song "Honeybee is feeling ______" next.  I think I sang it eight times as they buzzed around the room looking mad, glad and sad.  Even Littlest got in on the action, watching the bigger girls to see how they were expressing the emotion of the current verse.

We did a lot of journal entries today, to make sure we stay caught up.  For the hexagon entry, I used tape on the back of the pattern pieces to help keep them from sliding around as they traced them to make their own beehive picture.  I asked them to trace at least as many shapes as they were years old.  Littlest followed along but mostly drew circles around the shape on her paper.  For the 15 journal page, I had them stamp their fingerprints fifteen times using yellow ink, then they turned them into bees and we wrote a sentence about what the fifteen bees were doing.

We learned about how bees suck up nectar; I think this was Littlest's favorite activity because she got to play with lots of water.  I am proud of myself for giving them bowls of water to transfer back and for with various items and I let them make a mess without immediately wiping it up.  I'm realizing how very important it is to let kids experiment and I'm forcing myself to relax and let it be.  The art portion of the activity was really fun, although Miss M wouldn't let me trace her closed hand for the hive, she wanted a full handprint and demanded a new paper when I tried to explain it.  I took a deep breath and let her do it her way.  Littlest loved squirting the (too) watery paint on the paper and would have been totally happy to do that for at least half an hour.

Miss M loved the Bumble Bee project.  I folded the black paper to give her guides to practice cutting on.  We used the cut outs from the middle of the letter as the wings and she asked me to trim her stripes but otherwise she did it herself.  Littlest practiced holding the scissors (she's at least letting me show her how to put her hand in them, although she refuses to let me  help her actually cut) and glued together all the little leftover pieces (adding some googly eyes) to make her own little project.  They are both currently on the refrigerator, awaiting Daddy's praise when he finally gets home.

The Teachers Guide gives an activity for introducing this month's I Can Read book.  I changed it up a little to make a game.  We have a ton of Duplo blocks, including flowers.  I set out several of the flowers on the rug and gave Miss M a basket of blocks.  I had her start at our beloved circus tent and told her it was her "hive".  We talked about how scout bees find flowers and tell the other bees about it.  The game was to make a path to the flowers with the blocks, using one block for each step it took to reach the flower, then we would count how many steps to get all the flowers.  Of course, she added her own stipulations (you had to pretend to drink the nectar from the flowers and skip instead of walk).  She had a great time with it; so much so, that we didn't actually make it to reading the book before dinner.

I'm excited to get into butterflies next week; if I'd been more on the ball I would have ordered caterpillars so they'd be here in time but maybe I'll use this as a good introductory period and we will wait just a little longer to hatch our own butterflies.  It still gets pretty cold here and I'm not sure they would do well yet.

Bees and Butterflies

We started our new theme today, Bees and Butterflies!  I chose to do activities from the first two days, Homes and Food.

After looking at the topic poster and discussing the different kinds of homes bees can live in, we did the beehive stamping craft.  It can be hard for the girls to use objects that don't really have a handle on them for stamping, like the bubble wrap squares provided, so I took a piece of tape and rolled it around their finger (sticky side out) and attached the bubble wrap to it (bubble side out).  That seemed to work really well for all through of them.  I let the girls pick their paint color and stamp away.  Instead of making them stand up, I taped a piece of yarn to the back of one and used a rolled piece of tape to connect both hive halves, near the top.  The hive opens a bit so they can pretend to fly their bees in and out and we can hang them up rather than have them sitting on a counter.

They even added the flower stamens
so the bees had pollen to collect.

Next we played with our shape of the month (hexagon).  I showed them the wall shape, we counted the sides and talked about how hex means six.  I pointed out the shape of the cells on the topic poster as well.  I gave them black strips of paper to play with to see if they could make their own and then, because they were so interested in the Butterfly part of our monthly theme, I showed them how to trace hexagons onto paper to make a butterfly.  A tip for tracing shapes:  use a piece of rolled tape to attach the shapes to the paper so they don't move while your child traces.  Both big girls decided to draw a flower and attach bees on the other side of the paper and all three wanted their creations hung on the wall.  I think I might need to invest in a wire and clip art system to save my paint.

Fill the Honeycomb was a fun game and a good chance for Littlest to practice touching with one to one correspondence and take turns.  She was in charge of giving the die to the correct person, which she loved.  The girls did very well with this game since they are pretty good at counting.  When we had emptied their flower cards, we counted how many cells were still empty on the honeycomb and filled the rest of them in with our extra circles.

The nectar game was a fantastic fine motor activity that my girls absolutely loved and did for close to ten minutes.  They only stopped because we transferred all the water to the ice cube tray.  Littlest adores anything to do with playing in the water and Miss M liked the gradations in color from having varying amounts of water in each compartment (I added food coloring for fun).  It did take quite a bit of hand over hand guidance to help them get the hang of squeeze, release, squeeze with the included syringes.  Littlest kept trying to scoop and accidentally sucking up the water she had just squeezed into the tray.  I can see us doing this one a lot and adding some color mixing fun as well.

Lastly we started our journals.  Miss M informed me that her self-portrait is her when she used to be a sad bee.  When asked why she was sad, she said it was because she couldn't find a pink flower to drink from.  I love her imagination.  She drew her first initial by herself under the picture and I helped her with the rest of the letters.  That's it for today!

This and That

It's been a momentous week in our home--Miss M has finally consented to start potty training!  I will admit, I was not pushing this milestone because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing but when she told me she wanted to wear undies (a Christmas gift from Grammie) I decided to go along with it.  All in all, it's going okay.  Usually she decides she's done with the whole thing around nap time and ends up in a pull up for the rest of the day but we are making some progress.  It has meant that most of our time is spent going to the potty and playing with things we can put down quickly.  School hasn't been as formal as normal but we've still had some fun times with our Mother Goose Time activities.

The Matching Spots and Adding game was a fun one to play, both as written in the Teacher Guide and in a couple variations we came up with on our own.  One of the variations was to give one child the giraffes and one the ladybugs, then they took turns picking a number card and finding their corresponding animal card.  This greatly reduced arguing over who was touching the cards.  Another variation we did helped with addition.  They each picked one card, then drew a number card.  Using a dry erase crayon (you could use a marker), they added that number of dots to their animal and then counted them all.  You could use it as a memory game, too.  Use the giraffes and ladybugs or one of the animals and the number cards.


I altered the Grass unit's craft project to combine it with one that my mom did with my nephew.  Igave the girls the provided green paper and drew lines on it as a guide for cutting (Miss M will cut straight through a paper unless she has a visual reminder to stop).  Miss M did a great job of snipping her grass.  I had both girls trace a circle using one of our plastic stacking rings, which they then decorated as lions.  We glued the grass to the bottom of the page so it looked like the lion was hiding. Miss M added a tree to give the lion some shade and decorated it heavily with the included bug stickers.  She also added a blue sun, in case he got too chilly in the shade and needed to warm up.

Littlest finally let me help her a little with the scissors, although that ended when I tried to show her how to point her thumb up so they'd work better.  She was very engaged in the project, too, which is fun to see.  She liked tracing the circle and did a few on her own, then when I told her to draw a lion, her scribble actually resembled a mane pretty closely.  She loves stickers (one of my favorite fine motor tools) and enjoyed putting them all over her paper while roaring.

We liked the flamingo art project, which we coupled with a fun YouTube kids video on the birds and making bead necklaces with one of this month's manipulatives.

Finally, we played Bigger or Smaller and created a continuum of sizes using some of our toys and the ostrich and chicken egg cutouts.  Before we started, I let the girls gently play with some hard boiled eggs I happened to have in the fridge from the day before so they could actually feel the egg shell without me being nervous about them squeezing it too hard.  They collected objects and I held each one to the ostrich egg, asking bigger or smaller.  If it was bigger, it went to the left.  If it was smaller, we held it to the chicken egg and asked the same question, setting it to the left of the chicken egg if it was bigger and to the right if it was smaller.  They seemed to really understand this concept and enjoy this activity.

Next week we start our Food and Fitness theme, which is perfect timing because I am also starting a Biggest Loser competition in preparation for our family trip to Disneyland n March.  :)

Safari Sampler

For school on Wednesday, we took a sampler approach, choosing an activity or two from the remaining four days for this week.  We didn't get to everything I had planned but overall our hour went really well and sparked a couple new ideas we used later in the week.

We introduced the letter E and the country of Egypt.  Living in Utah is a little, um, monochromatic, so it was a good opportunity to about diversity.  We checked out the monthy theme poster and I had them describe what they saw:  a little girl, a mommy, a house.  I mentioned that even though it looked different from where they live and who they live with, everyone was still the same.  Our beloved Daniel Tiger has also addressed the issue so I could refer to those episodes as another way to help them relate to what I was saying.

We spent some time dancing like elephants with big stomping feet, flapping ears and swinging trunks using the song of the day from the Elephant unit.  They had a blast; I sang the song and they came up with the movements on the fly.  I liked seeing their creativity come out so spontaneously. 

We went over the I Can Read book together.  I tried using the sight word arrows with them but it didn't really work.  It might work better for me to do in one on one reading time with Miss M; in a group, they tended to get distracted or fight over the arrows.

The Giraffe Spot Game was fun.  It was a little too easy for them to just count out the correct number of spots to after a couple turns, I started changing it up by having them leave the spots on and the next player would have to add or subtract spots and then we would count the total at the end.  It worked really well and gave them a good introduction to those mathematical functions.

The Teacher Guide recommended letting them draw their own giraffes but we didn't have a lot of time available and a giraffe is little more complicated than drawing a face, which is what they have the most experience with right now.  Instead, I found a free giraffe silhouette online, imported it into Photoshop and created an outline that I printed for them to fill in as they saw fit.  I cut up the left over foam from the giraffe spots so they could use them as stencil, if they wanted.

For the zebra craft, I left the cutouts in the paper until after they had drawn their stripes.  This worked really well and gave nice clean edges when I did punch them out.  They glued them to the background paper, we talked about what they eat and they drew grass and sun to finish the pictures.  Miss M was very proud of her picture and insisted it go up on the refrigerator, along with her sister's.  Whenever Littlest sees her zebra, she starts neighing.  

I also hid some of their Little People
animals for another safari variation.

The girls have really enjoyed the safari theme so far.  They found some binocular sets I got for free for listening to some spiel and have been going around the house "spying" things.  I took the daily topic posters from this week and put them around the downstairs for them to find.  This has been a very popular activity.  Miss M likes to take the lead, naming the animal and some descriptive quality about it (the rhino has a big horn, the giraffe has a long neck) and Littlest gleefully follows and makes the sounds.  Her elephant impersonation is simply adorable.  It is also fun to turn it into an "I Spy" game and have them run to the animal I describe. We will be playing this many more times this week.

Dancing on Safari

I just couldn't wait until January to open our new Dance N Beats DVD.  My nephew is in town and he loves it when we do school (even though he is a big kindergartner now, the activities in the Mother Goose Time curriculum really appeals to him) so we did one of the "dance party" lessons in the Dance N Beats manual.

I love that the music this month includes African tribal chants; there is something about the drum beat that really gets to me and could almost make me start dancing spontaneously (as long as no one else was in the room).  We started with a couple dance songs while I gathered our materials for the academic activities (this was kind of spontaneous and it as nice that all of the materials could be easily and quickly gathered).

I had just (literally half an hour before) put an empty wrapping paper tube in the recycling prior to starting our lesson so I quickly retrieved it, cut it into various lengths and we did a quick activity of comparing the different lengths (which played nicely off our class from Monday) of the tubes and then practiced counting.  I had the kids roll a die and then place that many dots or stamps on their "giraffe neck".  For my nephew, I had him use two dice to make it a little harder.  Littlest just scribbled and stamped to her heart's content.  They kept at this for a good 7-10 minutes before moving on to the next dance.

While they danced to the giraffe song, I prepped the art activity.  I used white paper plates and drew lines on them.  I marked every other space with a B (for black) and had them paint stripes for the zebra shaker project in the manual.  It was a little difficult for Miss M to get the concept of skipping a space but I think she was starting to get it.  Littlest just made dots but she had fun doing it so we will just call hers a Dalmatian shaker.  We haven't actually finished these yet because they needed to dry before stapling them together with beans inside and we've been pretty busy but I'll try to update with a completed project photo when we get to it.

One more dance and it was time for Grass Letters.  By this time my girls had moved on to showing their grandparents their favorite Christmas gifts (Duplos, Magformers and a doll) but my nephew was still with me.  I cut up green paper into strips, then made up cards with upper case letters on them.  I started with all the "stick" letters and then added a few of the "curvy" letters for more difficulty.  He used the strips to form the letters on the cards and declared it to be "easy peasy" until he got to the letter C.  We puzzled it out, decided on the best configuration and then he decided it was time to get in on the toy testing so we were done.

I really love these little lessons in the Dance N Beats manual.  They are super simple and a great way to pass the time between nap and dinner that helps get the kids moving during this frigid winter weather and keeps them learning in a fun way.

An InLinkz Link-up

Finishing Up

We have been having a lot of fun with family this week and didn't get around to a lot of formal school after we left home.  I did make a variation of the bus game that my nearly six-year old nephew has really enjoyed and played several times with a variety of family members.

We used blocks to create bus stops around the living room.  The longest blocks were reserved for our "buses" and a collection of Little People and other block characters served as passengers.  We set up a little depot on one end of the living room.  I used the bus matching cards to determine how many passengers each player could take during a turn and counted out the same number of bus tickets, assigning one to each passenger.  Then we went off on our routes, dropping off passengers at the indicated bus stop (square, circle, rectangle or triangle).  When we had dropped off our passengers, we drew another bus card and picked up more until they had all been distributed.  Then we counted up how many passengers were at each stop and determined which stop had the most and which had the least.  It was a super popular game and entertained him for about half an hour each time we got it out.

We also played the bus matching/number identification game.  He is in kindergarten and quite good at this already so next time we play, I might have him count out an equal number of Unix cubes each time he gets a match and then count up the total at the end.  The person with the most cubes will be the winner, rather than the person with the most matches.

Miss M put on a dance recital on Friday night using Dance N Beats.  She started with some of the choreographed moves but then improvised many of her own while still maintaining the beat of the songs.  She knows all of the dances and likes to do them but lately she has been wanting to make up her own dances.  She's an original and I can't wait to see where she goes with this particular interest.

In addition to playing some of our school games, the girls and I did a lot of art this morning with my mom.  She is a former art teacher and has lots of ideas and materials.  We started with coffee filter Christmas trees.  They used Bingo daubers and smelly markers to
cover their filters with color, then we sprayed them down with a water bottle so the colors would run together.  After they dried, I cut them out into a Christmas tree shape (I stacked them, folded them in half and drew a half shape before cutting it out).  I punched out some circles and cut out Christmas lights and stars from scrap construction paper and they used those to decorate them.  Foil star stickers, glitter or sequins would be really pretty, too.

My dad works for a paper company and is able to bring home end of rolls that make great art paper.  We covered the kids table with a big piece of paper and got out simple stencils and flat crayons to try some rubbings.  It was a little hard for the girls but they liked coloring them in once we created them.  They probably sat and colored for 30-45 minutes without getting up.  It was pretty impressive for their ages.