Family Picnic Variations

I have always loved the extra celebration packs MGT adds to many of their monthly curriculum boxes.  This month was a family picnic, full of ideas for games and treats.  I find them very inspiring and usually end up coming up with some of my own ideas using the materials provided.  I thought I'd share some of those ideas today.

The spinner that came in the packet can be used for lots of different things.  I came up with a spin-off of the pasta salad game using it.  I didn't have plastic ants and didn't want to go buy any since we have little things coming out of our ears right now.  Instead, I used some of the foam shapes I've collected from previous month's boxes and added it to a bowlful of expired penne I found hiding on the top shelf of my pantry.  Using tweezers from another month of curriculum, the girls would take turns spinning and then pick out the corresponding number of shapes from the noodles.  You could also use little sticky notes, draw shapes on them and place them over the number for another variation.

After they finished that game, we continued to use the spinner and the pasta.  I cut long pieces of  yarn, made a tape "needle" on one end and tied a piece of pasta to the other.  They then took turns spinning and threading the corresponding number of pasta pieces onto their yarn to make a necklace. Miss M made a nice ABC pattern.

We then took our magnifying glass (from last July's nature box) outside and started looking for things in nature.  Originally I was going to have them observe some of the ants that live at the end of our patio but those little suckers were super fast so we settled for closely examining our roses and lavender flowers as well as the honeybees visiting them.  The girls then drew chalk pictures of what they saw (I see this as a precursor to nature journals, which I'd like to start with them next summer).  We talked about the different parts of the plants, the colors, smells and how they felt.


Daddy joined us outside and came up with a fun but definitely adult-supervision only activity.  Being a boy and former Scout, he decided to show the girls how to use the magnifying glass to concentrate the sun's rays and melt crayons onto a piece of paper.  We talked about safety as well as why the crayon was changing from solid to a liquid.  They had fun swirling the melted wax and drawing with the stubs.

Those were my variations to some really fun activities as we end the month of August.

S and T

So, I love Mother Goose Time buuuuut I had to do something different for S because while Sheep (the animal they chose) technically is spelled with an S at the beginning it does not actually start with an /s/ sound.  I found a cute, free Snake coloring page on the internet and printed off three copies.  I started by showing the girls pictures of snakes and pointing out the different patterns. I had the girls chose 2-3 markers and come up with their own repeating patterns.  For Littlest, I did a simple pattern for her, coloring every other stripe red, and then let her decorate the rest of the picture on her own.  Miss M chose a pattern of four blue, one brown and got a little tired of coloring the four blue after a while so to help her maintain the pattern, I colored the blue stripes and she did the brown one.

The concept review game was fun for the girls.  Since I wanted to reinforce the /s/ sound and we were also doing activities from T is for Tiger, I chose to use letter magnets instead of a small toy to hide under my paper cups.  I randomly placed cut up cards on top of ten overturned cups and hid both letters while the girls closed their eyes.  They then took turns choosing a cup and looking for the magnet letter after telling me about the card on top.  If they chose a number card, I made them count to it.  If they chose a letter card, I made them tell me something that started with that letter.  They had a lot of fun with this game.  Littlest is making good strides with her speech but still can't quite name letters so she just made the sounds and I directed her to identify numbers and shapes instead of choosing them on her own.

These cards could be used in lots of ways.  You could put them in a little Tupperware (to keep them corralled) facedown and use them when playing board games like Candyland and have every player draw one and name it before taking their turn.  You could have your child pick a card, then find something in the room that starts with that sound or is the same shape or color (you could make it into a scavenger hunt for older kids).  For numbers, they could collect that many of a certain object (or different kinds of objects that add up to the total).  You could also use the number cards with coloring games, having them take a number and then color that many items on a page red, for example.  You could do a version of the alphabet car game but have them use names of objects or family members for each letter of the alphabet.

They loved the tiger masks and they turned out so cute!!  I didn't help them at all except to tie the yarn on (I cut it in half first so it was easily adjustable).  After they finished drawing on their stripes and had donned their feline alter egos, all three started growling and prowling around the living room, climbing on the back of sofas.

We finished off the day with masks firmly in place and dancing away to the ABC Zoo Dance N Beats DVD.  We started with the T is for Tiger song and then they chose their favorite letters from there.  I think my favorite was watching them run around like quick quail, especially Littlest who still has that adorable whole-torso toddler run.  It was a fun morning for us.

P, Q, R

It's been a while and a crazy, difficult couple of weeks.  Our temperatures have soared into the high 90's and we've been cooped up inside to keep from roasting my littles in the afternoons.  Thank goodness for some ready at hand fun from Mother Goose Time.

On Friday we had a long overdue class with our friend and learned about Polar Bears, Quail and Rattlesnakes as we did projects and played games.

The included Zoogo card game was a huge hit and I plan to play it with the girls tonight with Daddy.  It's basically played the same as Uno, except instead of numbers they use animals we have been learning about this month.  You could easily make your own version of it by printing a sheet of pictures of your own choice (farm animals, transportation, items of clothing, letters, numbers, shapes) on four different colors of paper.  This game is great for helping children work on problem solving skills as they decide whether to match by color or picture, as well as reinforcing vocabulary and/or early academic skills.  I had them put their cards face up on the table and at each turn, asked them if they had a card with the same color or animal as the card in play.  After a few times around, the older girls no longer needed reminders and Littlest would place the correct by herself with a verbal cue.

We talked about rattlesnakes and they practiced their best slithering and snake sounds before making the rattlesnake rattle project, which of course evolved into bracelets because all three of these little girls love jewelry.  String beads onto pipe cleaners is a great fine motor project, even better than using yarn or string for young kids, because the pipe cleaner is nice and firm so they only have to concentrate on getting the bead on and not holding it still.  You could work on patterning with the beads but I chose to let them do it their way.

I think the favorite activity of the day was painting their feet for the Polar Bear project.  We talked about what they would need to protect their feet out in the snow and ice and discussed how polar bear feet are special in that way.  These girls love getting painted and each very patiently waited for me to get to her, then giggled as the paintbrush tickled their toes.  I had to watch Littlest carefully after she was done because liked it so much, she wanted to do it herself.  Make sure you get that paint out of their reach or you may end up with an adorable little toddler toe path painted on your floor.  I loved their responses when I asked them what would happen if they met a polar bear; our friend said it would eat her, Miss M insisted it would protect her from the snowstorm with its warm fur and Littlest shouted "Boo!" indicating that it would either scare her or she would play games with it.  :)  These will be fun to look out in a few years when their feet have gotten so much bigger and I yearn for the little days.

For the Quail egg game, each girl made her own cozy nest and took turns carrying an egg from basket back to it, where she opened it and identified the letter tile inside.  Littlest told me the sounds they make, which I thought was super impressive.  The older girls also listed animals and people they could think of with names that started with that letter.  Miss M then tried to incubate her eggs by sitting on them.

That was all we had time for, although I plan to go back and do the rattlesnake skin shedding activity today or tomorrow, just for fun.

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.

Rub a Dub Dub

Don't you love being quarantined?  Littlest came down with hand, foot and mouth disease (which Miss M has already had) so our friends stayed away and we stayed in.  Thankfully we had some fun things to keep us occupied.

On Monday we did the Bath Time unit.  I taught them the original words to the poem "Rub A Dub Dub" in lieu of the opening song that day and we set aside the I Can Read Book to look at another day (Miss M just wasn't into it that day).  I love those I Can Read Books, they are great to take in the car.

We watched "Harry the Dirty Dog" and then they decorated their dogs.  Instead of having them paint with dirt and paint (my paint is just not very good and I keep meaning to replace it), I had them color with brown crayons on one side of their dogs.  This was fun because they could see the rubbings of the dot stickers from the other side.  They had fun "washing" their dirty dogs in their play sink.

It wasn't until later that I had the idea that I should have had them put the dots on, them laminate the dogs and let them use our dry erase crayons to make him dirty.  Then they could have cleaned him off and started again.  Oh well, hindsight.  We did talk about different ways they get dirty.  Miss M likes to paint her hands with her yogurt and Littlest's favorite seems to be making mud by dumping sand from her sandbox into her water table, then flinging it.

Later on in the day, Littlest needed something to occupy her time while I made dinner so we did the Boats in Bubbles activity.  I filled up our powder room sink, put her in a smock and dumped a bunch of the boat counters into soapy water.  I gave her a variety of spoons and ladles to use to fish them out.  Our big slotted spoon worked the best because she could easily get more than one and it allowed the water to drain out before she dumped them into the bucket.  I could look over at her while I made dinner and name the colors she fished out and count them for her.

We survived the week and Littlest has recovered quickly, thankfully.  I am looking forward to sharing some of our last week's lessons with friends and family next week.

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.

Beautiful Butterflies

We finished out our Bees and Butterflies unit this week by learning about different kinds of butterflies.  Miss M later told me her favorite is the Blue Morpho.  I love the way she says it. :)

I decided to do the storytelling activity a little differently than we often do; I gave each girl a butterfly, bee and flower and then let them tell me the story.  Our friend started it off, Miss M played off of hers and Littlest buzzed around them both, flapping like a butterfly.  They went back and forth, helping their insects find food and take it back home, for quite a while.  It was fun to watch and I wished I'd recorded it.

You can tell by the blur that they
were pretty into the music.

We made the butterfly wands, giving the girls free rein to decorate however they felt.  Littlest stuck mostly to stickers while the older girls did more drawing and approximated patterns more similar to an actual butterfly.  Instead of just using the music CD, we turned on our Dance N Beats DVD for this month and they danced with their butterfly props for a few songs before I brought them back in for another activity.

They loved the matching game.  I gave each girl a caterpillar and they had to find their matching butterfly.  Miss M remembered days later that she was the Peacock Butterfly.  I may need to make a few more cards to go with that game.

I think my favorite activity this month was the journal.  We were really good about making sure we stayed caught up and both of the older girls are really getting into writing and making up their own stories about the pictures they draw.  Littlest even kept at her journal for just as long as the big girls, even if she mostly just drew circles.  The journal is such a great way to practice a host of skills, including fine motor/writing, counting, language, shape and color identification, etc...This summer I plan to buy each girl a composition notebook and we are going to draw a picture every night after dinner about their favorite activity from the day.  It will be so fun to pull these out when they are older to see how much they've grown and to review the things that were important to them when they were little.

We played the Pollinate the Flowers number identification game as outlined in the Teachers Guide at first but after a while I adapted it to their attention span.  They got really excited when I started spinning the spinner and telling them which number they had to find and bring to me, although Miss M got upset at the end because she wasn't the one to find the last number.  She thought that meant she hadn't won the game.  I didn't even know she had a concept of win/lose because we don't play games that way yet.  It gave me the opportunity to talk to her about the purpose of the game and sportsmanship.  I'm not sure how much sunk in but we will find out the next time we try this game.

Pollinator BINGO was a blast and a great way to work on language skills. Instead of just showing the girls which butterfly or flower I had drawn for them to find on their cards, I described it (three pink flowers, a blue butterfly with dots).  They also had to look closely because some of them shared characteristics but were different (a great way to work on the concept of same/different).  Miss M would yell BINGO really loudly every time she got three in a row and informed me that she was calling the dog Bingo to come play with her butterflies.  BINGO games are super easy to make yourself with clipart or even just a couple sheets of stickers and you can use them to work on colors, numbers, sight words, alphabet skills or vocabulary.

I think one of the girls' favorite activities was the Giant Blue Morpho activity where they measured their hands and different objects to see if they could find something that was the same size as the butterfly.  I pulled out a measuring tape and secured it at the eight inch mark so they could use it themselves to measure the toys they found.

The postcards are always fun and this month Miss M decided to use it as a thank you card for a friend who had invited her over to play in his backyard a couple weeks ago.  She insisted on writing his name (with me telling her the letters) and then trying to copy the message I wrote on it for her.  She was very proud to hand it to his mom.

That was our month.  This was a really fun unit and I look forward to doing it again when the girls are older and expanding on some of the fun details we learned.

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!

The Great Pyramid

What a fun day!  We learned about the Great Pyramid in school.  While I was describing what a pyramid is, Miss M remembered she had seen in a program and promptly decided to build one using the couch cushions.  It wasn't very stable but she enjoyed piling up the pillows and quickly laying down next to her "pyramid" so they could fall on her.  I enjoyed watching her brainstorm which pillows should go where and was happy I didn't try to rein her back into our original activity too quickly.

Next we did some prewriting with the hieroglyphics activity.  I poured salt over the cards and they used their fingers to trace the design, then I gave them paper to try and draw their own versions.  Littlest did circles and the older girls quickly decided they needed to add rainbows and birthday cakes but it was still good practice.

They all really enjoyed stamping the rectangle bricks on the pyramid structure.  I opted to use the salt that was left over from the previous project instead of opening the bag of sand included in the materials.  That will get placed in our general art materials for something else.

Our weather has been so weird lately, one day warm and the next cold and blustery.  The girls had been cooped up for a while and needed to let some energy out so we popped in our beloved Dance N Beats DVD to try out some new routines for a while.  It also gave me a chance to clean up the salt and paint while keeping them engaged in something school related rather than letting them loose in the play area, from which it would be more difficult to get them to come back later.  I have found that Dance N Beats makes a good transition or break for all of us.

That was it for the week, as far as structured school went.  It's been one of those weeks where everything tends to go a little askew (kind of like the picture placement in this post--I cannot for the life of me get that first picture to move where I want it).  I am hoping for a more normal week and looking forward to getting to do more of our units.