M is for Mouse

For our last day of school this week, we did the Mouse unit.  I taped off an M on the floor and put all our phonics cards along the path, while Miss M told me all the things she could think of that start with the letter M.  She came up with her name, Minnie, Mommy, muffin and mice.  They took turns creeping along the letter like a little mouse until they came to a card that started with M and then put it on our circle time board.  They liked the game so we did it again, using the other phonics cards.  When they came to a card on the path, they stopped and named all the letters in the word before saying the whole word and putting it back in our bag.  They are doing great with their letter identification so I am going to need to come up with a few more ideas to challenge them.

We pulled out the "I Can Read" book of the month and practiced reading words in the -at family.  They both enjoyed pointing to the words and telling the story to me (with cues and help) and we read through it a few times before moving to another activity.  I didn't use the sight word pointers because we were concentrating on the word family instead this time.  It was a little easier for them read words that had a pattern.

The mouse math game was fun for them.  I sat them on either side of the table with the equation in the middle, then had them count the number of mice that was closest to them, then we counted them all together.  I think it helped them understand the concept of adding two separate groups together.

We played the Cat and Mouse game.  They are getting really good at identifying the number of dots on the dice just from the pattern they make instead of having to count all of them but still need to work on directionality when playing a board game.

Our last activity was one I made up.  They love to do crafts to I cut out a little mouse head shape, ears and a triangle for the mouth.  I let them put their mice together and taped the triangle on the back of the head so the mouth could be opened, then we cut up some yellow card stock to act as cheese cubes.  They could roll the die and feed their mouse that number of cheese cubes.  It could easily be used for addition and subtraction as well.

Christmas is next week but I am still planning on doing some of our fun activities with visiting family members so check back if you're interested in more of our exploits.

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Cookies!

The theme for the day was cookies and it provided lots of fun learning experiences as well as a yummy snack.  The focus topic this month is math and there were lots of different ways of incorporating it in this lesson.

We had circle time and practiced counting the days of the month and predicting what that next picture in our calendar pattern would be the next day.  After that, I pulled out Miss M's wooden Melissa and Doug cookie set (it's actually a mixture of two sets that she got for her birthday) and we used it to sing and count along to the song of the day, a reboot of "One Potato, Two Potato".  Miss M actually made up her own version of this song using the cookies a week or so ago.

I brought out the shape manipulatives and they really had a good time with these.  We used the pattern cards in the last to see if they could duplicate the designs.  This was actually a little more difficult than I expected, so I think I will make up a few more examples and have them practice some more.  We tried a little tracing and I realized that I needed to teach them how to hold the shape with one hand use the pencil with the other.  This took a little more coordination than they have at the moment but they tried and that counts.  Mostly they wanted to stack the shapes into tall towers so we counted them and did a little sorting by color and shape.  Next time I think we will talk about how many sides they have and how they are the same and different.

We tried the cookie craft but they were not interesting in making matching pairs or even putting very many of them on the plate.  They liked adding the sticky dots and making designs with them but this activity was over pretty quickly.

I happened to have  a few unfrosted sugar cookies left over from a neighbor activity so I mixed up some quick powder sugar glaze while they decorated their paper cookies.  I gave them each a little container with the white frosting and turned it into a little lesson on color mixing.  Miss M wanted orange and Littlest's favorite color seems to be purple so we added food coloring and they got to mix to discover the new color before frosting their cookie and having snack.  This was a popular activity.  :)

At the end I brought out the play dough I made last week and we had fun adding nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon to it so it really smelled like Christmas.  All three had a great time strengthening their hands by patting out the dough and improving their fine motor with the beads.  They played for fifteen minutes, cutting out their own play dough cookies and decorating them, plus my kitchen smelled nice when they were done.

I was disappointed that my printer wasn't communicating well with my computer so we couldn't do the cookie jar activity with the online printable but I am hoping to do it another time.  It is meant for a handwriting activity but since my kids are still a little young for writing, I've got an idea to make it a shape matching game.  Print two copies, one on card stock if you can, and color them (you could have the kids color them if you wanted).  Laminate and tape a ziplock bag onto the back of the card stock jar.  Cut out the shapes from the other one and put them in the bag.  The children take turns pulling a "cookie" out of the jar and matching it to the front.  Another variation would be to print 3-5 copies of the jar.  Color the master jar and one other jar exactly the same and then color the other shapes differently from these (so the master circle is blue, there is another blue circle, a yellow one and a red one in the bag).  This way you can work on same/different (these are both circles but this one is green and the other is blue) and sorting (let's put all the green shapes together).  I hope that makes sense.

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Moving with Mother Goose Time

I'll admit it, I'm a homebody.  Especially when the weather is too hot or cold or if I'm not feeling well.  That's hard with kids because I feel the need to give them the opportunity to be out and about and moving around so I push myself to do things like go to story time at the library, play at the park or go to one of the various child-friendly museums in the area.  However, there are times when we just need to stay home and I have to find ways to keep the active.

My girls are natural movers so just letting them run from toy to toy in our play area takes care of a lot of that but sometimes we need ideas.  It's one of the reasons I adore the Dance N Beats DVDs from Mother Goose Time.  They are fun, my girls like the music and I find them to be a pretty good work out for me, too.  It's easy to pop in a disc while I get lunch or dinner together and they are ready for a rest after that and go down to sleep pretty easily (double bonus).

The curriculum itself has a lot of opportunities for kids to move around.  A lot of the Circle Time songs involve hand or whole body movement.  We sang about airplanes this week and did the described movements from the Teacher's Guide and then Miss M made up a verse and ran around the living room for about five minutes doing her own variations on the movements.  I loved the linguistic creativity and exercise she gave herself with just a little prompt from what we did first.

Writing in shaving cream activity
from our recent MGT lesson.  She
didn't love the feel of this but other
kids really like it.

I also want to help foster fine motor skills in my girls.  I've recently read an article indicating that children are entering kindergarten with lower fine motor skills, which hampers their development of handwriting skills.  A doctoral dissertation I perused indicated that there is a correlation between poor handwriting skills (the ability to form letters legibly and quickly) and poor writing skills (the ability to communicate effectively in written form).  We have an epidemic of poor writers in our country (just check out Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site inhabited by the current "young" generation if you don't believe me).

I don't want my girls to end up in that population if I can help it so in addition to building language skills, we work with a lot of (supervised) Lego play, blocks, stickers, beads and coloring with varying thicknesses of pencils, crayons and markers in order to build those hand and lower arm muscles.  JoAnn's has seasonal $1 crafts that come with their own little marker set that my girls love (and they come off my little Ikea table with just a diaper wipe).  The crafts included in our Mother Goose Time curriculum are specifically created to support this goal and we always make a point to do them even if that's the only activity we get to that day.   One of my girls' favorite activities is to thread beads onto pipe cleaners (it's easier for them to handle the pipe cleaner, which stays straight, rather than a string that needs more support so they can concentrate on one skill at a time).  I bought a bag of glow in the dark beads for $1.50 and a pack of pipe cleaners for $1 at my least favorite global chain store that I sometimes go to out of the sheer need for convenience but would rather not name.  We use them all the time.  When they are done, the beads go back in the bag and we reuse the pipe cleaners as well.

Please don't misread this and think I'm trying to be super mom.  Probably the biggest lesson I learned from my dad growing up was to find balance in life.  Real life is not well reflected on Pinterest or Facebook.  We definitely do our share of TV watching and iPad playing so Mommy has a chance to get housework done faster than it gets undone.  Miss M has one hairstyle because I don't have the time to research more or the energy to pin her down to create them.  My goal as a mother is to help my children develop into well rounded individuals physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and I'm thankful for the ideas and resources I have found to help me do that

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Buses, Bunnies and Keys

We get so many fun math manipulatives in our monthly Mother Goose Time kits.  Miss M loves to play with them so I came up with some new fun games for her to play while working on colors, number identification, counting and classifying.

Recently, she has been loving playing with the keys we got during our June theme so I made up a simple house picture in Photoshop (trying clicking on it at the bottom and let me know if you can print it) and printed it on colored paper that coordinated with the colors of keys.  I cut them out, wrote numbers on them and set up a little "town" in the living room.  The buses we got a few months ago are also in the same colors as the keys (except for orange) so we got those out too.  I had her pick a bus and drive it to a matching house.  Then she had to identify the number written on that house and use that many keys to unlock the door so the bus could get inside.  There are only four of each color of key but I had higher numbers on some of the houses so she had to figure out how many more she needed in a different color to unlock the door.  Simple but she loved it.  Littlest liked trying to match the buses to the houses, too.

I used the same houses, keys and buses and added the rabbits from another kit (also in the same colors) for another game today.  We set up our neighborhood, dumped all the buses and rabbits on her "sleigh" (a paper plate with yarn threaded through it for a handle) and she got to be Santa, delivering toys to the houses.  This time she shook two dice (I put them in a plastic baby food container and she rolled them in there, to keep them contained), counted the number she got and then found the house with that number on it.  She chose a matching key, unlocked the door and then gave the house the same number of gifts as its "address".  For numbers under 4, she tended to give all of one item in the color that matched the house.  For some of the bigger numbers, she had to mix and match.  This is where the classifying came in.  She could choose to use all the same color of buses and rabbits, all one type of toy in different colors or even sort by size (the rabbits come in large and small).  She liked sorting them into groups and counting out the right number for each house.

I really enjoy making up new activities with the materials we receive every month.  I will try to share more of those ideas in the future.

Seed Explorations

This has been a fun week with our Mother Goose Time materials.  We started Monday by exploring seeds.  We had done a little bit during our In the Garden unit this spring but it was fun to introduce the girls to them again and see what they remembered.  As it turns out, they needed a little reminder about what seeds were exactly but after just a couple of minutes they were telling stories about planting seeds in our gardens this year.

We reviewed our letters of the month and I gave one of the Hands-On letters to each girl along with a some of the seeds from our monthly manipulatives packet to see what they did with them.  Littlest (16 months) enjoyed sifting them through her fingers and dropping them on her letter.  Miss M (2.75 years) lined them up along the edges of her letter and our friend (3.5 years) made a pattern with hers.  It was really interesting to see how each one used them differently and at a different level of complexity.

Next I emptied out an ice tray to use for sorting the seeds (I really just need to buy a couple for sorting).  Our friend helped Littlest put her seeds in the different compartments with her fingers while Miss M practiced using the tweezers to sort her seeds.  This is a great fine motor activity that I would like to do again but maybe with craft pompoms to start with (I think they'd be a little easier to grab).

The girls mentioned that would like to go plant seeds in the ground right now.  Given that our frost date is only a few days away, I let them know that it probably wouldn't be a good idea but it did give me a great idea for an extension activity.  I grabbed a few green index cards (I keep them in the kitchen for writing down recipes but they come in handy for school), drew lines and added numbers at the end and gave each girl a couple of "gardens" to plant with the specified number of seeds.  I let them decide if they wanted to plant all the same type of seeds or a variety.  They worked at this activity for almost ten minutes.

The apple craft was fun, although I didn't get any post-worthy pictures.  I wanted the girls to leave the middle of the paper plate white so I drew lines on the plate, dividing it into thirds.  This was also a good way to teach the concepts of top, middle and bottom as well as following directions containing a negative (they are both pretty good at doing what they are told but need to work on not doing things when they are told not to :).

 I've been lucky to find some really good apples lately (I think we are finally getting to the new crop rather than the mealy leftovers from last year) so we cut one open and I let the girls dig out and count the seeds.  We use the seed counting sheet in our materials briefly but they were ready to eat by then so I sliced up the apple and let them munch away while we watched an illustrated version of the poem "One Seed" on YouTube.  It was a very fun and successful morning.

Fun with Letters

This week's theme has been communication.  The Mail day was a huge hit in our house.

We started with the circle time activity, placing the month's phonics cards in envelopes and having the girls take turns opening them and identifying the letters.  I had Miss M go one step further by finding something in the room that started with that letter (we did floor, pillow and kick the ball--a stretch but all we could come up with for /k/).  Miss M then decided it would be a fun game to take turns closing our eyes while the other person hid the letters around the room.  She played happily for twenty minutes.  It was also a great way to practice the prepositions "in", "on", "under" and "between".

I buy diaper wipes from Amazon Mom and as a result end up with one new container about every four weeks.  I rounded up three of these containers to use for the letter sorting activity.  Since Miss M is very familiar with the three letters of the month, I added a little difficulty by giving each container a 3-letter "address", all letters that look fairly similar and that she sometimes gets confused.  I made three copies of each letter on cut up pieces of index card and gave them to her to sort.  Littlest even participated for a few minutes.  Miss M loves to let her choose a card and then shows her where to put it.  Since Littlest loves putting objects inside other objects, it was a win-win.  This was another extended play activity and is still sitting out in the living room to be played at will.

Since Miss M has a much longer attention span than Littlest, she needed a filler activity.  I recently bought a small bag of craft pompoms for $2; I dumped them into a bowl and gave her a spoon and yet another diaper wipes container.  She happily transferred pompoms for several minutes.  This easy, cheap and portable activity will be coming with us on our road trip this weekend.

For our final activity, we read the included storybook (I loved the emphasis on engineering and the fact that the kids had to try several ideas before coming up with one that worked) and decorated postcards to send to the grandmothers.  Miss M insisted I draw the stick figure on her swing set but I had her add the facial features, fingers and toes so it wasn't just my drawing.  She dictated a message to my mom and we wrote a note to mother-in-law on Littlest's card, added addresses and stamps and marched them out to the mailbox.  Since MGT includes a similar activity every week, I think this may become a tradition.  I used to love getting mail and it actually makes me sad that this medium is used so little now.  On our upcoming trip I think I will buy a few postcards for the girls to dictate messages/draw pictures on and mail them to ourselves so they can have the experience of getting things in the mail, too.

The Language of the Body

We had Mother Goose Time with just the three of us today, thanks to a little cold caught by Littlest over the weekend.  We focused on body language, especially facial expressions since I think those are a little easier for really young children to understand.

After our morning devotional and while they ate breakfast, I let them watch Daniel Tiger.  This episode focused on times you might feel sad and was a great opportunity to point out the body language of the children when they were sad and how it changed when they got happier (it also reinforces that it is okay to be sad sometimes and you don't have to immediately feel better.  I love this show).

Following circle time, I brought out several of the daily posters from the past few days and we looked at the children in them, describing how they felt and how we could tell from the picture.  Miss M enjoyed this activity and started playing the part of teacher, leafing through them and questioning me about the pictures.  It was a good way to keep her engaged while providing vocabulary and explanations she may not possess yet.

Surprised.

I supplemented some of the activities today with games I found on the internet to help teach the girls more emotional vocabulary.  One idea was to draw faces on circles and use them on a flannelboard to create an emotion word version of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear".  I found some pre-drawn faces by Googling "facial expression pictures", printed and laminated them.  Miss M liked identifying the emotion on each face and putting it in the familiar pattern (we have all the books in the Eric Carle series so she knows it really well).  For example; "Happy face, happy face, what do you see?  I see a sleepy face looking at me."  We talked about how we could tell what the emotion was by how the mouth and eyes were lifted or scrunched.  She practiced making her version of the emotion when I pointed to it.

The second game was simply another emotion matching game, similar to the one provided in one of last week's day bags but with a few more expressions to help boost her vocabulary (like exhausted, disgusted and bored).  I printed two copies of this free worksheet, laminated them and cut one apart, leaving one whole for an easier matching game.  The girls took turns picking a card and matching it while I explained the emotion and when they may have felt it.

I attempted several times to introduce the ASL activities but the girls weren't interested today.  I'm going to keep the poster out and try again another day.

Checking out the craft and trying
to make the sign.

They both scurried to our craft table in the kitchen when I announced that we were going to make a project.  They both love having their hands traced, even though it tickles.  I love the multiple mementos of their tininess that I get to save to look back on in the future.  They put the glue on the hearts and placed them in the palms of the hand cutouts, then (their favorite part) sprinkled the green sand on the top.  The project is meant to be a hand signing I love you in ASL, with the third and fourth fingers bent down.  My husband and I use this sign all the time with each other and Miss M has tried imitating it when we do but was adamantly opposed to bending down the fingers of her project so for now it is a high five with a sparkly heart.

Have you noticed that she's always wearing her crown?  She loves this
craft from June, even though most of the jewels have fallen off from constant use.  I rue the day it finally gets destroyed.  It is her "most favoritest" accessory (in her own words).

Preschool Gaming

On Wednesday we focused on the feelings of being glad, mad and sad.  I was shocked that the girls were able to identify those emotions just from the daily unit posters.  It goes to show how much more kiddos know than we think they do.  They really enjoyed drawing pictures in the included Feelings book and coming up with ways to finish the prompt "I feel ___ when _____________".  Most of Miss M's responses had to do with Daddy leaving or coming home. :)

Aside from talking about feelings and how we show them, we also played some fun games.  One game involved drawing concepts on the bottom of paper cups and hiding the colored buses from this month's manipulatives bag.  The child was supposed to identify the concept (a letter, number or shape) and then look for the bus.  Miss M knew all the ones I put on the cups so I started introducing the concept of subtraction.  I held up my fingers to show that there were five buses and said "There are five buses.  You have two (put down two fingers) so there are three still hiding."  She loved this game and we probably played at least a dozen times.  About the fifth time through I asked her how many were still hiding and she said "Three!" correctly.  I will admit I was completely floored that she got it that quickly.  She continued to subtract correctly until she got bored with me asking and just started looking for buses as fast as she could.  How I wish I could have gotten it on video!

 At the grocery store today I tested her to see if she still had the concept.  We went to the produce section and I handed Littlest a bag and an apple.  I told Miss M that I wanted four apples and we had one, so how many more did she need to give her sister to put in the bag?  She knew the answer, had a blast picking apples and Littlest loved putting them in our bag.  I think it is vitally important that our children learn to use academic principles in the real world, not just in the classroom, on a worksheet or a test form.  I try to be conscientious about pointing things out during our daily routines without getting into the habit of constantly quizzing.

The other super fun game we played was a variation of the one in the Teacher Guide.  I made the girls their own fly swatters using a folding square of construction paper with a straw taped to the middle.  I used the upper and lower case letter cards from our June theme, laid out the lowercase letters on the floor and then held up the upper case version.  The girls took turns swatting the correct letter, then practiced the sound the letter made.  They had a blast.  This would be a fun game for an older child to practice sight words, color or number words (hold up the color/number, they find the label or vice versa), math facts, etc.  I would recommend buying dollar store fly swatters if you do this a lot because our little homemade ones would not stand up to prolong swatting.

The mirrors were fun for both the big girls to make.  Littlest just wanted to work on her fine motor skills so she dumped out the jewels on the table and painstakingly put them back in a jar (quite contentedly, I might add).  See, there is always something for every age!

Grammie School

We were lucky to have my in-laws visit us for the holiday weekend.  We took advantage of a fresh audience and introduced Grammie to the pleasures of Mother Goose Time.  She loved it and the girls loved having her there.

Miss M loved showing Grammie how we do circle time and how much she knows already.  We introduced our letter of the week (Ff) and then she used a magnifying glass to find as many as she could on the world map.

The skill of the day for us was fine motor in the form of the I am Special trees and F is for Fox crafts. I let both girls use the glue on their own (for the most part--I added extra glue when they indicated they were done since they tended to put it just in one spot) and was proud of myself for letting go of a little more control.  Littlest got a somewhat frustrated trying to release the metallic hearts so I helped with that but she picked them up herself and used the glue bottle to squeeze out a well-measured dot of glue.  She liked having her hand traced, even though it tickled a bit.  Miss M really likes tracing her hand (although Grammie helped with this one) and insisted on doing it herself in her journal, with just a little help from me to keep her hand from moving too much.

With the Fox craft, I brought out a pack of dollar store Christmas stickers (it's what I had) and I let them choose what they wanted to use to decorate their fox.  When they pointed to one they wanted I did my best to use a word that began with "f" to describe it, like funny rabbit or furry mouse, or used it in a sentence with as many "f" initial words as I could think of such as "Father Christmas is frolicking in the frosty air in his sleigh pulled by Fred the Reindeer."  We called this auditory bombardment in the speech therapy world.  I was doing it in the context of teaching children to say the sound correctly but it works just as well in teaching the sound a letter makes.  I used to make sound collage pages with my students, using stickers, magazine and newspaper photos or pictures they drew themselves.  When I worked as a reading tutor before graduate school, I helped the kids make their own personal alphabet books, which they loved.  Using stickers helps them with their pincer grasp and finger strength, as well as coordination (it takes a bit of maneuvering to get those stickers off your fingers and on the paper in one piece).  All in all, it was a fun morning with MGT.

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Exploring Air and Water

We are getting caught up on our school units.  There are so many fun activities, it's hard not to do them all but I had to do some picking and choosing this week since we also had to shopping,  cleaning and other necessary things around the house.

On Saturday Miss M and Littlest needed something to do so I slightly adapted another art project from our lesson book from the tree week.  I taped off a tree shape onto a piece of paper and let Miss M paint the whole paper, then peeled it off when it was dry.  It's somewhat noticeable.  Littlest was given crayons but really wanted to paint like her sister so she managed to dip the crayon in the paint and use it to stamp her paper.  She was actually pretty careful with it, not trying to decorate the wall, table or herself, so I stood nearby while she had fun.  Miss M thought that was pretty neat and started doing it, too.  I am working on controlling that part of me that wants to make sure everything happens the way it "should" and let things happens the way they will (within reason, of course).

On Monday we had a great time with our friends learning about air and the fun things it can do.  This month's theme poster is a big hit with all the kids, they love looking for new things during circle time.  We looked for things that float, fly and make colors in the air.  We talked about hot air balloons (one of friends got to go up in one in June during our town's annual festival) and made the adorable craft.  During snack I found a Mr. Wizard clip on YouTube that teaches about hot air balloons so we watched that.  The kids were mesmerized.

The feathers were fun, the kids waved them in the air to feel the way the air moved and then we had feather races, blowing them across the floor.  They were a little giddy and took off, pretending to be birds or I would have contrasted how the feathers moved with trying to blow on something heavier.  

Our last "structured" activity was coloring rainbows.  I showed them the daily poster with the rainbow picture and we talked about the recent rainbow that had appeared in our neighborhood during the last rainstorm.  The kids could name the colors and kind of tried to follow the pattern for their coloring pages but Miss M especially liked using whatever colors suited her fancy.

This morning found us friendless (due to other plans, not because they no longer like us) so we did some school with just the three of us.  I had planned a lot of different activities from the water week but the Puddle Jumping activity proved to be quite fun and then we modified it a bit so that was the only one we got to today.  Miss M liked seeing how far she could jump and then counting her steps to see if she could jump as far as Mommy.  When it got too hot to hop outside, we brought the puddle pieces inside and I made a trail of letters from the start to the finish.  Miss M hopped from one letter to another until she reached the end, naming them as she went.  Another modification could be to make more puddle pieces, number them on one side and put letters on the back.  Kiddos have to hop from puddle to puddle in order and then identify the letter on the back before hopping to the next one.  I think we might try this tomorrow, since we are starting potty training and will be housebound for several days with hours and hours of time to fill close to the powder room.  I really want to do the Eyedropper Art project (dripping watery paint down an umbrella cut out) and hope that Miss M will be amenable to it tomorrow (she just wanted to hop today).  I'll post the finished product if I can get her to do it.

Cars, Boats and Castles

We are going out of town this weekend and will be spending a lot of time in the car.  I am always nervous about what kinds of things I can bring to keep the girls happy without letting them spend the whole time on a device of some sort.  I started thinking about the folder games included in many of the Mother Goose Time daily units and decided those would be some easy entertainment

Miss M loves the puzzles and tangrams so I the RV/hotel shape puzzle and the tangram set for this month and laminated them, then hot glued ziplock bags to the bag to hold all the pieces.  We are also taking some of the alphabet review games from our Ocean unit and the color worm review from last month.  They all fit pretty well in a gallon bag, although I can't zip it closed so I'm considering whipping up a quick little bag (I have so much scrap fabric and a bag only takes about an hour, if I iron as I go).  I bought an inexpensive cookie sheet with a rim at the grocery store and it fits perfectly across her car seat so she can play without losing pieces.  It's also handy for keeping crayons from rolling everywhere or using as a magnet board with a really fun set of dress up magnet bears she got at Christmas time from my mom.

Besides getting ready for our trip today, we did a few activities from the Houseboat and Castle units.  Both girls had a grand time floating boats and other things in our water table.  We brought ladles to see if we could get the containers to sink but that quickly led to drinking the water and pouring it on the sidewalk to make puddles for splashing in.

We have this fun tunnel and a circus tent from IKEA that made a great castle.  They loved racing through the tunnel into the tent and back out.  Miss M flew our pet dragon in as soon as we finished making him (that was a fun craft for practicing prepositions as we placed the body parts on the bag).  She also liked making the crown and was disappointed that the jewels needed to dry before she could wear it.

I am planning on taking some of next week's units with us on our trip to give Miss M some fun activities to do with her grandparents while they babysit so we can go on a couple nice, long dates.  I think they are perfect for leaving with a babysitter or other caretaker, along with the Dance N Beats DVDs.  Any prep work can be done before you leave and the lessons are so easy to present that you don't need a lot of experience working with children to do it.  I won't be blogging next week but I'll let you know how I went when we get back.