Letter B Week (Day One)

(29 Months)

Last week I created a plan for our Letter B Week.  While I scoured the internet looking for ideas that I thought my little ones would enjoy, the majority of the wonderfully engaging activity sheets come from Erica, Confessions of a Homeschooler.  Thank you again Erica for creating so many fun learning activities and for sharing them with all of us.

After the kids were in bed last night, I took out our easel paper and drew two large, block letter B's (to color), several dotted B's (to trace), a couple of balloons (easy to draw) and a book (again easy to draw).  Little Miss woke up first and when she saw what was on her table, she immediately sat down and started tracing the B's.  Then she traced her brother's B's and asked for "more B's Mommy".

She kept asking for more and more B's, so I grabbed the first activity sheet (it has the child first draw lines, then curves and then the letter B).  As soon as she saw it, Little Miss smiled and said "thank you Mommy, thank you very much."  My heart melted (thank you Erica).  When Wild One saw what his sister was working on, he asked for one too.  Woo hoo!  They are working and asking for more!

We had a fun teddy bear breakfast of whole wheat blueberry pancakes with sliced bananas (notice all those b's?).  They loved having their bears sitting at the table with us.  They polished off half the batch of pancakes between the two of them!  These are delicious!  Instead of artificial sweetener, I used two tablespoons of real maple syrup, plus we added 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and 1 tsp of vanilla.  We needed 1 1/4 cups of milk for the batter (1 cup wasn't nearly enough), and since it's a thick batter we spread the batter out slightly when we ladled it onto the griddle.

My hubby and I created a long list of "b" objects, and I noticed that we have many of these items in the house.  So, I created a really large discovery bin (I used an empty case of copy paper, wrapped both parts in wrapping paper) and then let the kids explore (of course, by the time I grabbed my camera the items were already all over the place):

     letter b sandpaper                    letter b magnets

     bracelet                                   balloons

     butterfly                                  bees/bugs- 10 Little Ladybugs

     bears                                       books

     blue blocks                             blue ball

     basketball                               baseball

     beach ball                               baby blanket

     brush                                      baby

     baby bottle                             bowl

     blue basket                             bandaid

     jar of beans                            box

     bubbles                                  bunny

     banana                                   beads

They both practiced tracing the sandpaper b (rough) and the magnetic b (smooth).

So much fun and it's only day one!

Rainbow Bubbles and Glow Sticks

(28 Months)

A water table is so much fun.  A water tables with bubbles is even more fun.  A water table with RAINBOW bubbles - well, it causes hiccups from laughing so hard!  This is our second time playing with rainbow bubbles, it always causes instant smiles, squeals of immense joy, and the laughter that makes your heart just melt away.

How can something so simple as food dye on bubbles create this type of incredible reaction?  It's been said that "it's all in the little things", well that's definitely true.  To make a rainbow bubble table, we poured in about three big squirts (tablespoons) of bubble bath (from The Dollar Tree), then used the hose to make the bubbles nice and frothy.  The kidabunks chose their liquid food dye colors and began squeezing the bottles and making little droplets of color on the bubbles.  We played for awhile.  Then we tossed in a couple of glow sticks and glow bracelets into the water (the water turned a deep dark purple from all the food dye that the kidabunks added).  I wasn't able to get any good pictures of the glow sticks under the water though- I really need to spend time (HA!) learning how to use my camera.  The twins loved "diving" for glowing treasure.  We started out fishing for glowing treasure, but Wild One started flailing around the toy fishing pole and Little Miss was not happy with all the splashing.  

The dye makes the bubbles so pretty - it does temporarily dye skin (it washes off in the tub though).

 For some reason he didn't want to put down his squeeze bottle while playing with the bubbles.

We needed to make a new bubble table, because we lost most of our bubbles when we were splashing.    Which was all good for Little Miss because she convinced her brother to make a Pinkalicious bubble table this time.

Little Miss has a serious look on her face as she watches her brother pick up the hose- she doesn't like being squirted and splashed with water .  She's so concerned about what her brother is doing that she didn't even notice that she was pouring pink bubbles and water all over herself!

Wild One made a huge pink foam cupcake, but by the time I grabbed my camera he poured it out onto the palm tree in the background.  He said the palm tree was hungry.