Hot Air Balloon Craft

We went grocery shopping this morning instead of our usual homeschool routine (which usually includes art and a story), so I improvised with a quick after-dinner craft instead.  We read The Big Balloon Race, which is an exciting story about a girl who helps her mother compete in a hot air balloon race that takes place in the 1800s.  Then I gave L and E (33 months) the materials to put together their own hot air balloon craft.  We usually do more free-form art exploration rather than specific crafts, so the girls enjoyed the challenge of aligning all the parts to form a specific object...

Introduction to Maps

Yesterday we used sand and water to make various natural formations.  Today I wanted to show the girls that we can use symbols to represent some of these land and water forms.  I drew some examples of symbols and invited L and E (33 months) to try to copy them or to make up their own...

Cooking With Kids: Mini Pizzas

For our weekly Cooking Day, the girls and I made mini-pizzas.  Not only was this a fairly easy kid-friendly cooking activity, but the results turned into a great lunch that my husband and I enjoyed as well.  Here's how we did it..

Land and Water Forms

I'm going to start a Geography unit with L and E (33 months).  Today we did a variation of the Montessori Land and Water Forms activity using real sand and water.  Since the girls have no need to know the difference between a Peninsula and an Isthmus (as in the Montessori curriculum), I made up my own variation.  We made mountains and valleys, islands, lakes, rivers, forests, and other natural formations that the girls were already familiar with...

Alphabet Boxes

I first learned about alphabet boxes here on the Counting Coconuts blog.  The concept is that you have boxes or drawers representing different letters of the alphabet and put tiny objects that start with each letter in the correct box...

I'm constantly collecting little trinkets for the girls in the $1 section of Target, craft store clearance sections and other places, so I've built up quite a collection of miscellaneous objects.  I put some alphabet boxes together for the twins a while ago when they had just turned two years old (they're now 33 months old).  At first they just wanted to play with the small objects inside instead of doing anything alphabet related (I can't really blame them - using the small cup and fork to feed the small animals is a lot more fun than sounding out words), but now that they are a bit older I've been taking the alphabet boxes back out again to work on our phonemic awareness and the girls are being a lot more receptive to organizing the objects by starting sounds..