Baby H Update (9 months old)

I'm really excited about Baby H's current age (9 months) because it is so much fun watching him explore his world. I'm so lucky to be blessed with a quiet, content, smiley baby.  I love how he can transform things like measuring cups, plastic spoons, and large lids into hours of entertainment (yes, you heard me right, this boy can play for over an hour by himself with just a handful of toys!).  I'm constantly on the lookout for miscellaneous containers and other objects for him to play with, and I'm starting to think up more ideas for homemade games.  Here are some photos of Baby H in action..

Preschool Science: Experiments in Buoyancy

This morning, the girls enjoyed doing some basic science experiments to explore buoyancy: Dancing Raisings, and Egg Floating.  The experiments did not go quite as planned, which gave them an even more important lesson in the scientific process...

Art Inspired by the Book Swimmy

This morning we read the picture book Swimmy by Leo Lionni and made our own artwork inspired by the beautiful illustrations in the book.  Here's what we did..

Cooking with Kids: Process not Perfection

The girls and I made banana bread the other night as an early Fathers Day present for their dad.  Now that I've left my job, I feel a lot less stressed in general, and I had a really good time just observing how much the kids enjoy the process of creating something new..

Exploration with Bottle Caps and Lids

When I realized how many bottle caps and lids we throw away on a weekly basis (3 gallons of milk, 6 bottles of soda water, 12 squeezable applesauce pouches, etc...), I started saving them.  It wasn't long before my little collection had grown large enough to provide an entire morning's worth of entertainment for L and E (34 months)...

Nomads Game - Story of the World Activity

I recently started reading The Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times to L and E (34 months).  Before we went on vacation, we discussed history and archeology, and today we read about how ancient people were nomads.  I made up a simple Nomad Game, which the girls were very excited to play after dinner.  I wanted them to know that ancient people lived in caves, hunted and gathered food, and moved from place to place when the food ran out.  So that's exactly what we did...

Back from Vacation

We've come back from a much-needed vacation to my in-laws' house.  Their internet is slower than dial-up (yes, that's possible!), so no blogging for me.  It was nice to spend time without being glued to my computer, to catch up on sleep, and to get time alone with my husband while grandma watched the kids.  The girls did amazingly well considering that it was a new environment and they only had about 3 toys to play with for over a week.  Baby H let so many new people hold him and even smiled and giggled at them (at the same age, his sisters had a bad case of 'stranger danger' and would scream whenever someone new even said hi to them).  We visited a Children's Museum, swam in a zero-entry pool for kids, went for many walks, fed baby goats, and had lots of great family fun. 

I am now officially done working at my job!...

Motor Skills Activities with No Setup Time

I'd love to have the time to create beautiful Montessori-style trays which the kids can use to practice certain skills, but in the meantime I have to come up with fun activities on the fly.  I want to share two activities that the girls enjoyed immensely, both of which took mere seconds to set up..

Scarf Pull - Homemade Baby Game

Using a $1 plastic bag dispenser (from Target), I made Baby H (8 months old) a new game.  I filled the dispenser with silk scarves and invited him to pull them out of the holes.  H found this very entertaining, especially when I showed him how to keep pulling and pulling the longer ones.  L and E (almost 3 years old) also had a good time with the scarves.  Here are some of the games we played...

Paint Exploration

What do we do when my mess-averse husband is away all morning?  We paint!  The girls and I had fun exploring different ways to paint, from golf-ball painting, to painting with cars, to making bubble-wrap prints.  It wasn't so much about the final product, but the experience of exploring this medium in different ways...

Learning About Plants

The girls (34 months old) planted some pinto beans in a clear container with some wet cotton balls last week.  Within a day, two of the beans started growing.. and growing.. and now one of them is over a foot tall already!  L and E were very excited to check on their beans every day, and I was amazed at how quickly they grew.  Today we learned more about plants...

Homeschool Preschool Weekly Update

Apologies for not blogging more - I've been trying to wrap up my project for work so I can be done with my job and focus more on homeschooling and other projects.  We've actually been doing a lot of fun learning activities this week, but I haven't been good about taking photos.   Here are some of the things we've been up to...

Changes

Working a demanding full-time job at home while raising three kids under three and sleeping in 2-3 hour intervals has been a big challenge for me, but somehow I've managed to do it for the past year and a half.  I constantly find myself nostalgic, however, for the days where I could play with my kids without having to check my work email every ten minutes, or when my daily schedule didn't revolve around conference calls. The stress has just been building up and affecting my physical and emotional well-being.  So earlier this week I talked to my boss about leaving the company.  Here's what this means for our family...

Decorative Picture Frame and Painting Wooden Objects

On a recent trip to the craft store, I bought a bunch of wooden frames and other wooden objects for $1 each, and the girls (33 months) have been having such a wonderful time painting and embellishing them over the past couple weeks.  I wanted to share the process for making this lovely sparkly picture frame because it was so much fun, and actually ended up looking pretty neat (the photo doesn't do it justice)...

Early Learning Fun with Unit Blocks

We have a big tub of unit blocks (each is one centimeter square, weight one gram) which I've been using with the girls when we play with our bucket scale (see our Blocks in Socks activity).  This morning while I was trying to catch up on some work, I let L and E (33 months) do some exploration and play with these unit blocks.  Later, I joined them and made up lots of fun math, spatial vitalization, and fine motor skills activities.....

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..