Excavating Toys from Ice

Excavating toys from ice is one of our favorite Spring/Summer activities, and we do it often!


To prepare this activity, I filled a plastic container with small toys, marbles, and gems and then filled it with water.  I put the container in the freezer and forgot about it for at least a month (that always happens!).


 I finally remembered the container was there (when I was searching the freezer for something to cook), so I dumped the ice block on a pan and gave it to the girls along with salt, water droppers, a hammer, spoons, dull children's knives, and a cup of water.



We all worked together to get the toys out of the ice, and it was tons of fun...as usual!

Rice Crispy Treats Fun!

Since Elliott and I were away for his brain surgery during the week before Easter, we didn't get to do many Easter activities with the girls.  Luckily, we were able to get home right in time for Easter (they told us this was unlikely, so we were very thankful that it happened), and we had some Easter fun with our loves.





After seeing the Rice Crispie's commercial where the mom makes egg shaped rice crispy treats with her kids, I thought we should try it.  It was a little harder to make the eggs than we thought, but the girls had a wonderful and messy time!





O(5) was proud of her rice crispy nest.



E(2) stuffed as many treats in her mouth as she could!  Making rice crispy treat sculptures may be a new tradition for us because this was just SO much fun, and the clean-up was relatively easy, too :)

The Alphabet Stomp

While Elliott and I were in a hospital far away having his brain tumor removed, the girls stayed with their grandparents for the week (the longest we've ever been away from them...it was so hard).  They had lots of fun playing outside and playing school.  My mom found these large letter cards leftover from her teacher days, and they had fun learning with them all week.


One day after we returned home, I spread the cards out all over the floor of the deck, and we played "Alphabet Stomp!"  I called out letter names or sounds, and the girls found the letters and stomped on them.


After playing for a while, we put the letters in ABC order.


Then we walked along our alphabet path and said the letter names or sounds as we walked.


Lastly, O(5) and I had fun making words with the letter cards.



My favorite thing about this activity was that we did it outside!  I love for our girls to spend as much time outside as possible. They usually spend their outside time digging in the dirt and making various stews and soups out of dirt, sand, gumballs, leaves, etc, but occasionally we'll "play" school, too :)

Kindergarten Activity Bag...Sight Words Beans

I put together this activity for O(5) a few months ago to take on vacation. It was super simple to put together.




I used sharpie marker to write sight words from the dolch sight words lists onto white beans.  Done!





The beans can be kept in a pencil pouch for "on the go" sight words practice.

Homemade Moon Sand....FAIL!

Edit to add:  Our moon sand was great for a few days, and then it turned nasty...very, very nasty.  Don't make my mistake and use cornmeal instead of cornstarch...unless you only want it to last for a couple of days :)

The girls and I had fun making and playing with homemade Moon Sand last week. We made moon sand with O(5) when she was younger (probably 2), and it was really messy. This time we used a different recipe, and I liked it better. Here is the link to the blog where this idea originated. To make moon sand you need 4 cups of sand, 2 cups of corn meal (the recipe says corn flour, but we used corn meal...evidently I was supposed to use corn starch.  However, it worked out fine with the corn meal, and I like it better since we used cornstarch last time, and it was terribly messy.  I'm not sure how long it will last...I'll let you know), and 1 cup of water. We ended up tripling the recipe and adding a little bit of extra water.

The girls took turns pouring in the ingredients, and they loved mixing the dry sand and corn meal. I added in some mini construction vehicles, and we had a work site! I had fun playing with them, and O(5) asked "Mama, how do you know so much about construction?" so I must have done a good job of pretending! We were excited when Elliott played with us, too! They tired of the construction zone fairly quickly and started cooking with the sand...no big surprise there :)

Volcano Fun!

We love to make volcanoes on our beach, and I thought this would be a fun activity to do with Elliott while he is recovering from surgery. The girls were SUPER excited, and we had a lot of fun. First, the girls built up the sand around a bottle to form the volcano. Then they took turns pouring water into the bottle. They took turns squeezing red food coloring into the water. They took turns measuring out a total of 2 tablespoons of baking soda and pouring it into the bottle. Elliott poured in the white vinegar, and we watched the lava explode! Here are our volcano posts from previous years....2011 and 2010 and 2009

Who Needs Toys...

when you have a basket full of straws??? The girls love to play creatively with straws (and I had fun, too!).

An Edible Moveable Alphabet

The girls and I were really excited to see these Scrabble Cheez-its at the grocery store a few weeks ago! E(2) said the name or sound of the letter, and O(5) made simple words with the letters. Fun and simple!