Unplug Your Kids: Green

The unplugged theme this week is green, and we decided to share a few of our weekly "green activities.
O loves to drink from her green Kleen Kanteen just like mommy!

Helping sort the recycling.
Helping mommy put the plastics in the correct container
Helping mommy and daddy crush cardboard boxes
Helping daddy put the boxes in the correct container

We cheated a little since we didn't really do anything that we don't normally do. However, O doesn't usually go to drop off the recycling. We had to go to town on Thursday and in order to minimize wasteful spending of gas, we packed everything into one trip... dropped off the recycling and trash, dropped off the tiller at Kenny's house, went out to eat, and went grocery shopping. It was a long night, but we wanted to get our money's worth since it cost $7 to go to town and back (yes, I'm a dork, and I like calculating things like that).

Thrifty Thursday

Donated: 15 magazines, 20 greeting/Christmas cards, 1 record, 5 cassette tapes, 1 teddy bear, 1 small Barbie, 1 small photo album, etc.

Purchased: 2 small glasses for O, a basket for Montessori work, a wide mouthed ceramic frog (I've got a few Montessori inspired ideas for this frog!), a small doll for O (I'm feeling some buyer's remorse for buying the doll since O REALLY does not need another doll, but it was cute and only cost 1 dollar) Total spent- $3.69

Open/Shut

I presented O with a basket of items to open and shut. She was very interested, and she liked the ring box the best. She said "ope, shut" the whole time she was doing this work. For some strange reason, she does not like to clean up after this work (she usually puts things back with no problem and actually enjoys putting things in their places). She'd rather leave the items scattered on her rug while she goes off to play with something else. Obviously, that's not acceptable. Hopefully, she'll do better with this tomorrow.

Unplug Your Kids: Birds

The unplugged project this week is birds. We do lots of bird watching around here, so this was the perfect theme for us.
O is counting with her bird wall cards.

On Friday we took the pedal boat over to check on Mother Goose and her eggs. We were hoping that she would stand up, so that we could see her eggs, but she didn't. You can see the goose in the top left hand corner of the picture. O is pointing at her.

It was a breezy, cool morning, but it was sunny and beautiful. Elliott found several bird calls (and deer calls) in the garage, so we sat on a blanket and tried to call birds to us. They didn't fall for it! We could see geese in the distance, and a mother duck and her 6 ducklings swam by, but they wouldn't come close. Although the mother duck did pause when I blew on one of the calls. I don't know which call is which, so she probably thought I was a deer :)

O crushed stale bread to spread around for the songbirds.
O kept calling "geese, geese, bread, bread," while throwing bread to them, but they weren't interested.

Pink

O and I are making a color book similar to the ones in this post, and today the color was pink. I'm going to try to take a few pictures a week, so hopefully we'll finish the book relatively soon. The cat in the photos showed up at our house almost 2 weeks ago, and she has decided that we are her family. She is the friendliest cat I have EVER seen. O had fun trying to get the cat to blow bubbles!

Our 1st Weekly Pizza Night

I really don't like to cook, and the thing I dislike most about it is figuring out what to cook (my mom always said this when I was a kid, and I thought it was just silly. Now I understand). I decided that a weekly pizza night would be a fun way to get O involved in cooking while providing me with a great idea for a healthy supper. Thanks for the idea, Mom and Kiddo from the blog, What do we do all day?
We used our bread machine to make the pizza dough yesterday. I've been feeling guilty about not using my bread machine lately, so I was thrilled to use it again. We used whole wheat flour along with all purpose flour to make the pizza a little healthier than usual. O loved pouring in the ingredients and mixing.

I struggled to roll out the dough for a LONG time. O was very patient, but she did leave for a little while to go cut her wooden food. I coaxed her back with the promise that she could paint the dough with olive oil. Obviously, I did something wrong (I really had no idea what I was doing)! The dough was crumbly and almost impossible to roll.
O stuffed more cheese into her mouth than made it onto the pizza.
She also stuffed lots of veggies in her mouth. I didn't mind :)
Here it is! We put onions, bell pepper, mushrooms, brocolli, and organic cheese on it. It looks a little crazy, but it tasted great. I think we'll make another pizza tomorrow because I have more of all of the ingredients that I need to use before they go bad.

O's 1st Painting on Canvas

O painted on a canvas for the 1st time today. Yay! I was much more excited than she was :) She started by making continuous circles while saying "o, o, o." Then she made some dots and put her hand in the paint and attempted to paint around it.

Crushing Cheerios

O used the mortar and pestle to crush Cheerios. Today was the 1st time, we've used it and she did a good job. She needed some help to crush the Cheerios, but she enjoyed trying to crush them:) I then poured them into her organic applesauce (the mortar and pestle is made of stone, and its too heavy for O to lift). She enjoyed mixing the Cheerios into her applesauce. She loves to mix and says "mix" all the time :)

Matching Art Cards

I ordered Child-size Master Pieces by Aline D. Wolf for myself for my birthday, and I finally finished cutting and laminating the cards last night. O matched the Step 1 cards today. She was very excited when I was laying the cards out, and she kept saying "match, match." We then talked about the different pictures- colors, objects, etc.

Our Busy Day

This is what we did today. It was a busy day despite the fact that this mama is sick! Bleh! I hate being sick. O keeps looking at me saying "sick" then she tells me to drink "tea" because she knows that hot tea makes me feel better. She is just getting over the same illness, and she's been quite a grouch lately :( I can't wait until we are both better. We are so rarely sick that we don't quite know how to handle it!
She loves this work and is always so focused while doing it.
Stringing beads
Putting rubber bands on the doorknob. This is a favorite activity which requires lots of concentration. I LOVE to see her totally focused on the task at hand. O's hair is in her 1st ponytail! After putting the rubber bands on the door knob, she took them off and put them on her wrist. She was proud of her bracelets. It also tooks lots of time and concentration to get the rubber bands on her wrist.

Coloring with Markers

O had a great time coloring with markers in her new, thrift store coloring book (it cost me 49 cents!). I love it because the pages are wipe-off, so we can use it for years!
After coloring for a bit (mainly making dots!), she decided it would be more fun to color her toes:)

Too Easy

When cleaning out a few under the bed boxes yesterday, I came across this ring holder. I thought it would make a fun activity for O. I showed her how to put the small hairbands on the ring holder and push them down, then she had her turn. This was much too easy for her, and we won't do it again. I wish I'd thought of this a few months ago :(

Toothpick Work

This is a variation on the toothpick work we've done in the past. Before we used a parmesan cheese shaker which had much bigger holes. O enjoyed putting toothpicks in the container. This time we used an actual toothpick dispenser. The holes are much smaller, so it required more concentration and fine motor control. O did great and she really enjoyed it. She also enjoyed taking the lid off and putting all of the toothpicks in the jar that way :)

Bear Puzzle

O has had a good time playing with her bear puzzle lately. Its been in the toy closet for a while because she used to spend more time chewing on it rather than playing with it :) We talked about emotions and colors while doing this activity.

Brown Bear I Spy Bottle

I made an I Spy bottle for O to go along with the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? I got the idea from here. Thanks Shannon for the link to that site. Its full of great ideas! I used lentils instead of rice since O already has a rice I Spy bottle. For this activity we read the book and after we read each page we look for the animal on that page. I kept saying "Green frog, green frog. Where are you?" O wasn't too interested at first (she just wanted to shake and open the bottle), but she became more interested as a I called to the animals asking where they were.