Sponge and Straw Boats

O and I made sponge and straw boats this morning. It was easy, fast, and fun! To make a boat you need a sponge, a straw, and a triangle of craft foam for the sail. See Make and Takes for more detailed instructions.
O helped put the straws in the sponges.
Putting the boats in the water.
"Tiny O" is going for a ride!

Muffin Tin Monday

Here's O's Muffin Tin lunch for today- tomato sandwich triangle, cucumber slices and mini pickles, grape tomatoes and banana pepers, raisins, avocado, and grilled chicken. She was SO excited about her muffin tin lunch today!

Goodnight Moon Lapbook

Thanks to Sako for this wonderful Goodnight Moon lapbook! If you haven't checked out her blog, One Little, Two Little, you need to do it right now! I love this lapbook, and her most recent one which is about the human body is great, too (I can't wait to make it!). I've wanted to make a lapbook for O for a while, but I was a little intimidated by the process. However, all I had to do was download the files, print, cut, laminate, and glue :) Thanks, Sako, for sharing the wonderful materials you made!!! I especially love the pockets on the lapbook, and O does, too. I laminated the mini books, but I probably shouldn't have because now the pages are difficult to turn. O loves the clock, but I think coloring the balloons was her favorite part so far.
Its so great to have so many different activities in a small, organized space, and I love that O's 1st lapbook is based on one of our all time favorite books!

Writing Names

Amazingly Simple, Yet Soooo Entertaining

Can you guess what O's doing? She's pulling a tape measure out, then I'd count, and she'd let it go. This was VERY entertaining :)

Homemade Pizza Night

I'm trying to get back into the routine of having homemade pizza for supper on Friday nights. I couldn't find the recipe that I've used in the past, so my friend, Becca, sent me her recipe. I decided to share it since the pizza was DELICIOUS. Since we don't eat red meat, we always make vegetarian pizzas and the bell pepper and tomatoes from our garden were delicious on it. We usually have leftovers, but we ate the whole thing tonight. Here it is:

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough (do not substitute flours - must be exact)

1 Cup Water (80 degrees) I just use hot water & don’t check temp.2 TBL Oil (I use Olive Oil)1 TBL Sugar1 tsp Salt1 Cup Whole Wheat Flour1 ½ Cups Bread Flour 1 tsp Active Dry Yeast

Select Pizza Dough Course if your machine has one.

Dough takes about an hour in my machine.

Place finished dough on a lightly floured surface. Divide in half and press onto a 12 inch pizza pan raising the edges. (Very Thin crust) -

Sprinkle the pan with a little cornmeal. It keeps the dough from sticking to the pan and gives the crust a little more texture. I use about a teaspoon and a half if that much.

Generously prick the dough with a fork. Rub a little olive oil all over the pizza especially the raised edges.

Bake in a preheated oven at 425 for 10 minutes.
Take out when the edges of the crust begin to turn a light golden brown.
Remove, add toppings and return to oven to bak and additional 15 - 20 minutes.

Yikes! I just read the recipe a little closer after I pasted it from my email, and I really didn't follow the directions. Oops! I put the toppings on right after I coated it with the olive oil, then I cooked it for about 15 minutes. This worked GREAT, but I might try the real directions next time :) Also, I didn't have any cornmeal, so I used whole wheat flour on my pizza stone. In the past, I've preheated the pizza stone but I didn't tonight because its so hard to transfer the pizza to a hot pizza stone. I was afraid that the crust would not be crispy, but it was perfect. The best thing about it is that I have enough dough left over, so we'll have pizza again Sunday night :)

Summer Matching Cards

I downloaded and printed these summer matching cards from Montessori for Everyone. The cards are beautiful, and O was excited to do this matching work!
I tried laying them in a row, so that she could match left to right, but then she ended up looking at them sideways because she wanted to sit beside the cards on the rug. I didn't like her looking at them sideways, so I turned them for her.
She had a great time, and we'll do this again soon.

Postcard Book

The idea for making this postcard book has been bouncing around in my brain for months, so I'm so glad to finally have it made! I added a piece of cardstock to the left side of each of O's postcards and laminated them. Then I cut the cards out of the lamination, punched the holes, added the rings, and now she has a book of postcards! Yay! Most of the postcards are from her grandparents from their various vacations. I've also started getting postcards whenever we travel, and I write a few lines about what we did and what O liked about each place. It's an easy way to create a vacation memory book, and hopefully I can get Elliott to participate, too. Since I used ring binders, it will be very easy to add new postcards to the book.



O likes looking at her postcard book, and her favorite page is the postcard from Disneyland :) I'm not sure why she surrounded herself with the bowling game bottles when she sat down to read. Silly girl :)

Helping with the Laundry

One of O's favorite things to do is to "elp mama" load the washing machine. I sort the clothes from the hamper and put them in a pile in the hallway (outside the linen closet where the hamper is kept), and she takes them piece by piece to the washing machine. This keeps her busy for a LONG time (long enough for me to fold and put away a load of clothes), and she is very proud of herself. She kept sniffing the clothes while saying "dada's shirt dirty." Occasionally, she'd say "stinks" although none of the clothes actually stank :) O chose all of her clothes today, and she was very proud of herself. She was especially happy about her "tap-tap" shoes and socks!

Baking Bread and Making Butter

O and I made honey oatmeal whole wheat bread in our bread machine this morning. She loves helping to pour the ingredients into the machine. She also helped cut the butter. She tasted the honey again, and she really liked it this time. She kept sneaking bits of it while we worked.

After she woke up from her nap, O and I made butter! We had leftover cream from making ice-cream, so we decided to give it a try. To make butter you need a jar, a marble, and whole cream.
O put the marble in the jar and held the jar while I poured in the cream. I closed the lid tightly, and we took turns shaking it. O shook it 2 or 3 times then tried to open the jar. She REALLY wanted to see the marble, and she got upset when I wouldn't let her open the jar. She got over it when I turned on the music and started dancing while shaking the jar. She helped some, but I did the VAST majority of the shaking :) After about 10 minutes, I couldn't hear the marble anymore. I poured off the liquid, and we had butter!
Here's a piece of the bread with the butter. The marble is still in the butter :) The bread looks a little deformed, but it tasted good. The butter was delicious! O wanted to just lick it off her fingers, but I convinced her to have a little bread with it. We used the whole jar, so we had to make another jar to share with dada!

Grinding Cheerios and Walnuts

I bought this grinder a few weeks ago because I thought it would be the perfect way for O to grind her cheerios and walnuts to put on her applesauce. She loved it! She had a little trouble holding it still, so I had to help her by holding it down a little. She was very proud, and she liked pouring the cheerio and walnut mixture onto her applesauce for her afternoon snack.

Our Daily Schedule

Since a couple of people have asked about our daily schedule, I decided to write a post about in case anyone else is interested :) We are currently in a state of transition with our schedule, and it is changing daily. O and I used to sleep until around 9 am, and she went to sleep around 9:30, but we are waking up earlier (7:30), and she's going to sleep earlier (8:30) starting yesterday. Elliott's is on a new schedule at work, so we are all trying to go to bed earlier :)



So...we start our day with getting dressed, brushing teeth, doing a little light cleaning downstairs (the bedrooms and laundry room are downstairs, and the den and kitchen which is really just one big room are upstairs). Then we go upstairs for breakfast. Its amazing how long this all takes. This morning we finally finished breakfast around 9am. O plays with her toys while I fix breakfast. She primarily has wooden (puzzles and cutting food) and open ended toys (ex. bilibo, felt board, and rainbow stacker) and montessori type materials, but she does have a couple of plastic toys (Mr. Potato Head and dollhouses that a friend just gave her). I put her toys in a toy rotation because we realized early on that she plays better when she doesn't have "too much stuff" (whenever there's is clutter O always says "too much stuff. clean up!") The problem with the toy rotation is that once the toys are gone, I forget about them, and they often don't come out of the closet for months and months :)



After breakfast we either go play on the beach, read books, or play with her toys. Occasionally, we'll do a few montessori activities. It really just depends on what she wants to do. I was surprised that she hasn't wanted to go on the beach lately, but tomorrow I'm going to insist that we go out. I know she'll love it once we get out there. I like to take morning walks with her, but its usually too hot at this time of year. We eat lunch around 11:30 or 12:00, and then she naps for about an hour and a half to 2 hours. This is when I blog and clean the house. When she wakes up, we usually read books for about 45 minutes to an hour. Reading books is her absolute favorite thing to do, and I love to read to her. Then we do a little housework (washing and folding clothes, etc).


After that we go back upstairs and have fun! Today she kept asking for "more activteees" and "more games!" She likes to toddler activity bags a lot, and I'm planning on making more soon. I am a little concerned that she's getting too dependent on me for entertainment, so I'm trying to make sure she has plenty of independent play time each day (and the Montessori work helps with this a lot, since most of it is independent work). She loves playing in her rice pit out on the screened porch, but its usually too hot to go out there in the afternoon. She really hasn't shown much interest in her Montessori work lately, and I think that is because its out on the shelf all of the time. I need to have a place where I can limit her access to it, so it will be more appealing to her. Elliott and I are planning on building a shelf (hopefully this weekend) that will be the Montessori shelf. It will have casters so I can turn it around during "school time," and then turn it to the wall when we are just hanging out and playing. I think our Montessori time will go MUCH better after we have this in place. I'll post pictures once I have it all set up. I'm VERY excited about this, and I can't wait to be more organized.



Back to the schedule...O has her afternoon snack around 4 or 5, and then we try to go outside and work in the garden and check the mail. If its not too hot, we'll play for a while. Yesterday, she had a great time chasing me and riding her tricycle around the yard. Once we have a fence, we'll spend a lot more time in the yard (it makes me nervous for her to be so close to the lake, and I can't take my eyes off of her for even a second).



We eat supper around 7ish, and then she plays or reads books with dada for a while. Then its time for a bath (or a quick shower with mommy) and bed.

I have a list of activities (baking, arts and crafts, etc) that I want to eventually do with O, and I loosely plan to do 1 or 2 things each day. I LOVE reading toddler/preschool activity books and searching for ideas on different blogs. Google reader makes it so easy to read blogs quickly and star the items that I want to go back to, so it has helped me get much more organized. Thanks for the comments, and let me know if anyone has any questions. I've got to go steam the kitchen floor now :)

1-to-1 Correspondence

I'm not sure what to call this, so I'll just call it 1-to-1 correspondence since that is the concept we're working on. O enjoyed putting the babies in each bowl. She said she was putting them night-night. She loves babies and everything tiny, so this was the perfect activity for her. The babies are cake decorations and the bowl is a paint palette (I think). Lately, she's been asking to wear a bathing suit after her nap :)

Peanut Butter Playdough

O and I made peanut butter playdough this afternoon. It was fun and very messy! There are lots of recipes on the internet, so I finally chose one and modified it a bit.

I used 1 cup of peanut butter (at the last minute I decided not to waste my yummy, organic peanut butter and used the cheap stuff that we used for the pine cone bird feeders a few months ago), 1 cup of dry milk, and a tablespoon of honey. Next time I will add more honey because our playdough was quite crumbly, and honey should help it to stick better.
O helped mix the peanut butter and honey. She tasted the honey and wasn't terribly impressed. We talked about the concepts of sweet and sour. She said the honey was sour, so we'll have to work on those concepts more :)
We mixed in the dry milk 1/4 of a cup at a time
She's having fun with the playdough! We had a bowl of cheerios and a bowl of raisins to use for decoration. She ate the raisins like they were candy (not that she ever eats candy!). I think I'll have to give her raisins more often! We also had a bowl of playdough accessories. I made a bear and a snake, and O just had fun mashing it all around and sneaking bites while saying "O tastes." I put the pb playdough in the refrigerator to use again soon, and we'll definitely add more honey before we play with it again.

More Color Mixing

Thanks to Jo at A Bit of This and That for this super fun activity!!! O loved it! I set out 5 glasses and put a few drops of food coloring in each one. I had O guess which color each would hold before she poured in the water. She did a great job pouring, but I did have to remind her to pour slowly and carefully and to support the measuring cup with her left hand. She did a good job guessing what the colors would be, except that she guessed that the blue would be white :)
She used her drum stick to make music briefly.
Then she was ready to mix! I couldn't find the dropper, so we tried a turkey baster which did not work well. Its a concept that she has not mastered yet. I quickly got out a bowl and let her pour the colored water into it. She LOVED doing this, and it made an icky greenish, brown color! Thanks again, Jo, for this wonderful activity!!!