Easter sound eggs

We did this activity last year after I saw the idea on this blog.  Little Lady didn't really get it, but Mini Me had a great time.  We are most certainly going to try this again.  


I chose six small items  (a small bell, a large bell, wooden beads, lentils, a small wood shim, and a pom pom).  I put those inside plastic Easter eggs and then put matching sounds in another set of six plastic eggs.

I plopped the eggs into two egg cartons and sat down with Mini Me to shake the eggs and make the matches.  Not only was this fun, but it also taught him problem solving skills and strategies.  He had to decide which sounds were similar, and we also worked on using a method of shaking the eggs in an organized way so he could figure out the matches. 

Three and a half ways to dye Easter eggs

Last year all four of us had a blast coloring Easter eggs.  We used several different methods to color the eggs.  

Our supplies were:

colored water/vinegar mix

crayons

spray bottles of water

stickers

paper towel tubes cut into sections for egg stands

We like hard-boiled eggs so we can eat them!  I made a batch of 16 and took a few straight from the hot water to the table.  The rest went into a cold water bath.  When the eggs are hot, it is extremely easy to draw on them with crayon.  The colors are vibrant and since the wax melts on the hot egg, you can make a very easy drawing.   The kids had fun with this, and I think it was my husband's and my favorite egg-decorating method, too.

The second thing we did (now working with cooled eggs) was put a couple drops of food coloring on each egg, then spray it with water.  It made a beautiful color splash effect but when you have to little ones who like to spray and spray and spray and spray.... the color eventually just gets washed away.  It just wasn't too much fun.  

Next we put stickers on the eggs in various shapes: mostly stars, dots, lines, and crosses.  We then dipped them in our colors.  When the eggs were colored and dry, we pulled the stickers off and enjoyed the resist pattern.  When we were dipping, we put the kids' eggs inside a whisk so they could stir the egg around without making a huge mess.  It worked great!

We discovered that if we dipped our crayon eggs in the colored water, the waxed part where we had drawn resisted the dye and they turned out so beautiful!  I almost wanted to make another batch just so I could do the crayon drawings and then dip them.  The white egg with purple and orange at the top of this photo is an example of Little Lady's crayon-on-a-hot-egg. 

I am just in love with how they turned out and can't wait to do it again!

Resurrection Eggs

I saw this great idea here last year and made a note to do the activity this year for the kids. I copied the ideas directly from the blog, but I wanted to share the idea with more people.
Each egg has an item and a Bible verse telling the Easter story from Palm Sunday to Easter morning. It's meaningful for little kiddos because there is a tangible item for each part of the story. At the site where I stole this idea, she also has extension ideas to go along with each egg. I'm excited to start our Easter countdown!

Egg letter matching

Little Lady is getting great practice matching her letters with this egg matching game! I bought a big pack of plastic eggs for $1 and wrote about 15 letters on egg tops and egg bottoms. I made sure to not match the colors. I also made sure to include letters that look similar like these:

It's a challenge (especially snapping the eggs together) but she has a great time.
Mini Me also loves this game - we have races to see who can match the most pairs first.

Mini Me has his own egg matching game, but his is with simple word families. This was a bit tricky to explain to him, as not all the egg tops and bottoms will have a match at the same time. Once he got it, he really likes it. Playing with our "letter eggs" has been fun - and colorful!

Preschool activities: Fruits of the Spirit

Galations 5: 22-23

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

<sup>For the month of January, we are going to do activities on the Fruits of the Spirit. Each activity begins with a preschool devotion on the Fruits. I printed it last year and I have no idea where it's from so I can't link it.

I made nine different fruits out of foam shapes. Each child and I are going to weave a paper basket. With each lesson, we'll add a fruit to their baskets. I've also read that people use this as a good behavior tracker throughout the day. When the child shows peace or self-control, etc, their fruit gets put in the basket.</sup> 

^Love

^{We will do the devotional first, then add an apple to our basket.
Ways to show love grab bags -Two sets of love action cards to put in bags. Each child draws an action out and shows the family/sibling the love action. I'll also see if Mini Me can think of more actions for each category.}

Words – say I love you, say something nice about someone

Time – do a puzzle together, ask the other person what game they want to play

Gifts – find a sticker to give your sibling, find a toy they want to play with

Acts – Pick up sibling’s room, Ask Mommy how can I help

Touch – Give a hug, give a kiss

Joy

Do the devotional first and add blueberries to our basket.

Sing I've Got the Joy - a fun one to dance to, also.

Joy puppet show - there is a great script and ideas here.

Peace

Do the devotional and add watermelon to the basket.

Peace skits - another link from Meaningful Mama here. She has great ideas for teaching the Fruits.

Patience

Do the devotional and add a banana to the basket.

Scratch and sniff fruit -  Mix unsweetened Kool Aid packets with a small bit of water, then have kids paint a fruit print-out with different colors/scents. When it dries, the kids can scratch and sniff their fruits.

Kindness

Do the devotional and add an orange to the basket.

Kind words with toothpaste - Here is one more activity from Meaningful Mama about the importance of kind words.

Goodness

Do the devotional and add cherries to the basket.

Goodness dropper activity - The original idea is found here. With a cup full of water representing God's goodness, you use a dropper to take water from the cup and fill another cup. It shows that our goodness comes from God and is always changing but God's goodness is never lessened when he gives it to us.

Faithfulness 

Do the devotional and add grapes to the basket.

Sticker patterns - making sticker patterns on a paper (complex for Mini Me and more basic for Little Lady) will show that God's faithfulness is the same always, like a repeating pattern.

Gentleness

Do the devotional and add strawberries to the basket.

Disappearing egg - Gentleness comes in our words and actions. We have to use gentle actions with fragile eggs. We'll see how beautiful these eggs are in the disappearing egg activity found here and we'll make sure to be gentle.

Self-control

Do the devotional and add a lemon to the basket.

"God says" game - We'll play with all kinds of regular Simon Says commands and then switch to some directly God-like and moral ones: "Pinch your mom / God says hug your mom" or "Hit your sister because she took your toy / God says use kind words to tell your feelings".

 
 

A Year of ABCs, Letters X, Y, Z

LETTER X

Art: X is for X stamps
I was going to cut an "x" letter stamp out of a potato but just didn't get that done. I like the idea, though!

Literacy: X is for X
We used stick pretzels to make letter X's before we ate them. This was as big a hit as when we make Cheerio towers, so we consumed many pretzels during snack time that day (and the next, too).

Movement: X is for X-cellent relayThis was a great activity and we kept the X's taped to our rugs for a week. I put two tape X's about ten feet apart in our living room. On one end I put a jar of glass gems and the other I put an empty container. Little Lady got a scoop and her relay was to transfer the gems from one container to the other. Mini Me got into this, too. We did it with all sizes of scoops. We tried it with tongs and artificial flowers but it was the most fun to do it with glass jars and glass gems because the sound was loud and clanky. We loved this activity!

Music: X is for Xylophone

I used glass jars and colored water to make a xylophone. I didn't do it in tone order, but the kids looooooved this activity. Whether they were simply tapping around with it, or chiming a color I called out, they really loved it. Mini Me even got paper and crayons and used colored dots to write the notes to a song (he did this in preschool and enjoyed doing a replay of it at home). This was also a good activity to practice our colors in Spanish!

LETTER Y

Art: Y is for Yellow
We did a matching activity with shades of yellow using cut-up paint sample cards. I tried to get shades that were quite distinct but this was still on the difficult end for Little Lady.

Movement: Y is for Yawning

One might not think it difficult to practice yawning but since Little Lady truly has endless energy and some days seems to survive on smiles and hugs alone, it was funny trying to "teach" her how to truly yawn. After a busy Thanksgiving weekend, we found our opportunity.

Science: Y is for Yak

We watched a video on YouTube about Yaks. No one was that interested...

LETTER Z

Art: Z is for zebra

We colored a zebra picture. Purple!


Math: Z is for zero
We drew zero and talked about how it means nothing. We demonstrated with zero blocks, one block, two blocks, etc.


Movement: Z is for Zipping and Zig Zag
We haven't played with our quiet books for a long time so one night I got them both out and we found the zipper pages to practice zipping. Little Lady is really good at zipping!

One afternoon I taped a zig zag line on the rug and we walked, hopped, and danced along the zig zag. 


Science: Z is for zoo
It's too cold to go to the zoo (and there are none where we live) so we made our own zoo at home. With all our zoo-appropriate animals, we placed them in "cages" and took a trip to the zoo with our backpacks, lunch, and cameras. What fun imaginary play time!

A beautiful Merry Christmas!

New stuff: Tatted snowflake ornament and nativity hand print animals

I love my tatted snowflake hanging ornament. Made mostly from the serious talent my grandma has for tatting anything dainty and beautiful, I assembled it from several of her tatted snowflakes, fish line, beads, and sparkly ribbon hot glued around an embroidery hoop. The pictures are terrible but in real life it is sparkly and gorgeous!

I saw this blog post with some hand print nativity animals and fell in love. I used the kids' hands for the prints and finished them off with extra paint and markers to make them look like animals. The rhymes are also from the other blog post. I assembled them all on a long canvas that I had previously painted with Modge Podge and glitter to give it some base sparkle. The pieces are attached with double stick tape. I'd love to go over it with something to seal it all together and make it shiny but I can't think of what.

Mini Me informed me that the order of the animals is wrong: it should go donkey, cow, lamb, camel but I didn't think it through that much before I started! He's right, as usual. I do still love this fun Christmas hanging, though!

Joy

One day last week one of our Advent activities was to take a special treat to people in our community. We made those really easy chocolate-circle pretzel treats (very easy, quick, and fun for kiddos). Little Lady chose to take some to our pastor and our new neighbors (I prompted her with that one), and Mini Me wanted to take some to the firefighters, police officers, and ambulance drivers (I prompted police officers and he thought of the rest).

We put some treats on small plates and loaded up the car. The police station receptionist took our plate there, and we pulled up to a completely empty parking lot at the fire station, but our timing was good and just as I was walking to the door to leave the cookies, a volunteer firefighter ran up and let us in. Before I knew it, he was giving us an excited tour of the entire station. We climbed in the brand-new 2013 fire truck that hasn't even been out on a call yet. We saw all the gear, tested a radio, and climbed on three more trucks. This man loved his job and was so excited to tell us about it. I felt that our paltry little plate of cookies wasn't enough for his enthusiastic display of thanks. We were supposed to be thanking him and instead my children got a private fire station tour! To top it off, he took our address so he could mail the kids some coloring books and a treat (they were out of the books at the moment).

Our next stop was the hospital. We wandered back to ER, where I thought we would just leave our plate with the receptionist to give to the "ambulance drivers" when they were around. But our timing was good again and just as we walked up, the EMTs were coming down the opposite hall. 

I will always remember how their faces lit with happiness when Mini Me presented them with our (tiny) plate and said "thank you". It was as though we gave them diamonds wrapped in gold. They immediately invited us to look in the ambulance and my children were again treated to a private tour. They got to see the oxygen mask, sit on the stretchers, turn the lights on, and explore the back-up camera. The EMTs were like the fire fighter: thrilled to share love of their jobs.

I learned several things about our experience:

Good deeds seem to be disguised as "good" for the recipient of the generosity but they are really "good" for the giver. We got back waaaay more than we gave. 

People in our community love their jobs, especially those who serve in these big ways. We unexpectedly interrupted their day and they took time to show us around. What a comfort to see the passion for work these people have - genuine dedication to their jobs is certainly what I want in firefighters and EMTs!

There is good in the world and people have faith in it. I'm not talking about my children and I as the "good" here. The people we gave gifts to were not skeptical and overburdened with our gift. They didn't see us as one more family to talk to, one more plate of cookies to shovel down. They were receptive, kind, and grateful. They asked my kids' names and addressed them by name, asked them questions, and seemed to really care.

What a blessing it is to give. How is this a lesson that still excites me? What a great feeling to do a good deed, and it's made me want to do more. And why stop at Christmas?

Baby doll bibs, burp rags, blankets, cloth diapers

I am giddy with excitement about Little Lady's Christmas gift this year; I can't wait for her to enjoy it and I can't wait for me to enjoy playing, too!
I have a beautiful wooden baby doll cradle and high chair from when I was little. My parents have carefully kept them all these years and they are in fabulous condition. I am giving them to Little Lady for Christmas along with some other baby doll necessities. I'll relish the nostalgia associated with the doll furniture, but she is going to have worlds of fun playing mommy.




Doll bibs - look at that awesome embroidery!

Burp rags to toss over her shoulder while burping the baby:

Doll-sized cloth diapers!

Soft, small doll blankets:

Here is the whole lot together. It looks so fun!

My mom made the bibs and helped me fashion the tiny burp rags and cloth diapers. The burp rags and bibs are itty bitty versions of the real deal that we sell in our Etsy shop here.
I'm pretty excited that we get to spend Christmas Day hanging out and playing with our new (old) things. This is going to be great!