Paper Bag Princess

This is one of my favorite books.  I like that the main character is a strong girl that doesn't give up.  She is smart and able to outsmart a dragon to save the prince.  I also love that she realizes at the end of the book that the prince isn't very nice.  It was a good opener to discuss how people should treat each other no matter what they look like.   In the story, the prince doesn't want to be rescued by the princess because she is dirty and wearing a bag.

by Rober Munsch

First, we took paper bags and cut out holes for the head and the arms.  I also ended up taping paper over the words cover up the writing on the bag. 

The girls then got to decorate their paper bag princess dresses.

Don't forget the crown!

The finished product

Once our dresses were finished, we acted out the story.  The girls had a fun time taking turns pretending to be all of the characters in the story.  I think they know this book by heart now!

Number identification and counting

These are east activities that can be done at any time.  I noticed at the the time that Sophia did not have a big grasp on number recognition and often skipped numbers when counting.  

Easy as can be to prepare.  I took a large sheet of paper and broke it up into 10 squares.  She loves to glue ANYTHING so this was a no-brainer.

She took googly eyes and glued the correct number of eyes to match the number.  This can be modified to be harder by using words instead of numbers in the boxes.

Next up, we took 10 plates and wrote a number on each plate.  I mixed them up and she had to first line them up in order from smallest to biggest.

She had to find objects to put on each plate.  The plate with the number 1 had one object....

Oreo needed to monitor her work.

This was great for her to practice counting.  At every plate, she had to count what she was placing down.

She enjoyed this but as we got to the higher numbers, she started to lose interest.  She claimed she couldn't find anything to put on the plates....We finished up to 10 and then I had the fun job of putting all the things back where they belonged. 

Finally blogging again.....Letter hide and seek

I have had pictures on my phone of various activities that we have done over the past year.  I have been a little busy having a third child and all:)  This is one of Sophia's favorite games to play.  It is a great way to reinforce letter recognition and have a little fun in the process. 

First, I wrote all the letters on sentence strips and cut them up.  I wrote both capital and lower case letters.

I wrote the match on the back side of the cards (lower case e had a capital E on the back).  This allows the activity to be self correcting.  Sophia could see if she found the correct card or not.

I would give her a capital letter card.  In this case, she needed to find the lower case b to make a match.

I hid the lower case letters all throughout the house. 

Once she found a match, she had to tell me what the letter was.  This was also a great time to teach and review all the letter sounds too. 

We did this over 6 months ago and Sophia still asks me to play!

Nature Scavenger Hunt

Thanks to Pinterest, I have been able to find all sorts of things to do with the girls.  One thing I found was a nature scavenger hunt.  You can find several links if you search pinterest.  Here are some of the pictures that I took before my camera died.  It was a ton of fun!  We were on our hunt for nearly 2 hours! 

Every good scavenger hunt needs a pair of binoculars.  I glued 2 toilet paper rolls together and they decorated them with tissue paper. 

 

Ready to go with the list, bag and binoculars.

Here are our lists.  I tried to put things on it that I knew we would be able to find in our neighborhood.

Reading the list....sideways:)

Ohh, I found a stick-which was later fed to my dog....

Princess Lila checking out the neighborhood

I found something blue!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kool aid paint

 Well, clearly this is really old since it has been extremely dry and hot these days!  There was a day where it rained all day.  The girls started to go nuts from being trapped inside.  It was one of those days where they were fighting about everything.  I remembered that I had bought kool aid-actually generic- to try to paint with. 

First, I dumped several different flavors of the kool-aid into muffin liners.  It was VERY dusty!  I would recommend NOT doing this with the kids.  We kept sneezing.

I gave them each poster board pieces.  I used the poster board because it is thicker.  I figured regular paper would rip easily.  I didn't have watercolor paper.  I would probably work better.

They both then spread the different powders across their papers.

It was pretty messy but on the plus side, the kitchen smelled good for days:)

Once they were happy with the powder, I put the papers outside on the deck in the rain.

They were so excited to go outside in the rain to check out what was going on.  It was raining pretty hard at one point.

This was the beginning.....

A little more wet...

This was the finished product.  We probably could have let it spread a little more but the girls were impatient and they decided  that the pictures were done.  

 

 

 

 

The project turned out pretty cute and provided an hour of entertainment.  Next time, I would use water color paper and make sure that the powder is in a thin layer on the paper.  The piles turned into pretty cool "mountains" on the paper.  The colors would spread more if it was thinner, I think.  Also, I would avoid the grape flavor.  It looked more like black than purple. 

The Napping House

One of our favorite books is the Napping House by Audrey Wood.  If you are not familiar with it, it is a really cute book to get to know.  It is great for sequencing skills and retelling.  I found pictures in one of my old Mailbox magazines from 2002 that correlated with the story.  Here is what we did: 

The first thing that the girls did was color their characters and bed from the story.  After that, they cut them out and taped them to blocks.

This is Lila retelling the story.  The bed is on the bottom and each character gets added one by one.  Each character that gets added is smaller than the one before.  The book uses great adjectives to describe how each character is sleeping.  Once the house is built, the flea makes everyone fall off of the bed:)

The next thing that we did was to create a sequence chain ordering the the characters from smallest to largest.  This was a piece of cake for Lila and it was surprisingly easy for Sophia too.

Phia's finished product!

Lila's finished product!

The last thing that we did was to recall the adjectives used in the book to describe how each character was sleeping.  We then added some additional ones of our own.   I encourage the girls to use different words when we are going to sleep.  Tonight the girls are going to hibernate:)