FYI - Cleaning with Children

Hi All! I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be doing a guest post on Ask Anna (http://www.askannamoseley.com) next Thursday April, 5th. The post will be ideas for making cleaning up a little more fun for kids. We have used all of these strategies in our house and it makes a big difference with my kids. So, if you are interested, check it out this Tuesday. I will link to the direct post when it happens. Thanks for being so awesome!

Clover Prints

I am always so sad because St. Patrick's day always falls over spring break so we don't get to do all the fun activities related to it. We decided to do one, simple art project related to St. Patrick's day.  We made clover prints using a bell pepper and green paint. 

After the kids stamped the clover on their paper, they added a stem. It was pretty easy!

N is for . . .

. . . Noodles!

We covered letter N's with different kinds of noodles. We used some of the noodles we dyed for our noodle rainbow we made here.

. . . Nose!

We practiced using our sense of smell by closing our eyes and guessing what we were smelling with our super sniffer nose glasses. 

. . . Numbers!

The kids did matching number cards. They had to match the written word, the number, and the correct amount of dots. This time I did each number in a different color. When we are ready to take it up a notch, I'm going to do them all in black.

. . . Nine!

We are making a number book with the numbers 1 - 10. I decided to start with number nine because it was letter n week. Each page in our book will follow the same basic outline: trace the word and number on the bottom. Color and cut out the number. Glue on the right amount of whatever onto the number. For 1 we'll do a mouth, 2 - eyes, 3 - tricycle, etc.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

We had our Dr. Seuss birthday/ Read Across America read-a-thon celebration this week in class. The kids wore their jammies and brought pillows and blankets so we could snuggle in while we read. We read a lot of different Dr. Seuss books and some activities that went with them. This year was especially fun because the kids really got into how fun Dr. Seuss books. There was giggling and comments about how silly things were. It was fun to see them enjoy an author that we all love so much. Here is some of what we did:

We started with I Can Read With My Eyes Shut which is a great classic about the importance of reading.

Among other books, we made Cat in the Hat hats after reading The Cat in the Hat

We found red and blue (and purple) fish hidden around the room and created a venn diagram after reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

We read The Lorax and made these awesome Lorax plant holders. The tutorial can be found at the Little Birdie Secrets website.

We read all over the place and had a great time. 

And of course we ended the day by eating green eggs and ham after reading Green Eggs and Ham.