Shaving Cream Spelling Practice

We are always looking for ways to make learning more engaging around here, so when Erik needed some help with his spelling words we decided to bust out one of our favorite supplies; shaving cream! Shaving cream free play has been one of Erik's favorite things since he was a toddler, and we've had lots of fun with it over the years. 

This day I set up all three kids with a tray, some shaving cream, and a few drops of food coloring. The older two loved it, but Maren wasn't quite as impressed. She played for a moment or two, then wanted to get cleaned up. Oh well, she'll learn to love it eventually. :)

 After giving the kids a few minutes to play around, I started having Erik spell his spelling words with his finger in the shaving cream. This works great because it gets both fine and gross motor muscles involved, as well as multiple senses. And, the more of yourself you get involved in an activity the better you remember it, so theoretically this is a great way to memorize those boring old spelling words!

Field Trip: Fire Station Tour

 Earlier this week we got to go on an awesome field trip with our friends from our Summer Reading Playgroup. We had all missed a public tour of the fire station earlier in the summer, and we were disappointed not to get to go. I decided to look into it, and found out that all that stood between us all and getting our kids into the fire station was a simple online form. We picked a day, got our form turned in, and we were ready to go!

My kids and I were the first ones to get there, so we goofed around while we waited for the rest of the group to get there.

 We got to tour the living quarters of the station (which that adults thought was interesting), but the real excitement was when we finally got to go out into the engine bay and see the trucks. Oh boy were the kids excited! One of the fire fighters "turned out" in his full gear so the kids could see it all. They got to check out each piece before it got put on, which was really fun.

 It was sure hot out in the engine bay, we were grateful to get to be the ones watching the whole "turn out" process, but not have to do it ourselves. That poor firefighter was sweating up a storm!

Doing a dance, or putting on suspenders...you decide. :)

 The kids were fascinated to watch as the firefighter put his gear on, but once he had the face mask on and the air regulator going they were not so sure about going anywhere near him. It's so good for them to have a chance to see that this is not someone to be scared of in case they are ever in a situation where they need to be rescued. Seeing how scared the kids were made me think this is something we ought to do every year so they get to see it often enough to remember.

 The kids all got fire hats and other trinkets to take home with them, which of course is always a plus!

 What an awesome way to spend a day! I highly recommend reaching out to your local fire station to see if you can do a tour like this!

Summer Reading Fun: Curious George

My kids love Curious George books! We've read quite a few, but my favorite are the original H.A. Rey books that started it all. I decided to base this week's reading play group around the original Curious George book.

Unfortunately, we got so busy having fun that somehow I managed to forget to take a single picture. I've made up for this where I could with pictures from my files, and I'll make sure there are links leading you to the sites I took my inspiration from so that you can see these ideas in action.

For our play dough I gave the kids some green play dough, along with some toy monkeys and some leaves and flowers leftover from our garden theme.

After we read our book, we did this cute hand print craft with the kids. It turned out really cute, I can't believe I don't have one around here somewhere to take a picture of!

For our gross motor play we blew up a whole package of balloons for the kids to play with. Just like George, the kids LOVE balloons! Balloon free play is one of the quickest, easiest, least messy ways I know to keep kids occupied.

For our sensory play we did a rice bin. I have 50 lbs of rice that I keep handy for just such occasions. We added the monkeys and plants from our play dough fun, as well as all the digging/scooping toys I could find.

My original plan for the sensory play was to recreate George's ocean voyage by filling a kiddie pool with water and adding toy boats, monkeys, sea shells, etc. It was way too hot to play outside that day though, so we improvised and used the rice instead. The kids didn't know any better and they had a marvelous time!

For our snack I kept things simple with bananas. Easy Peasy!

I always try to have several books on hand that fit in with our theme. Click on the image below to go to Amazon and learn more about each book. Here's this week's book list:

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Summer Reading Fun: Up, Down, and Around

 When I originally planned all these summer reading activities it was with the idea of implementing them in our local library using the book Bear and Bunny Grow Tomatoes, which I knew they had in their collection.  After our move, when I discovered that this book is nowhere to be found in our new library system (which surprised me because it's a huge library network), we had to switch things up and went with more of a general garden theme instead of just focusing on the tomatoes. It was still a lot of fun and worked out perfectly.

For our play dough this week I made this scrumptious smelling chocolate play dough. It looked like dirt, and the kids loved making their own little gardens with rocks, flowers/leaves, and toy bugs.

Our art project this week as really fun. The kids colored on coffee filters with markers, then sprayed their art work with water and watched the magic happen. After things dried in the sun for a bit we added some cute little apple borders I found here and hung our art on the wall.

For our gross motor, I had planned to play this fun apple toss game. I picked up a couple packages of these balls from Amazon for us to use. We ended up cutting things a bit short this week and never got around to playing the game, but I think the kids would have had a good time with it.

Our sensory bin this week was pretty epic. The kids thought it was amazing! I put 50 lbs of rice in a kiddie pool, added in the toys from our play dough fun plus all the fruits/veggies from our play food, and all the digging/scooping toys I could find. The kids had a blast digging and playing their pretend garden.

 For our snack this week we could have gone with any possible number of healthy garden fruits and/or veggies. Instead though I decided to have some fun with the kids and made a dirt cake instead. I assembled it in a clean flower pot (purchased just for this and scrubbed well before using), and stuck a couple bunches of fake flowers in there. It looked real enough that the kids were a bit shocked when I dug in and ate a big spoonful of the "dirt" right from the pot. I wish I'd gotten a picture, but they gobbled it up too fast for that.

Last, but not least, here is a list of all the fun garden themed books we used to inspire our fun. Clicking the image will take you to Amazon, where you can learn more about any book you're interested in.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Spelling Practice with Game Tiles

 I've been looking for fun ways to help Erik learn his spelling words, and while this one isn't super exciting, it's something out of the ordinary and that's good enough for me.
I pulled out our Banagrams game, but you could use Scrabble, or Boggle, or any other game that has letter tiles. I chose to use these ones because they don't have any numbers on them (like the Scrabble ones do) that might be distracting.

I sorted out a pile of all the letters that Erik would need and put the rest away. Then I gave him the pile and let him get started. I was really curious to see how he'd arrange them all on the table, and he's just like his mom. He wanted them all in a nice neat column. :)

 This activity was really great because it made him really have to think about which letter came next while he searched through the pile for it.
After he'd gotten them all spelled out on the table we went through all the words spelling them each out loud. He had fun and we made progress towards mastering his list, so it was great.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Shapes; Cutting and Sorting

 If you're like me, then you get a mountain of junk mail every week. Piles and piles of it. Normally I just toss it into the recycling, but then I realized that we could get more use out of it first. Here's what we did.

I started by having Erik cut different shapes out of construction paper, then I had Sharli glue them on to a piece of card-stock. We labeled each one, just because I can't seem to not label things. Also print awareness, let's go with that one. :)

 Next we gathered up all the sales papers from the grocery store, but you could also use old magazines. I handed each kid a pair of scissors, and told them to look for shapes.

 As we cut things out we sorted the pictures onto the shapes on our paper. Squares and circles were the easiest to find, but we managed to find one or two triangles, and even a heart shape. The kids had a blast, and spent more than half and hour cutting up all the papers. Even Maren got in on the action, tearing the papers randomly instead of cutting.

 When the kids got bored, we cleaned up the mess and I saved our cutouts and the paper with the shapes so that we can pull them out to play with later.

Word Jump; Spelling Word Practice

 As I mentioned before, I been trying to compile a list of fun ways to practice spelling words. We do a lot of sitting and writing words over and over, and that has its place and its benefits, but that gets so boring. When we get to the point where there are just a few words on the list that Erik just isn't getting, I try to find a way to get more excitement into the learning to finish off the list.

On this day, I wrote each word on a piece of construction paper and then taped them to the floor with masking tape. This gave us several ways to play with the words to help Erik learn them. Here are a few ideas:
- Call out a color and the child has to spell the word on that color of paper before they can jump on it.
-Jump from word to word, saying or spelling each one as you jump to it.
-Spell a word aloud and have your child jump onto that word as they read it.

Yep, this is real life. There's a week's worth of clean laundry on my couch and I'm not even trying to hide it. But Erik passed his spelling test the next day, and in clean clothes too, so I count this day as a success.

You can also include younger siblings in the fun by treating this more like a color wheel. Here are some ideas on how to do that.

Pudding Writing Spelling Practice

In March of this year our family loaded up and moved from our beloved Glenwood, New Mexico to Arizona's Phoenix valley. One of the many HUGE changes that meant for our family was that Erik started attending a new school. He went from a tiny school with one teacher (pre-k through 3rd grade) and a grand total of 8 students, to a school with more than 1000 students and a class of more than 25 kids. His new school has a mandatory homework policy (don't even get me started!), so we found ourselves trying to find ways to help Erik get his work done without pushing him to the point of burn-out. Practicing spelling words was becoming a fight, so I've been compiling a list of fun ways to get that job done. I'll be sharing several of them here for anyone else looking for better ways to memorize things.

For today's Spelling Practice idea, we've got pudding writing. It's so easy to set up! Mix up a box or two of instant pudding in any flavor, spread it on a sheet pan (or serving tray, or whatever you have that works) and tell your child a word to spell. They get to use their finger to write the word, then lick it clean when they're done. Everyone wins!

 Well, everyone wins except for you, because you have to look at my crummy phone pictures. I lost my camera for about a month so this is as good as it gets. :)

 The fun thing about this is that it works for all ages. For Maren and Sharli this was just pudding painting, like we've done before.

 There are several reasons why this is an excellent way to practice spelling. Here are a few:
- the more senses you get involved the more likely you are to remember things. This is great sensory stimulus, bringing in smell, taste, touch, and sight.
- the more emotions you involve in an experience the more likely you are to remember it. See the joy on this face:

 - gross motor (large muscle) movement (moving your whole arm while you write in the pudding) means you're getting more of your body involved which means better memory building.

 So, whether you're looking for a way to learn some new words, or a way to keep little fingers busy, there's something here for everyone.