Yeah to new hobbies!

With baby Sophie on the way I am busy making sure she has everything that Dylan had. One of the gifts I received from Dylan's baby shower was a painted hospital door sign that my 3rd cousin (who is an art teacher) made me.

Dylan's Hospital Door sign

I wanted to have one for Sophie too, but unfortunately did not stay in contact with my cousin. So after looking on sites like Etsy and seeing the price people wanted for these I thought, hey wait a minute I can do this myself!



Now remember I my cousin is a professional and I am just an amateur, but I am happy the way it turned out!






    

Sophie's Hospital Door sign!

I am looking forward to painting some more things like door signs for both Dylan and Sophie's bedroom! Yeah to new hobbies!




 


Dylan wants to paint more too!

Celebrating Easter!

Easter came early this year, but we were prepared! Dylan was very curious about Easter and what it meant, so I made sure he got the full Easter experience.

We first read his favorite book, Duck and Goose here comes the Easter Bunny and talked a lot about The Easter Bunny and what he does.

We Also went and visited him at the mall, and guess what??? No Lines! We went right up to him. Something tells me the Easter Bunny is not as popular as Santa.

We then made a really cute Dylan face Bunny! We took a picture of his face and put it on a paper plate and glued a cotton nose, construction paper bunny ears and whiskers, and a ribbon bow. Dylan enjoyed seeing himself turn into a bunny.


To go along with the bunny theme, we watched and discussed Peter Rabbit. Youtube has a wonderful selection of Beatrix Potter tales and we watched The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MisrUJX3QGU

This is the traditional tale of Peter rabbit going into Mr. McGregor's garden despite his mother's wishes. I was emphasizing the "listen to your mother" part of the story for Dylan.

After we colored Peter Rabbit in the "forbidden" garden. This was a great opportunity to teach coloring using different colors, not just one!
 

From there we went on to learn about animals in spring and we made a handprint chick, which I had made with my students years past.




After all the spring time talk I also thought it appropriate to teach the "real" meaning behind Easter, so we watched a Bible tales Easter story on youtube and discussed Jesus resurrection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0FS-GaGEak

I was surprised how much Dylan grasped on the subject, but the part where the soldiers beat Jesus and put him on the cross was puzzling to him. It is very hard to teach how cruel our world can be to someone so young and innocent. That part makes me sad to think how he is going to find out how mean and cruel people are and there is not way to shelter it! Even the bible shows it!

After we watched the video we made a Jesus timeline cross with pictures of major events in his life and Dylan colored it.



After all this learning it was time to have some fun!

Dylan got to attend 3 Easter egg hunts, one at a park, one with his playgroup, and one he did on his own with his little church class.

The one at the park was freezing! North Texas defiantly gets a lot colder than I am use to! I don't think I ever remember being bundled up in heavy coats for an Easter egg hunt!



Luckily by the time his playgroup Easter egg hunt came it warmed up!





Easter "Saturday"

Jason my husband has to work on Sundays, so we celebrated Easter on Saturday, 1st with a visit from the Easter Bunny, then dieing real Easter eggs, and going to a Saturday night service at church.

Happy Easter!

My little Myrmecologist!

Spring time is a wonderful time to study animals. Dylan is really into bugs (Typical boy!) So I bought him an ant farm and thought it would be fun to learn about them.

Now ant farms have changed over the years. When I was little they were green, filled with dirt, and you had to water and feed the ants. Well not anymore! Thanks to NASA and space age technology the new ant farms use a gel that was first used in space to provide nutrition for the ants. This makes having an ant farm really easy to maintain!

We received 30 harvester ants in the mail, but unfortunately a few died. At first I was a little sceptial because the ants were not doing a thing and looked sick

But soon they started working together and building tunnels. Now they are happy ants!
 

To learn about the ants we read Are you an ant?
 

And watched some Youtube videos on ants.

We also colored ants

and learned that A is for ant by gluing raisin ants on A!



Observing our ants!


Cool Ant facts:

Ants can carry up to 50 times their own weight!
They talk to each other by scent, sound, and touch through their antennae.
They poop!
All the ants are female in our antfarm no use for males! 
They are older than Dinosaurs!

Happy Saint Patricks Day!

My son has been busy all week learning about Saint Patrick's Day. Saint Patrick's Day can be a hard concept for little ones to grasp. In fact it seems to me that the holiday has turned very "adult" over the years focusing on drinking and adult parties, hence the lack of "kid friendly" events. But never the less it is still a fun holiday to celebrate and there are ways to explain to your little ones about the holiday.

We first started out simple and examined the holiday symbols using this very simple baby book:

It examines the typical symbols such as : Shamrocks, Leprechauns, Pot of gold, etc.

Then we read this easy reader book:

This book explains more about what you do on Saint Patrick's Day like go to parades, dress in green, eat Irish foods, and watch Irish dancing.

These books were great, but being a teacher I wanted my son to know the real meaning behind it because I hate to say this I don't think I ever even knew! Growing up all I know is Saint Patrick's Day was a day you wear green, so the leprechauns don't pinch ya haha! But when I started teaching about it to my classes I found this wonderful Discovery Education Video that not only shows the Irish Customs for Saint Patrick's Day, but also explains about Saint Patrick and why he is so important to the Irish people, now wither my 3 year old understood this or not, is unknown, but he did sit and watch the video! Which can be rare for and extremely hyper child!

After learning about the holiday I found some great toddler appropriate crafts to do, to celebrate the holiday,

First we brushed up on our color skills, We have always sang a song about the order of the color of the rainbow ROYGBIP, so he was familiar with the order and we finger painted a rainbow. We cut out half of a paper plate, finger painted the colors of the rainbow, added cotton balls for clouds, hung construction paper gold coins from the bottom and.............

tadda........ Ended up with a rainbow mobile. My son choose to hang it in the playroom!

Next we decided to just color a simple Shamrock, because that is the most popular Saint Patrick's Day Symbols.

I love the toddler coloring!

 

We also made a Shamrock using his tiny hands, I first painted his hand green, then we placed his hand four times on the page to make a sort-of Shamrock shape!


And due to request we made another Rainbow mobile, this time coloring the rainbow using a cut out arch from a paper plate, and three hanging Saint Patrick's Day Symbols.

We are currently finishing up this little dude:

And lastly a little rant about Kroger! Dear Kroger, you did not have ANY white carnations, in fact I barely saw any carnations. How can my son die the flower green, if you do not provide the flower! UGGGGG sigh, I wanted to show my son how we could change the color of a carnation, but unfortunately Kroger the only grocery store within miles does not sell white carnations. So that will be an idea for next year!

To finish the holiday I am hoping to make a traditional Irish dinner tonight, I am thinking Irish stew, or Shepard's pie. Hopefully my two picky eaters, aka husband and son will eat it!


Happy Saint Patrick's Day to all the wanna be Irish out there!