Little Baker's Man!

Today, while Kailyn was at a special princess tea birthday party, Will and I decided to do some baking!!!! Baking is one of Will's favorite things to do.....he can add ingredients, use the mixer, and even does a decent job of cracking an egg, without too many pieces of shells getting in the mix! He was also excited to try his new apron, which we found at the dollar store and is actually for gardening, but fits this little baker's man perfectly!!!! Thanks for all your help in the kitchen buddy......now if you could only learn to do the dishes:)We made both chocolate chips and M&M (daddy's favorite) cookies and were able to share them with friends at our lunchtime playdate!!!!!!

Spring Fever!

Needless to say, we have thoroughly enjoyed this break in the weather!!!! The ease of travel and chance to get out our bikes and scooters was priceless:) Here are a few pictures of our fun in the sun and our annual trip to the frozen beach!The kids were so happy to get out the dusty bikes and scooters and play on the clear, mostly dry driveway!

We decided to trek out to the beach to check out the snow and ice formations and to just get outside on the gorgeous day we were blessed with on Friday. The kids really enjoyed sliding down the ice on the pier and going on adventures with the family as we navigated through the snow!We laid on our bellies on the edge of the "glacier" and watched all the melted, mushy ice rock back and forth with the waves....it sounded so cool!
Kailyn wanted to go look for treasure on the dunes, which is a favorite past time in early spring and last fall when we visit the beach:)

Beach Day and Butterflies!

Can you tell we have spring fever? The past few days we have been finishing up the letter B...so what better way than to have a beach day! We hauled out some shorts and t-shirts and set up the living room with our beach umbrella, towels and some "water"(a blue sheet). We read some beach books, the kids had a picnic with Aimee and we went "swimming" complete with goggles, swimmies and life jackets:) We also talked about shells and painted some of our own, using jumbo pasta shells.Kailyn looks so adorable in her sun hat!!!!

With today being our final day of Bubba Bear's visit, we completed out letter b page for our alphabet book and reviewed it's sound and named all the things we could think of that start with b! We also made these adorable butterflies in hopes that spring may truly be right around the corner:)

It's About Love!

We had a lot of fun in the days before valentine's doing crafts, playing games and making food! This year valentine's seemed to creep up on me and I wasn't totally prepared....so we did a few simple things this year. For starters we made these adorable heart sun catchers! The kids had fun gluing all different sizes and colors of tissue paper inside their hearts, but the end result was what was so rewarding....they are so cute!The next few days consisted of sorting different size hearts, reading valentine books, painting with heart cookie cutters and making these elephants out of hearts! I used to do this with my first graders every year (but with all different animals) and they always turn out so good!

We also made homemade cards for daddy and both sets of grandparents! We used Kailyn and Will's hand print to make a heart and then added stickers and some text to the front and inside of each card....Kailyn even signed her own name:)
The day before valentines we did our conversation heart sort...but this year Will got to join in the fun!! Both kids did a fantastic job sorting their hearts by color and then we counted and compared, using less or greater, how many of each one the kids had! Kailyn even got to graph her outcomes before eating all her hearts.For lunch, daddy made us heart-shaped pancakes...yum!The kids and I also baked a cake in the morning and Ryan and I got to finish it by decorating! We took the cake to dinner with the Stehouwer family and it was devoured:) The kids did a great job!

On Valentine's Day we got to give daddy his card and some Starburst jelly beans (his fav) and the kids got Ice Age:Dawn of the Dinos!!! We finished the afternoon by playing some valentine bingo, using valentine M&M's as our chips....Will's favorite part was eating them:) Thank you Lord for all the Loves in my life!

Bubba Bear Visits!

Today I introduced Kailyn and Will to the letter B!!! So Bubba Bear (from Zoophonics) came for a visit with the kids! We talked about how much Bubba likes honey and that his body and the hive are in the shape of the letter b. We also acted like Bubba Bear by getting some honey from the hive and eating it, while making the "bbb" sound!!! Bubba Bear brought a bag of goodies for the kids to explore....like bread, beans, blanket, bear, boat, Barbie, bubbles, bell, bowl, brush, etc. Kailyn and Will really enjoyed taking turns reaching into the bag and pulling out one of Bubba's treasures! Once they got an item out of the bag I asked them to make the b sound and then say the word of whatever they were holding....they both did really well:) Thanks Bubba Bear!After we named all the "b" items, we read the book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? We looked for the words that started with Bubba Bear's sound and then used the last page to find all the colors that start with "B". Once we found the three colors....the kids used them to color a picture of a lower and uppercase b.

Coloring their b's with blue, black and brown! I also had them find and pick out the 3 colors from all the crayons in their pencil boxes....good color recognition!After we do some activities together I put out the little centers that I created (with the help of The Mailbox). One is snowmen that they need to put buttons on that match the hat, another is letter recognition and the other is feeding penguins a certain number of fish!
I'm really working on number recognition with Kailyn as she really only knows 1! However, she is getting better the more we work on 1-5:)

I would like to take this opportunity (since this is my second post with Zoophonics) to thank my friend, Lindsey, for downloading all the animals for my personal use!! This is a program that has been proven and I've seen how effective it is....but is also expensive! So thanks again, Linds!

Cold Weather Learning!

While the wind and snow blows outside, we are staying warm inside with our hot chocolate cafe! I set up this cocoa cafe, as we call it, for the kids downstairs....I was inspired by my "Organize January Now!" Mailbox book! The cash register has been a hit and so has counting out the marshmallows per the "customers" request:) I had a big Swiss Miss container that was almost gone, so I put our cocoa (brown paper shreds) in there!

I used the kids' first initials to name our cafe!
Kailyn counting out the 3 marshmallows that I ordered on my cocoa.Trying to work together while they take my payment....this part doesn't always go so well!

These penguins turned out too cute not to include in a post....so here they are! I used them with our "p" learning and polar animals theme!

Part Monkey!

While having a time-out in his room, he obtained the stool out of the bathroom and climbed up onto his dresser! I swear this kid is part monkey:)