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Mon
27 ^th

Chicken & The Egg Craft

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If you tune in with us regularly, you probably already know that my daughter loves to read. She has many favorites that we read all the time, but we try to introduce new books as much as possible. We visit the library every two weeks & pick out our new reads & look for potential new favorites.

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Our latest trip to the library was a success. Our newest discoveries were ‘Water is Water’, ‘Thumb Love’ & ‘First the Egg’.

‘First the Egg’ is a charming book with beautiful and simple illustrations. It shows the development from egg to chicken, tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly & more. It uses cut-outs to form the initial form & then reveals the transformation when you turn the page. We enjoyed this one so much that it inspired an art project based on its lovely cut-out concept.

Fold a piece of tan construction paper in half like a book. Sketch out an egg shape on the top page & cut it out.

Lightly trace around your cut-out onto the bottom page. Open the page up & paint a picture of a chicken. Make sure to cover all of the light outline. My daughter kept the book open in front of her & did a great job painting. My daughter blended the blues & yellows into the chicken just like in the book.

Set the painting aside to let it dry & then glue one googly eye onto your chicken.

When you close the page, it will show the egg on the front.

When opening the page, the egg is revealed to have the chicken underneath.

This was a fun project & it sparked my daughter to want to create similar crafts using the same cut-out technique. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out this delightful book.

Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.

Sat
25 ^th

Craft Stick Crayon Craft

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We are a family of readers. Mom loves books, dad loves books & our 4 year daughter loves books. We frequent the library every 2 weeks & load up on new books, but we still have our old standby favorites.

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‘The Day the Crayons Quit’ is one of our all time favorites. My daughter loves it.

This craft was inspired from this wonderful book.

Choose your crayon colors & grab the coordinating paint. Add a touch of white to the paint color. Paint the stick in the lightened color. Add the original paint color to the tips of both ends.

My daughter wanted to make a brown crayon & white. I went with red, blue & green.

Set your painted sticks aside to dry.

Cut a piece of foam sheet to form the crayon tip. Glue your tip to the back of your stick. Use a Sharpie to draw on the face & jagged lines at the bottom.

Finish it off with pipe cleaners for arms.

They came out so cute & would be great for a bookmark.

Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.

Tue
05 ^th

DIY Scratch Art Cards

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*I received a free Story Box in exchange for my honest review and receive compensation for new subscribers directed from my page. I attest that all opinions are my own.*

As you probably already know if you follow us regularly, my little girl has a voracious appetite for books. Our bedtime story time keeps getting longer & longer. We have exhausted all of our books. She knows them all by heart now. That’s why we were so excited to receive a one month subscription to Story Box. When the box arrived, the books were nicely wrapped & included a parent guide with a breakdown of different age groups & how you could apply them to learning for that age. It also included a list of age appropriate activities for each story. The best part is the books are yours to keep.

The two books that we received were ‘Outside’ & ‘Go to Sleep, Little Farm.’

They were both an immediate hit with my daughter. She loved both books, but she really fell in love with ‘Go to Sleep, Little Farm’. I did as well. It was like being in a dream. We often take craft inspiration from books we read & we did just that with this one. We made our own DIY scratch cards & etched out our own dream-like scenes.

What you will need:

Crayons

Black Tempura Paint

Dish Soap

Card Stock (we used 4.5X6.5)

Small Paint Roller or Large Paint Brush

Toothpick

Directions:

Color the card stock in with the crayons.

Mix equal parts tempura paint & dish soap in a container. Brush the paint over the top of the crayon & let dry. I was impatient & used a hair dryer. Once dry, use a toothpick to scratch of the black paint.

My daughter adored this craft. We made a pile of them to set aside for later.

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Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.

Sat
03 ^rd

Alphabet Block Bookcase

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Our home is no longer an adult’s house. It is a toddler’s house that has a couple of adults living in it. There is not one room in our house that is not filled with Mai’s toys, clothes, artwork or books. I can hardly remember what is was like to have a tidy house.

We read a lot in our home. My daughter loves being read to and now is at the point that she knows most of her books so well that she can recite them to us. Her books are everywhere. We have two baskets of books in our living room, a pile on her floor in her room, a stack on our night stand in our room and a shelf of them in the kitchen. I had read a suggestion regarding rotating your books out as you do with your toys, that your toddlers only need a few books out at a time. The thing is my daughter reads them all. I boxed up a few of the less popular books in her collection and she knew that they were not there. We have book picnics in our living room, where we will lay about 15 books out with snacks and pillows and we will go through them all.

I wanted to organize her books better and at a little cuteness to her space as well. This was a simple project using wooden storage cubes.

ALPHABET BLOCK BOOKCASE

What you will need:

Wooden storage blocks
Acrylic paints
Alphabet stencils
Paint brush
Tape
Ruler

Directions:

Lay down newspaper and gather all your supplies. Position your first block for painting.

Place your stencil in the center of your block. Measure around all four sides to make sure that you are centered. Tape the stencil in place.

Using the color of your choice paint within the stencil.

Using a ruler or anything with a hard edge, paint a straight thick line about an inch thick around all four edges.

Let dry and then repeat all steps with how ever many cubes you choose to use. For your bottom cubes, paint so that the openings are opposite of one another so that you may get books easily.

Secure with gorilla glue, nails or screws to secure the blocks in place.

Learning to Read

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My husband and I both love to read. On the evening of our first date while riding in his car, I happened to glance in his back seat and noticed a book sitting there. After closer observation, I realized that he was reading the same book that was at that time residing on my night stand. I knew at once that it had to have been a sign.

Before we had our daughter we agreed that we would read to her often and encourage her to love books as much as we did. We kept that promise & continue to. With a lot of help from her Nana, my hubby & I have bred a fellow book lover.

Over the weekend, we pulled out two bags of books that we have not read yet and had a reading picnic on our living room floor. We put down a blanket, some pillows, spread out all our books and put out a few snacks.

We devoured book after book. Mommy would read to her & Mai would point out what she was seeing on the pages and narrate the story based on the pictures.

Mai’s has such a great grasp of the alphabet and is able to distinguish the first letter of many common words. It is common practice for her to sit in her crib in the morning and practice her phonics. “A ahhh ahhh ahhh, apple”. We have done a number of phonics lessons with her and she has done wonderfully with them. We wanted to start some reading lessons with her too.

One of my favorite tools for making easy learning materials is to create simple lessons using Microsoft Word or Paint. For this lesson, we created a page with a clip art picture and the word that describes that picture minus it’s first letter. Here is an example of one of the pages.

I used a printed copy of the page I created & hung it up on a magnetic easel. You can also use the refrigerator. I gave my daughter a bag of alphabet magnets and let her go.

Mai did a great job and was very proud of herself when she was finished. She clapped her hands and said “Mama, I did it.” Yes you did!

Mon
10 ^th

Who Needs Toys – Playtime Made Easy

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You always hear people joke that you don’t need to buy young children expensive toys because all they end up wanting to play with is the box. This is no joke. There is no truer statement. Toddlers are easy; they can find the fun in anything. Their little spongy minds are absorbing and exploring everything. Things as simple as the box, are still new and fascinating territory for them. At 2 years old, my daughter is past the excitement of the box, but still has a taste for the simpler things in life.
We have more toys in this house than we know what to do with. Between the play kitchen, Little People Villages & Twisty Tracks, she should have enough to keep her occupied until she is in her teens, but as kids tend to do, she gets bored of these things very quickly. There are many things that you can do to occupy your child’s day without the use of fancy toys.

Here are some simple and fun things for your child to do.

Water play

It doesn’t get much simpler than this. This is one of my favorite activities to give my daughter while I am cooking or doing dishes. Lay out a towel & fill a large container half way with water and add some measuring cups & spoons. Here my daughter told me she is making coffee.

Chick Peas, Beans & Rice

Similar to above, I have a container of chickpeas & colored rice set aside just for play. It is amazing how long my daughter will play with them. She will count them out & transfer them from cup to cup.

Couch Cushion Fun

My daughter has a lot of energy. She loves to jump & is always throwing herself on the ground for some odd reason. Take your couch cushions off the couch & place them on the floor & let your child roll around on the pile of pillows.

Stringing Pasta

Pasta necklaces are an old classic. This requires a little bit of hand – eye coordination. Mai strung up the 3 shown below & told me that it was the mama pasta, daddy pasta & baby pasta.

Read, read & read some more

We spend about a half hour before bed reading books every night, but books are not just for bedtime. We often read to our daughter while she is eating to keep her firmly planted in her chair during her meal. Many times even if my daughter insists that she does not want a story, if I just start reading she will eventually jump up on my lap.

Bubble Wrap

We order from Amazon a lot, I mean a lot. Bubble wrap comes with most of these packages. I think that bubble wrap is fun for small children and adults alike. Who doesn’t love popping that stuff?

Blanket forts

Being that mommy is always cold, even in the summer, we have blankets all over the house. Mai loves it when we make forts over the couch. “Mommy, play in the fort toooooooo?” Definitely! Here she is reading with a flashlight under her fort.

Song & Dance

My daughter loves music. She has been dancing as long as she has been walking. She also loves to sing songs with mommy & daddy. Don’t underestimate the power of music.

Red Light, Green Light & other games

My daughter loves running around our house in circles. I had to teach her Red light, Green light just to catch my breath in between chases. Pheeew! Also try Simon Says or Hide and Seek.

Get outside

If your toddler is like mine, then he or she loves to run free. Take them outside, weather permitting & let them run & jump and play. Here is Mai walking the track at the Relay for Life in memory of her grandmother & namesake.

Color & Draw

I have an unlimited supply of poster board in our home. My daughter loves to doodle & color. She also loves when we draw for her too. She & I will lie on the floor and she will ask me to draw pictures of caterpillars & horses. She has a vivid imagination. She creates different scenarios for these pictures. Here Mai asked Mama to draw a mama & dada spider. She said that they were both sick & needed medicine.

Stacking boxes

I love stacking boxes & have quite a few sets strewn all over the house. My daughter shares my love for them. She likes piling them up & placing them inside of one another.

Styrofoam & Yarn

Seriously! Yarn sticks to styrofoam. If you are like me & have styrofoam cones laying around this is a great busy activity.

What easy & simple activities do you have for you & your toddler. I would love to hear.

Sun
09 ^th

The Snicky Guide To Falling Asleep

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Sun
10 ^th

What’s Your Favorite Children’s Book?

Posted by Pinparent — 5 Comments

Like most parents, my husband & I don’t always see eye to eye in our opinions on how to raise our daughter. There are differences in opinions on meal choices, routines & even what she wears. One thing we both have agreed on from the start, was that we wanted to make sure that we read to her & encouraged her to read at an early age.

Our daughter loves books and we read to her everyday. It is interesting to me that even at such a young age, she has certain book preferences, some that are even surprising.

I found this list on Pinterest of the top ten children’s books…

It got me thinking about Mai’s favorite books. Did any of these books make the cut?

Not really. Which books did?

HERE ARE MAI’S TOP TEN

1. As an infant, it wasn’t Eric Carle’s ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ that we read to Mai while rocking her to sleep it was Carle’s ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear’

2.While all of Mai’s friends were grabbing for ‘Goodnight Moon’, it was the

‘Goodnight Gorilla’ that Mai would reach for.

3.And it wasn’t Dr Seuss’s ‘Green Eggs & Ham’ that Mai chose for her mealtime story, it was the Dr’s

‘One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish’

4. ‘ I Like It When’

This is an adorable board book. Mai loved this one & used to act out the actions as we read them. My favorite was “I like it when you hug me tight.” Mommy would receive a wonderful hug complete with an “awwwwwww” from my darling girl.

5 .‘If You Give A Mouse A Cookie’

This was a favorite of our munchkin. She also liked the similar tale ‘If You Give A Moose A Muffin’

6. ‘Owl Moon’

A lovely book with beautiful illustrations. The story of a father and daughter that go owling. My daughter loved the illustrations in this one. She would squeal and point out all the snowy animals.

7. ‘The Berenstain Bears He Bear She Bear’

Great book that shows the reader that they can do or be anything they want to be and it doesn’t matter if they are a he or she.

8. ‘Ten Little Ladybugs’

This is a cute book to teach counting with..as the ladybugs disappear one by one & reappear home at the end

9. ‘The Napping House’

This is a cute and silly tale with a repetitive style about a house where everyone is napping on top of one another. .a dozing dog on a dreaming boy on a snoring granny.

10. OK! So, I guess one of these did make the cut after all…

‘Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs’

Story of a town that rains food.

Do you see your favorite’s here? Please share your toddler’s favorites.

Up next…Fun Food Art