Spring Gluttony

 We have been Spring gluttons lately.  We have spent days at the park, hiked, ridden bikes, picnicked outside multiple times and gone on horse rides and visited farms three times- in the past week.  The weather has been beautiful (unless it's a soccer game and then the weather turns awful.)  This week we took a full day to a historical park to learn a little history and enjoy more Spring weather and farm animals.

Checking out the goslings

Carding some whool

Going to school

My little horse lover

Little pioneer girl

 Horse rides are a highlight of any day, especially for Red Fish.  She is horse and unicorn obsessed.  She desperately wants to take horse riding lessons but she isn't old enough.

Brushing up on her milking skills

 The best part of the outing (and the reason we went) was seeing all of the Springtime baby animals.  They let us go right in the pens and the girls held lambs, goats, chicks and ducks.  I had to pick up the birds for them (I hate birds and think they are creepy) which was less than delightful but it's good to do things out of your comfort zone.

 Red Fish was completely in heaven.  She wants to live on a farm someday.  She adores animals and could have spent all day hanging out in the animal pens.

Plowing the field

The girls practiced some chores like washing and ironing and plowing a field.  they were pretty hilarious to watch.

Making stamped leather creations.

There was plenty of crafting happening around the park.  The girls got wrist bands that let them to several activities.

We rode around on a train for awhile and sang "Little Red Caboose."  It was a very long, very fun day for the girls and their little friends.

Snippets Of The Weekend

Playing astronauts

Story time with Mimi

Temple visit

Red Fish has been learning about the human body and we talked about the brain sending signals to the rest of the body.  We concentrated on how the body uses the five senses so we pulled out all of our sensory activities from September and reviewed all of the senses again.  We have a whole bin full of sensory actvities and experiments.

Duso

A little while ago Red Fish brought "Duso" the dolphin home from preschool.  She had to take him on all of her adventures for a week and then write down what they did together.  I loved hearing what she thought about her week.

Duso came home from school with me.  I was the line leader.  We made lion manes.  First T came over after school.  We made collages with rainbow stuff and we made fishy glass windows.  We fingerpainted.  We colored.  We did science experiments with red, yellow and blue and mixed them to orange, purple and green.  We mixed them up from colors.  When T went home, S invited us over.  We played kingdom.  I was the queen and S and New Fish were honeys and A was the king.  We watched a movie.  I didn't want to go home so I cried. Then I got ready for soccer.  Tonight I went to my soccer game.  My uniform is turquoise.  It was cold. I wore a puffy, big coat.  I scored a goal and I was happy.

I went to speech in the morning.  Duso came with me.  It was good.  Mommy picked me up.  B's Mommy is coming over for visiting teaching.  I went to T's house.  We played dress up and the boys were zombies.  I went to piano lessons.  It was fun.  I passed off two songs.  Then we went to get slurpies.  We went home.  We had dinner and it was my favorite.  Mommy read me the rest of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.  Duso loved it.

Duso came with me to school.  I wore a lion mane.  I played with J.  I got my face painted and my arm.  A clown came to school and she made a bunny.  She was a girl with purple hair.  I ate lunch.  I finished my math workbook and I get a prize.  I went to T's house to play princesses.  Mommy taught me to ride my bike without training wheels.  i rode all the way down the sidewalk.  My Daddy is going to be excited.  My Daddy took me and New Fish to the dollar store for prizes and I got a Carebear coloring book and crayons.  Daddy read me stories.

Baby Thing 1 came over.  We  played with Thing 1 and MeMine came over.  We played rescuers down under and I was a bald eagle and New Fish was a princess and Mommy and MeMine were the captains of the ship.  I made a cannon out of paper to shoot a net.  We went to soccer practice.  T and T were there.  T came home with us and we shot bubbles at the dog.  He jumped up and caught them.  After Daddy came home we went to dinner at Pei Wei.  It was fun.  I had a cookie at the end with a paper in it.

We did science experiments and learned about bodies.  We learned about lungs.  We had a bottle and a long thing (surgical tubing) and we filled the bottle up with air from our lungs.  We played math games and had a relay race.  Daddy helped me ride my bike.  It was cool.  I can ride it down the street by myself.  My butterfly came out of his cocoon.  We painted butterflies of paper and antenaes.  We still have butterflies that need to wake up.  My ants dig tunnels.  Sometimes I watch them but I like the butterflies.  It was fun to have ants and butterflies.

We baked brownies.  Mommy and my little sister named [New Fish.] We went to church.  Then we had dinner and A.J. and her whole family came over.  We played with her.  We had salad, grapes, tomatoes.  I ate all of the tomatoes.  We had apples, onions and carrot salad.  We had meat.  I wore my Rapunzel wedding dress nightgown to bed. 

We went to swimming lessons.  I got five punches on my swimming lesson card.  I'm five.  I learned my strokes.  We got ice cream cones and seeds to play.  Mommy practices piano with me.  Mommy and Daddy are nice.  We went on a pony ride at the farm and saw baby goats.

Vocal Mob

It was a funny day.  I woke up expecting to photograph and assist with a vocal session today and instead I ended up singing my lungs out for four hours.  It was a blast. Never know what kind of day it is going to be or what kind of hat I will wear.

d is for diversity

 This week was "d" for diversity and our nursery rhyme was "Hickory Dickory Dock."  We started off our day with a new batch of homemade playdough (purple with red sand) and then made letters with the dough.  We read Peter Spier's "People" and looked at pictures of people from all over the world.  We did a lot of games involving rhyming, opposites and putting numbers in order.

 We made some awesome collages with magazine pieces.

My kids change back into their jammies even after going to school.  Crazy kids.

 When Red Fish got home the girls spent the afternoon drawing people of every color and shape.

Red Fish

New Fish

Hiking Weather Again

My Hat Matches

Dear Bockum- It has been so cold here that we have had to add layers for soccer games.  Good thing her new hat matches her uniform!

Sunday

Gotta love Sundays and peaceful trips to church. Today, my three year old inhaled her sacrament cup and was wildly thrashing for the sacrament tray so that she could cough it up into the tray. I was simultaneously trying to hold the tray out of her reach and retrieve the cup from her throat. It finally popped free with a dramatic spray of water. #mykidsaremorereventthanyourkids

Sunday baking

Rainbows and Butterflies

Two of our butterflies completed their metamorphosis this weekend. I have been a little worried that they were dead because the whole process took much longer than expected.  Two of the caterpillars died,  One is stilling kicking but won't form a chrysalis.  It has been really great for the kids to watch the whole process.  The bugs get checked on quite frequently.

 

In honor of rainbow week we did some paintings with the primary colors and did more color mixing.  Unfortunately I ran out of yellow liquid watercolor and my regular watercolor didn't quite stand up to the other liquid versions so their paintings turned out mostly red, blue and purple.  The girls couldn't have cared less.  We turned some of the texas snowflake paintings into butterflies with pipe cleaners.  In our insect discussions I have taught the girls that all insects have six legs. Disturbingly, our butterflies only appear to have four legs.  Either the butterflies are hiding a pair or I am grossly misinformed on biology.  The girls keep asking why I said the butterflies would have six legs.  I'm going to have to investigate on google.  We made our paper versions with six legs.

New Fish

Red Fish

 We also made tape collages because kids just love using tape.

Bodies

 I don't always talk about the things Red Fish is learning at home because it is not my own curriculum a lot of the time.  We have been doing most of the same topics that New Fish has been doing and continuing with discussions on living things. We talked about the human body this week.  We did several science experiments including testing our lung capacity with surgical tubing, a bottle and a sink full of water.  The girls spent over an hour trying to fill the bottle with air over and over.  Red Fish loves learning about the human body because she says she wants to be a doctor/giraffe trainer someday.  We will be looking at different parts of the human anatomy for a few more weeks.

Lung capacity experiment

Red Fish finished a math workbook (she loves to tell people she is REALLY good at math) and asked me to take a picture and put it on my blog.  Request granted.

Little Lions

r is for rainbows

Preschool this week is all about the letter "r", rainbows, color mixing and the nursery rhymes: "Roses Are Red" and "Ring Around The Rosies."  We started by cutting out our letter.  It was the first time New Fish was able to actually cut the whole letter out and follow the template.  She used to just slice the paper up. Either way works for me because I'm really just trying to get them to hold scissors and notice the shape of the letter. Next we traced inside both the upper and lower case R with a bunch of different colored markers. We made collages with all different colored items.

Next we started our color mixing experiments (which all had to be repeated when Red Fish and a friend came home from preschool.)  We spread globs of paint between two pieces of wax paper.  We took bowls of colored cornstarch and water into baggies and squished the colors together.  We took droppers of colored water and mixed them in ice cube trays.  Buddy B enjoyed the color mixing so much that he kept shouting: "I love it!  I just love it so much!"  It was hilarious.

We played with the rainbow parachute and sang songs.  We did file folder games on opposites and rhyming words and then we headed outside.  I planned to dance with rainbow streamers and string fruit loop necklaces but I had way too much planned this week. (Plus, I forgot to buy fruit loops.)

New Fish's creation

Red Fish's after school creation

I drew the numbers 1-20 in chalk on the sidewalk. The kids traced most of the numbers behind me.  I would call out a number and the kids would run and stand on it.  Then they would have to do 3 jumping jacks, stomp their feet 20 times etc.  It was a total hit with them.  They loved it.  Any time we can involve movement, things go well.

First Goal

 Soccer season is in full swing again even though it is so cold outside.  Red Fish has had two games so far and frozen through both of them.  Last season, Red Fish never really knew what the rules of soccer were or what she was supposed to do.  I kind of thought she didn't like soccer and I didn't think we would be signing up again.  Red Fish kept insisting it was her very favorite thing to do and that she HAD to play soccer. In February and March she did a little soccer camp (with 25 little boys) and was really excited about playing with a team of her little neighborhood friends. 

 She is running with the kids and really playing this year.  It's fun to watch.  She seems to genuinely be enjoying herself.

Kicking her first goal

She scored her first goal tonight.  (At least the first deliberate goal.)  Seeing her face afterwards was priceless.  Seriously, I highly recommend motherhood.  There is nothing better than the feeling of watching your kids progress.

Just after kicking her first goal

Daddy got in trouble for this picture- it distracted her from blocking a goal.