Returning Friends

Lovely L has moved back to the homeland and we are so excited to spend time with her and Miss C.  We had our first playdate and spent some time in the snow.  I'm trying to get the girls out of the house frequently because winter is making everyone a little grumpy.  The winter blues are setting in a bit (though not as bad this year) so hopefully we can keep busy until bike weather is back.  There will be more playdates, more activities and more skiing.

Cute Girls

Every year our ward does an activity for the young men and women to help them learn about missionary work.  Families host the youth in their homes and cook a dinner.  We have hosted a couple of kids for dinner every year.  Two Fish gets out all of his mission stuff from the Philippines, cooks them chicken adobo and tells them about what it was like to be a missionary for two years.  Then the youth teach our family a short missionary lesson that they have prepared.  It's a fun activity for our family and it's a blast to host these amazing kids for an evening.  We have had boys over for the past three years and it was fun to have some of the young women this year.  I've really loved getting to know these girls over the past year that I've been working with the young women.

Ignore New Fish's chopped up hair- I will give details later.

V Is For Valentine

 Today, I was the least prepared for preschool that I have been all year.  Luckily it was just a Valentines theme so there wasn't anything too huge to concentrate on.  We did the letter V and the nursery rhyme "My Valentine."  I let the kids cut up heart doilies with scissors and decorate a paper V with the doilies and some glitter glue.

 We read several Valentines themed stories and did our calendar.  We sang our jungle songs from last week again.  Then we did several puzzles and played the game "The Cat And The Hat, I Can Do That."  It has a lot of props, uses large motor skills, helps kids learn right vs. left and is always a favorite at our house.  The kids were laughing their heads off.  We also played a couple of board games to practice counting.  We used valentines erasers to practice patterning and sorting.

 We made cookies decorated with frosting and candy.

We decorated hearts with do a dots. I love our do a dot markers and then we played in the sensory bin.  It was a pretty low key morning.

 After we picked Red Fish up from preschool a few friends stopped by and finished the cookies off with her.

Snow Party

 We have been having play-dates galore lately but today all the kids played outside.  This made me miss summer a little.  It was so fun to see them all playing outside.  Nobody asked me to entertain them, everybody was getting along and laughing.  Playing outdoors makes kids happy.  I'm looking forward to bike weather.

Dress Up

 

We were supposed to dress as a princess for a Young Women's activity tonight.  My girls and I had fun trying on all of my old prom dresses and they had me take out my wedding dress to show them.  They insisted on helping me with every step of getting ready and kept refering to me as "your majesty."  It was fun to play dress up with them.  (My Mom made this dress for me when I was in Highschool.  It's cuter without the jacket.)

Children's Museum

Valentines Everywhere

  
The annual Valentine making has begun and there are paper hearts drying all over the house.  There are collages, stamps, drawings, paintings and combination pieces in vary stages on every flat surface.  It's fun to see their creativity.  They have a lot of hearts left to make because their lists of people they love are extremely lengthy.

Can't Keep Them Inside

It has been windy at our house so we have a big bald spot in the snow and then drifts of up to five feet other places

Now that the February weather is slightly less cold than the January weather, I can't keep my kids inside.  They don't care how hard it is snowing.  They are headed outside.

Princesses String Beads

Mimi's Birthday Party

New Fish helping Mimi unwrap her presents

 Happy Birthday Mimi!  We love you.

Mimi and Thing 2

J is for Jungle, Jack & Jill

Today was jungle day.  We talked about the letter "J" and we did the nursery rhyme Jack & Jill.  We started with our calendar and then looked at pictures of jungle and grassland animals (mostly African.)  We read poems about jungle animals from Eric Carle's Animals Animals and read part of "Why Tigers Have Stripes."  We sang "Five Little Monkeys Swinging In A Tree" and "Five Little Speckled Frogs" with some cute visuals I downloaded online and laminated.  We also read "The Animal Orchestra ABCs" and sang the ABC song.  

Next we did a letter matching game and reviewed all of the letters we have learned so far.  The kids know all of them and have even learned to recognize quite a few of the lower case letters on their own.

 Next we got out some wooden shapes and worked on patterns.  The kids had fun making their own patterns and having each other fill in the blanks.

 We did some simple animal and jungle puzzles.  I think we need to do puzzles more often in preschool.

 We are working on recognizing the numbers 11-20.  We used little cards with pictures of jungle animals and try to match them with a number.

 Next they worked on letter "J" shaped scratchboards.

 We practiced writing J on our paint bags.

 They did some prewriting worksheets to practice holding their markers right.

 Next we made jungle themed Valentines with jungle animal stamps, tempera paint and foam stickers.

New Fish's Jungle Valentine

 We finished off with the sensory bin.  Funniest moment of the day was when New Fish was telling Buddy B that she saw a caricature in Disneyland of Rapunzel and The Hulk together and she was telling him it looked just like when she and Buddy B get married and that he gets to wear his Hulk mask to the wedding and she will wear a princess dress.  He said : "Yes!" and fist pumped.  Hilarious.  Glad they are in agreement on the details of their future wedding.

We did some clay sculptures with friends later and spent more time in the sensory bin.

Work Stuff

A track from our new library plays about one minute into this trailer.  Awesome.