Gingerbread Family Night

Dinner
We ate Gingerbread Waffles, eggs, bacon & sausage, and fruit & yogurt salad.

This was a HUGE hit with the whole family.  Really, what could be simpler than breakfast for dinner?

Activity
We made a graham cracker Gingerbread house (adobe of course because we're in the southwest)!  I set out an egg carton with various fillings in each section.  We used marshmallows (became luminarias & snowmen), sprinkles of various sizes & colors, chocolate chips (walkway & roof tiles), pomegranate seeds (doorknobs & windows), shredded coconut(snow) and walnuts (wood pile). 

R worked his fine motor skills by trying to eat the dropped sprinkles.

Not the prettiest, but M sure had a good time!

Craft
I traced a gingerbread man using a cookie cutter onto a paper plate and then cut it out.  We used this as a stencil to paint gingerbread men on plain white paper.  I think I'll cut them out and use them as tags or cards to family members.

 I tried to draw a little Gingerbread Man storyboard that I could add the cut gingerbread man to, but M hijacked it and turned my river into a Christmas tree.  She has just recently started actually drawing representative pictures instead of just scribbles, so it's pretty neat to see what she comes up with.

Books

We read The Gingerbread Cowboy and The Gingerbread Boy.  We also watched a few "books" on YouTube.

The Gingerbread Man

The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett:
There was this cute little Sesame Street clip:

And a music video:

Another great family night!

Week in a Glance - M is 33 Months Old, R is 12 Months Old (2)

We had a sort of off week.  I had tons of plans for our hibernation theme, but nothing really happened.  When the week gets away from us like this, I try to remind myself that the kids are still so young, it won't kill them to miss a week.  Here's what we DID do this week (and by this week I mean last week; boy this post is late!):

We did our Hibernation Family night & St. Nicholas Day activities.

I learned that M has been playing this game with her daddy where they see how many animals they can stack on top of each other.  Great motor skills practice!

We went to our city's Christmas parade on Saturday and the kids had a great time watching all the lit up floats going by.  M's favorite part was all the candy being thrown at her!

After R started walking a couple of weeks ago, he scared himself a bit and flat out refused to walk.  This week he started up again!  Isn't he adorable?!

That's all for now!  This week our theme will be Gingerbread Men!

Friday Finds

This lego table is amazing.  One of the biggest obstacles I've had to getting one of these is that there is no room to put something that I'd have to put away every time adult company was over.  She has a companion train table as well that is so cool!

This cell phone hack for keeping kids from throwing tantrums in the toy store is genius!

These Christmas Montessori ideas are fantastic!  Gotta love when you can keep your child occupied, teach them valuable life skills, and get them to do your chores all at the same time!

Happy Friday!  Did you see anything worth sharing around the blogosphere this week?

St. Nicholas Day

Today is the feast day of St. Nicholas so we took the opportunity to learn about the real St. Nick and his relationship to Santa.  It was fun to be able to celebrate a "little Christmas" in the middle of Advent.

When she woke up she discovered that her shoes were outside and had been filled with candy by St. Nicholas!  This is a fun St. Nicholas Day tradition that I've heard a lot about and hope to continue next year.

Yay!  Candy!

We watched Veggie Tales: Saint Nicholas: A Story of Joyful Giving, which I was excited to find on instant Netflix through our Wii.

We read And Now We Call Him Santa Claus by Kay Tutt, which was a great story that explained very simply that St. Nicholas was the first Santa Claus

We cut out, colored, and assembled this fun St. Nicholas playset which M had fun playing with. 

After her nap we plan on reading  Dream Snow by Eric Carle.  We are also going to attempt to pick a couple of toys to give away in the spirit of St. Nicholas.  Wish us luck!

Animals in Winter Family Night

I was planning to do a week of hibernation for M, but decided to add migration and then other animals in winter than do neither.  When I found this book at the library, this week started coming together.

Dinner
I made baked potatoes for dinner and made M's look like a cave and bear to go along with the hibernation theme.  She loved eating her "chicken bear".

Craft
We designed and decorated our own bear cave out of an empty tissue box.  Daddy worked on covering the box with a brown paper bag while M colored a bear I had printed out and R ripped up tissue paper to use as bedding for the bear. 

Storytime We read Animals in Winter and How the Hibernators Came to Bethlehem.  The first book is an absolute gem.  It is non-fiction for preschoolers and really helped explain hibernation and migration in a simple way that M could understand.  I'm hoping to find some more books from this series in the future.

I'll be posting an Animals in Winter Preschool Pack tomorrow!

Week in a Glance - M is 33 Months Old, R is 12 Months Old

We started off the season of Advent by focusing on it's symbols and meanings this week.  Don't forget to take a look at our Advent Family Night and Advent Countdowns if you are looking for more Advent ideas!

M worked on her writing practice from her Advent Preschool Pack

Both kids spent a lot of time playing with the caps from some baby food squeeze pouches. 
R enjoyed putting them in an empty puffs container and pouring them back out again.

M organized them by color and then used them for pretend play, carrying them around in her feed sack (baby doll sling) and feeding them to her stuffed animals.

We had friends over for a messy playdate.  I taped some butcher paper to the table and laid out some markers, paint, stamps, cookie cutters, and dot markers and we let the kids go crazy making homemade wrapping paper.  The kids had a great time making messes and I even let R get in on the action (although I had to find something else for him to play with when he started eating the markers).

M watched The King is Born too many times to count this week.  She kept asking for "baby Jesus" and I would gladly turn it on for her.

Lots of developmental milestones this week as well.  R said his first word!  (It was "No"!).  M also started potty training herself this week!  Long story short, I discovered she had secretly been using the bathroom and disposing of it in the guest bathtub!  Really gross, but also really neat that she took the initiative on her own!

I didn't get any pictures of her working on her Advent Countdowns but she has been looking forward to them and asking for them every single morning when she wakes up.

That's all for this week!  Next week we'll be working on Animals in Winter.

We'll be linking up to Preschool Corner as well as Tot School.  Visit their websites to find some more great learning activities!

Friday Finds

I see so many cool things around the blogosphere these days that I really want to be able to share them.  Fridays will be my special day here to share some fun finds that I have found that week.  Enjoy!

 

These Letter to Santa Templates are absolutely adorable!  I always remember being a little bit intimidated at writing a letter to Santa all by myself, so these would have been perfect.

I'm really digging the fun Advent activity calenders I've been seeing.  Here's one that makes a new ornament each day, and one that reads a new Christmas book each day.

Make sure to check out these ideas for quick car games if you'll be spending any time traveling in a car with your toddler/preschooler this Christmas.  The link is just to the first one, so make sure to take a look at all 5 of the games she posted.

What were your favorite finds this week?

Advent Preschool Pack

It's a little late in the week to be posting this, but Advent lasts 3 more weeks so we'll be using these periodically whenever M starts begging for school (and trust me, she does!).  I absolutely adore 1+1+1=1's Nativity Pack, but alas, since I have no color printer, I had to make my own. Hers is far superior, but in case you are in the same colorless boat that I am, feel free to use mine.

Advent Preschool Skills Pack

Advent Countdowns

Here are some of the ways that we are counting down to Christmas this year.

Jesse Tree

A Jesse Tree is an interactive symbol of our countdown to the birth of Jesus.  Each day we read a scripture and put up a new ornament that symbolizes that scripture.  The scriptures start at creation and highlight each important section of the bible down to Jesus being born, and his attributes.  Ours is simply a cut-out of brown paper for the tree with a homemade library pocket full of these cute paper ornaments.  Every morning until Christmas, M will pull out that days ornament, tape it onto one of the tree's branches, and we will read that particular story from her toddler bible.

Journey to Bethlehem Advent Calender

I was trying to think of an interactive visual calender that would help M understand what this season of Advent is all about.  I thought what she would understand most would be Mary waiting for her baby to be born, so that's what I went with.  This is a little picture of Mary & Joseph placed on one end of a ribbon, with a picture of Bethlehem on the other end.  Every morning she will cut a little bit of the string and move Mary & Joseph closer to Bethlehem, which they will reach on Christmas Eve.

Candy Advent Calender

This was super simple and took only about an hour to make total.  I cut and assembled library pockets out of Christmas patterned paper, and strung them up on a ribbon as a garland.  After numbering each pocket I slipped a piece of candy inside each pocket.  After dinner every day, we'll share this piece of candy and count down to Christmas.

Manger Padding

Every time M does a good thing like sharing with her brother or obeying us, she can come get a piece of hay from the little jar and place it in the center of our Advent wreath.  By the time Christmas rolls around, hopefully we will have a nice full bed for Baby Jesus to sleep on!