The Doctors Wife

The Snowy Day (or in our case Days)

A couple of weeks ago we had some snow in our neck of the woods, so we read The Snowy Day.  We have had a ton of snow this last week (along with most of the country!) so I thought I would share some of the activities that we did with this book. 

We made coffee filter snow flakes and decorated them with glitter and hung them in our front window. 

Styrofoam ball snow-man (I got the balls in a set from the Dollar tree)

Puffy snow flakes (Don't you love how she's holding her baby?)

Made Snow angels

And when we got some serious snow, we made a snowman and snow ice cream!

We also did an assortment of color pages, and we watched The Snowy Day on DVD. (I got a set of Scholastic DVD's from TJ Max for $7.99- I LOVE them and so do my kids!) We are due to have more snow this week, ugh! I am ready for spring but have had fun doing snow themed activities with the kids!

 

Rainbow Fun

One of my goals for this year was to be more intentional about my time with Hannah and David, and more specifically having a short devotional with them each morning. So far we have really enjoyed it, I usually print off a color page or two that has to do with the devotional and the kids color them while I make breakfast in the mornings. Last week, one of the devotions was about rainbows and God's promises and I decided to take it a little further and add in a few more rainbow related activities for Hannah in the afternoon while David was napping. 

 We mixed colors using this page.

Hannah had a good time with this- she loves to paint, and there is a Max and Ruby episode where they mix paint colors and she mentioned that she was mixing colors just like Ruby- so cute!

We also made a rainbow fan- we actually made two because I love the idea of demonstrating how there are many shades of each color. Hannah can definitely be a little stubborn on things like this, she is very much a black and white thinker so I loved that this was a fun activity that showed (in such a visual way) how there can be many varieties of the same thing. 

I got the idea for this here.

We had a really fun afternoon and David took a nice long nap so we were able to get in some good one on one time. I love it when we have these easy, teachable moments!

Other color/activity pages we used can be found here.

 

 

Bread and Jam for Hannah

We decided to forego mother's day out this year, so I have been working with Hannah at home on letters, numbers, coloring, etc. I am doing my own twist on Before Five In A Row, and Trish Kuffner's Picture Book Activities.  I love seeing Hannah learn and progress, and she loves doing her activities and projects. I am taking a very relaxed approach, and it is suiting our family very well during this  season. Sometimes David participates with us, and other days we do our "lesson" while he is down for his nap. I know I won't share all of the activities or all of the books we do, but I will periodically share some of what we do. I love the idea of literature based learning, and think it is such an easy thing to implement into daily life since most of us already read to our kids every day. I have used BFIA and PBA as a jumping off point to get ideas, and also make up a few of my own that suit our schedule and Hannah's interests.  Last week our book was Bread and Jam for Frances. I was really looking forward to this particular title since Hannah is such a ridiculously picky eater. I really tried to use the book as a jumping off point for trying lots of new foods. Here is a little of what we did last week:

 

I found some cute workbooks at Borders and we have done several worksheets from them each week. Normally I think 3 is a little young for worksheet type activities and prefer a more natural approach to early learning at this age,  but Hannah LOVES worksheets so it is working for her. Each week I pull out a few that go with our theme. We also did a few other coloring/ painting activities- we traced a plate, colored different foods on the plate and then used glitter to decorate. Hannah LOVES to use glitter, but man it is messy!

 

We also made felt food. I had planned on actually sewing and making "real" pretend play foods, but our schedule was not going to allow for this, so I ended up just cutting very simple food out of felt and called it a day. Hannah and I looked through the book together and she pointed out some of the different foods, and I cut them out for her. This was definitely Hannah's favorite activity and she had (has!) so much fun playing with her felt "food". I think Santa may have to take some time to actually make some felt food for her stocking. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just look up felt food on Etsy- so much cute stuff!)

Hannah had a bread and jam tea party with her babies and I thought it was so cute that she did this all on her own! Of course, I had to get pictures of her little table setting.

I also put out our food fridge magnets. We have several sets of fridge magnets, and I try to rotate them periodically and thought this set went well with our book.

I also made Hannah a simple chart to encourage her to try new foods. I made stickers  (there are several different ones, they are really cute, our printer was almost out of ink when I made them, so my pics don't do them justice!) for her chart and after she got four stickers, she got a reward, in this case I took her to get her nails painted. I know that this is essentially bribery and some of you think it is wrong, but it was good motivation to help push Hannah to try new things and I am completely okay with it, especially since she willingly tried new things. We are doing this again this week (this week the reward is a ride on the carousel at the mall) because getting her to try new things is absolutely worth it right now!

 

 

I wanted to have something permanent to help document all of the books we read and did "lessons" on. I came up with an idea to do a charm bracelet- we add a new charm for every book we do. Hannah LOVES her bracelet and I love that she will have a such a sweet momento to look back on.  I have had fun finding cute charms to match the books. I saw this and knew it was perfect!

 

So that is a little bit of what we've done with Bread and Jam for Francis, I'll share other books/ activities periodically, I just have to remember to take pictures!