St. Patty's Day

Shamrock painting with laundry clip spong. Simple rainbow squares - works so well when the paper is about the same size as the glue stick top.

Valentine's Week

Chocolate covered strawberries and heart shaped watermelon from our favorite Mr. C.

Heart "blooms" on our spring trees.

Practicing letter Vv with hearts and crayons.

Christmas Art: Catching-Up

Fingerprint candy canes and elf-shoe countdowns. Some day I will be able to find the rest of what we did for the holidays.

Safety on the 4th

A few good ideas when you are celebrating in large crowds this Independence day:

• It will be dark when the show starts – make sure if your kids are wandering around that they are back with you before dark. 
• Put a piece of reflective tape on the back of their clothes to help keep track of them as you’re leaving and always bring two flashlights with you (in case the batteries run out on one.) 
• Be sure your kids know your cell phone number and address in case they get lost on the way out. 
• If your kids are going to a fireworks show with a friend, give the parents a recent photo of your child and memorize what clothes they were wearing so that you can easily describe it to officials. 


from homesecuritysource.com

Father's Day Art

The children used tempra paint on regular paper. Once dried, I cut it out into a tie shape and attached it to a card stock "shirt."

Valentine's Day Crafts

A big thank you to Target's dollar aisle. These little metal mailboxes contributed to many happy hours of playtime. (And the destruction of a small forest of trees; the children wrote SO many valentine's notes. Too many.)

Heart shaped sponge painting.

Heart crowns with sparkly stickers!

I saw another cute Vday craft on Pinterest and hoped to recreate it; lots of tiny heart shaped fingerprints in a cute little hand drawn jar. It didn't quite turn out, for a few reasons. Maybe next year!

Christmas Cookies

We took turns rolling out dough and cutting cookie shapes. We learned pretty quickly that the santa shape doesn't work. Sad, but true. We had plenty of candy canes, trees and stars to cover with our icings. Yum!

Christmas Tree Collage

Pom-poms, buttons, paints & cue-tips, and lots of glue.

Veteran's Day

I find that it is often difficult to teach young children about veterans and the military. But their brave service is too special to disregard. Typically it seems that those figures are most easily described something like fire fighters or police- people who are brave and help others.

After discussing the flag and looking at photos of service men and women, we played this counting game. Each player has a sheet of stars and takes a turn rolling a 6 sided die. The children counted the die and colored in the corresponding number of stars.

Gratitude, Day 1