What I' ve Been Up to...

This is the front page, the letters come loose but are secured with
ribbon so Hanna can practice putting the letters of her name in
the right order. 

Here's the A page.  A simple apple, with a flap that lifts up to
show seeds underneath.

 In September, I decided to make an ABC quiet book for Hanna for Christmas.   I had all this scrap felt and thought it would be a fun and inexpensive project to make,  I was right about the fun, but very wrong about the inexpensive part. All in all, it didn't turn out to be that expensive, but just a lot more than I had anticipated when I thought I would just be able to use what I had.   Also, it took all of my spare time for the better part of two months.  But it was fun to make.  I like projects where I don't have to use a pattern because then I don't feel like I've messed up all the time.

B is for barn.  The doors open and I added a puffy lamb on a ribbon
to play on the page. 

C is for cupcakes.  The frostings are attached to a ribbon and
the sequin on each frosting corresponds to the color for the
cupcake liner to practice colors. It also has the same number of
sequins on the frosting as the number on the liner to practice one
to one correspondence. 

 I did a lot of google searches for ideas for my pages and I came to a lot of blogs featuring quiet book pages.  I took ideas from all over the place, but didn't use anyone's patterns or exact ideas.  But I was so grateful to others who had posted their books and gave me a great jumping off point for my pages.  In the spirit of that, I would like to share the pages I have made as well and hope they can give some inspiration!

Hanna loves ducks, so I made D the duck page. The ducks can
move around, but are once again secured with ribbon.  

This is one of my favorite pages.  The egg can hide inside the
shell, and she can pretend to crack it open and put the egg into
the frying pan. Super fun. 

I think, looking back, it would have been better to tackle a smaller quiet book as my first attempt. After all, an ABC book has a lot of pages! But I'm really happy with the way it turned out and Hanna really loves it, which was the goal all along. Even my 5 & 7 year olds love it and I hope to create some more activity pages for them after a long break from quiet book making!  So here's the beginning of the book; I will be posting some more of the pages soon!

Another Sensory Play Project

 I have made another sensory bin for Hanna's sensory table. This one is a Fall theme, mostly because I love Fall. We used orange colored rice with cinnamon in it for scent. I used the powdered spice this time, but I think it is best to use extract, if you have it. I did last time and it works much better. The cinnamon I used this time definitely gives it a scent, but every time we play a bunch comes off and is left in the table. It vacuums up easily, but I think after a few more play sessions it won't smell like cinnamon anymore.

I added some fake fall leaves that I had in our Fall decoration bin, some cinnamon sticks, and some scoops for playing.  As you can see, Elmo also managed to make it in at one point. I had wanted to add some small pumpkins and gourds, but have you seen the price of them this year?? At least at Fred Meyer it was outrageous. So they just had to use their imaginations. Which I guess is the whole point anyway, right? This was  a really simple bin but the girls still had a lot of fun with it.

I have more sensory play projects in the works, I just need to find the time to create them! Stay tuned if you are interested!

Geology Day and Sensory Bins

 Last Friday we were lucky enough to attend geology day at Lava Beds National Monument. This was supposed to be just for school groups, but since I have somewhat of an in with the supervising ranger there we were able to tag along with one of the public school classes.

This year we are studying Earth science, however, we are several weeks away from the topic of geology.  But I felt the kids would get more out of a geology day if we knew what exactly geology was went over some of my well planned lessons ahead of time.  And since we found out we could go to geology day only 2 days beforehand, we did a last minute crash course in geology the day before.

Here the girls are smooshing moistened graham crackers together to mimic the movement of tectonic plates to make mountains. They thought this was awesome. 

And here they learned more about tectonic plates using jam and graham crackers. I let them cover the crackers with dyed whipped cream (because I was not motivated enough to make frosting), then they put the two graham crackers on top of strawberry jam and pushed them together to mimic magma rising from under the Earth's crust. This one wasn't quite the amazing visual that the mountain graham cracker activity was, but they still liked it and of course asked to eat it at the end. 

We also read some books, looked at rocks from our rock collection and learned the difference between the three types of rocks, studied the rock cycle, looked at pictures of the layers of the earth, and read more books. 

Here are the girls at geology day. We went with some homeschool friends and you can see our four girls off to the side. They had such a great time with all the hands on activities.  I feel like they learned a lot too! And hopefully when we come back to geology in a few weeks they will remember this!

In other news, I've started the addicting process of making sensory bin activities for Hanna! Here she is with her ragamuffin hair (we are in that wild hair stage of toddlerhood) playing in the blue sensory bin. I colored rice blue using vinegar and blue food coloring (I just mixed enough in with the rice to coat it, then laid it out on cookie sheets to dry) and added blue pom poms, blue silicon cupcake liners, blue fake flowers, and any other small blue toys I could find. I am planning to make more of these with other colors to help her learn the colors, plus some seasonal and just for fun using other fillers besides just rice. There are so many amazing sensory bin ideas out there- just a google search away! When I was looking for ideas I also read a lot about how great sensory activities are for toddlers, so I am really excited to have these for her. Plus, it keeps her busy during homeschooling. The only problem is that the older kids would rather play in the rice than do their work!