Dance Class Review

Rose started at a new ballet school this year and as you can see they are a bit more serious about actually dancing.  There are only a handful of kids in her class and her instructor is actually a ballerina in a dance troupe.  

 Here they are warming up for class after reading part of a story that has at some point been adapted to a ballet.  

 Barre work - plies.

 At the end of the class they dress up in costumes that fit the story they read at the beginning of class.  They just finished up Mulan.

Here is a short clip of her individual dance.

Dr Seuss Party

 We made Oobleck from "Bartholomew and the Oobleck"

 "One fish, Two fish..."

 "Green Eggs and Ham"

 "Butter Battle"

"Pink ink drink"

We had a bunch of friends over and decorated with crazy colors everywhere (forgot to get that shot!).  We meant to read books, but there were probably 20 kids and only 5 or so moms, so it was a little insane.  Fun, though!

Watercolor Relief Art

 We took white paper and drew on it with white crayon.

 Then added some watercolors on top.  The crayon wicks away the watercolors, leaving the original drawing in white.  Rose enjoyed the magic of it.

Chinese New Year Theme

Since Jan 23 was the Chinese New Year, we used that as our theme for the week. I don't have a lot of pictures, but here is what we did:

 During our weekly project playdate, we made dragon puppets (it is the year of the dragon afterall) using these instructions.  It took the girls just over an hour to color, cut, and assemble all the prepared (I cut holes in cups and the tp rolls for them) pieces.  

 We also ate Chinese food from our favorite restaurant, and I finally found a dish they will eat - Sweet and Sour Chicken!  Yea!!  And we made an asian influenced noodle soup in the crockpot one day, which we ate with dumplings and soy sauce (they like those too).  

Some books we enjoyed were:

"Cat and Rat: The Legend of the Chinese Zodiac" by Ed Young

"Shibumi and the Kitemaker" by Mercer Mayer

and several other Chinese folk tales.  

Building/Construction Theme Week

I am not really sure what inspired me to do this particular theme with the kids, but it was a huge success.  We started the week with a fun snack - make a building out of graham crackers, pretzel sticks, and peanut butter.  It didn't quite look like I imagined it in my head, but then again I was dealing with a 2 and 4 year old!  

 James enjoyed smearing the crackers with peanut butter and smooshing them together.  And of course eating them. 

 Rose's looked more like a building (after a little guidance on where to put the peanut butter), and she wanted her snack without the mess - so some fresh crackers were retrieved from the cabinet.  I have to say that it was a big deal for Rose to get her hands messy with the peanut butter, she is currently in a hand washing stage.

 We went to a cool place called the National Building Museum and they have a room for the kids to build in.  All sorts of fun toys - big legos, blocks, a huge playhouse, a train table, etc - and Rose built this neat building.  James of course came running across the room and knocked it down for her.

 Later in the week, I thought we could do some real hands on work.  We found a 1x2 in our basement, some roofing nails (they have a great big head to aim for), and the lightweight hammer.  There were some smooshed (yes that is a word google!) fingers, but they both really enjoyed getting to use my tools.  

 Lots of supervision was utilized, especially at the end when Rose got to take the (slightly loosened) nails out.

 Totally stole this idea from here.  I am pretty sure James enjoyed eating them more than building, but it was a good activity for a cold afternoon.

We enjoyed several story books at night time and reference books during the day.  Although I do have to say that it is difficult to find story books about construction vehicles.  Here are a few we liked:

Jack's House by Karen Magnuson Beil

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton

Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site by Sherri Rinker

Snow Theme Week

Now that we are out of the holiday season and I am no longer feeling the effects of early pregnancy, we are back into the swing of things with school.  Rose loves doing projects, but we have been going slowly.  Our first week back was easy - snow, even though we didn't have any fall from the sky.

We had a snowflake snack - we did this last year too - but they really enjoyed it again.

We also did an interesting science experiment, which you can see Rose recording in her science journal.  I got this one from I Can Teach My Child, and it was one of the ones that the kids loved.  We did it several times that day, and again the next.  

You take a small piece of Ivory soap, microwave it for 45 seconds (or minutes as Rose kept saying), and watch what happens.  We thought the end result looked like a pile of snow, but it definitely did not feel like one.  We put it in the bath and James thought it was great - nice and mushy like mud - but Rose freaked out about the little white pieces floating around.

We also made coffee filter snowflakes for our front window and colored with white crayon on black paper to make a snow scene.  No specific books this week to share, like I said we are going slowly back into school.  

Farm Theme

This week we did a Farm Theme, as it seemed kind of fall-ish.  Of course, we had an indian summer, and the temps were near 80.  Oh well!

 I found some great pre-made packs for kindergarten HERE, which is where all these great activities came from this week.  Rose really enjoyed the connect-the-letters to help the farmer get to the cow.

Then she did a little farm math - count the different animals and circle the correct number.  She did well, in fact it was almost too easy for her, so maybe I need to start upping the ante in math.

I got these adorable magnetic farms from my Pampers points and they had fun making up their own story to go with the farm animals.  Rose was intent on getting them in the right place, while James just liked putting them on and off.  

We rounded the week out with a trip to a local farm/park.  It is run by volunteers and they have it set in 1771 so the farm was like it would have been back then.  They dress, speak, and act the part which the kids thought was funny.  We got to help carry firewood in, wash our hands in their 'sink' (a bucket of water), and play with cornhusk dolls & other farm toys.  

As you can see, Daddy made it with us on this trip, which was great for the kids.  Here they are looking at the pigs and trying to get them to oink.  It only really worked with the geese, which ended up scaring them anyway!

Clothes Theme

Ok, so I know it is a weird sounding theme, but Rose had fun with it - she is a girl after all!  Anyway, I found this cool felt doll at a sale the weekend before, so it worked really well with the week's activities.  She had a ball picking out outfits and dressing the girl.  We spent quite a bit of time discussing how certain accessories go with different types of outfits.  

Of course, this was the only activity that was really worth taking a picture of.  So I will just give a quick run down of the other activities.  For a math activity, we discussed clothing size then went through all of her clothes and noted that the smaller numbers didn't fit her any more but the bigger numbers were a little bigger on her.  Then she and I spent time organizing her clothes, folding and whatnot.  

At first, science was going to involve some tie-dye, but I didn't really want to get into that, so we did a laundry drying experiment.  We tried different ways of drying her clothes from the laundry.  She figured out that it was really nice to have the dryer do all the work!

We also donated a bag of clothes for our social studies for the week.

Transportation Theme!

We kicked off our 'school year' the same time all the public schools did so Rose felt included with the neighborhood kids.  Technically, Rose wouldn't be starting kindergarten until Fall 2013 (almost 6) because of where her birthday falls (cut off is September).  But when she decided to start reading this summer, I figured we could do pre-k/kindergarten this year.  If all else fails, I figure I have 3 years for her to complete kindergarten!

Anyway, our first theme was transportation.  No rhyme or reason, just started there.  Here is a basic run down of what we did:

Sorted all of our vehicles (who knew we had so many?) by

 type,

 method of movement,

 size,

and color. 

 Then we had a race for all the cars, down a book ramp, to see which one went the farthest. White won, green lost.

 She made some notes about the race in her Sid the Science Kid journal (we will use this throughout the year for different science experiments).

 She did a color by number train picture while I cooked dinner or lunch one day. All the manipulative were found online.

After discussing the parts of a boat (bow, stern) and the general shape, we made boats out of foil to see if they would float (idea found here).

 Added a paper boat to see the difference.

 Handwriting practice.

 Which way is the vehicle facing? Rose aced this the first time out, I wasn't really sure she even knew the difference.  Even the boat (before the discussion too!) didn't trip her up.

 A number ordering train, followed by odd/even organizing.

Finally...a trip to the Air and Space Museum!

 Supposedly learning about why the airplane's wings are curved.  I think they really just liked pushing the air button ;)

 Fun in the cockpit!

 They loved the fact that they could go through so many of the different planes and shuttles.  

This had to be Rose's favorite display.  It was just a capsule for the balloon that recently circumnavigated the world.  She thought it was cool that a balloon made it all the way around.  This was the first museum that held her interest at different displays for more than 5 seconds.  She even asked questions about different things and wanted to learn more about them.  We will definitely be going back this year, even if it doesn't fit in our theme!

We also briefly touched on outer space, but might take the time to do that in more depth later on.