Fizzy Dough Alphabet Ocean Hunt

Welcome to another edition of the 12 Months of Sensory Dough Series. This month is all about Fizzy Dough. Do I dare say this has been our most favorite month so far? Gasp! We seriously loved it! We combined a fabulous Small World Fizzy Dough activity found at Fun at Home with Kids together with an alphabet hunt and had such a great afternoon of fun and learning! 

Counting Crocodiles...A preschool math activity

I happened upon a darling book at the library last week, "Counting Crocodiles" by Judy Sierra and illustrated by Will Hillenbrand. The book inspired a preschool activity full of math and fun!

Planting a Rainbow Flower Craft

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert is one of our favorite Springtime books. Not only do we check it out from our local library every spring but we make a craft to go along with it. This year we made a beautiful rainbow flower garden out of one of my favorite craft materials, cupcake liners.

Heart Doily Monster Craft

Last weekend my 7-year old read us the story "Three Monsters" by David McKee and afterwards we looked in my craft closet and put our heads together to think of materials we could use to create our own monsters. My son saw a package of heart doily's I had just purchased from Dollar Tree and thought they would be a great element for each of us to add into our monsters. I fell in love with the idea! We also grabbed Dot Markers, crayons, an array of colors of construction paper, scissors and a gluestick. 

Plumply, Dumply Pumpkin (Pumpkin Hunt and Sorting Activity)

 

Plumply, Dumply Pumpkin by Mary Serfozo was the perfect book to continue our pumpkin themed preschool activities this week. I found this idea from The Mailbox Magazine a couple years ago and was excited to revisit it again with my daughter.

 

Prior to reading the book, I cut out 10 round pumpkins and 10 lumpy pumpkins out of orange cardstock paper. I had a pattern from The Mailbox Magazine (Oct/Nov 2010 issue), but you could easily just draw out a pattern of a lumpy and round pumpkin yourself. I hid the pumpkins around my living room for her to find after we read the book.

 

After reading the book, I set my daughter loose on her pumpkin hunt in my living room.

 

After she found a pumpkin she put it in her purse. 

When she was done finding all of the pumpkins we got them out of her purse and counted them. Then I attached a round pumpkin and a lumpy pumpkin to the front of two tin buckets and my daughter sorted each pumpkin in the right container.

Such a fun preschool activity!!

 

I like to post pictures of our activities on Instagram so if you'd like some sneak peeks now and again and a glimpse our silly life, you can follow me HERE.

 

8 Family Favorite Thanksgiving Books

We hit it big this year at our local library for Thanksgiving books. Usually I end up on a waiting list for our favorites, but this year we happened to be in the library at a slow time of the day at the exact moment the Librarian pulled out the Thanksgiving Holiday Storage cart right in front of us.

{This post contains affiliate links, read our Disclosure Policy for more information.}

I'm certain my reaction was as if I had just won the lottery. The Librarian probably had to hold back from laughing as my jaw dropped to the floor and my heart pounded out of my chest as I dove my nose into the cart in search of the perfect Thanksgiving reads. I wish you could have seen how many books I took off that cart my first round. I made sure to take full advantage of the opportunity by finding a quiet table to sit and read through as many as I possibly could to pick just the right ones to bring home.

So after an exciting day at the Library, and story time with my children, I thought I would share a list of our family's eight favorite Turkey and Thanksgiving stories (in no particular order).

Turkey Surprise by Peggy Archer

Two pilgrim brothers set off to hunt up a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. "We'll pluck him, and stuff him, and cook him up right. We'll gobble, gobble turkey for dinner tonight!" Their song forms a refrain throughout, but the smaller pilgrim brother begins to have second thoughts. He most certainly sees a terrified turkey a number of times, but he always leads his brother in another direction. Meanwhile, Turkey tries hiding in a tree, a gopher hole and a pond—with disastrous results. Then small pilgrim brother helps Turkey hide in a woodpile, and the two boys take home a huge pumpkin for dinner instead.

 Run, Turkey, Run! by Diane Mayr

With Thanksgiving only one day away, Turkey tries to find a place to hide from the farmer who's looking for a plump bird for his family feast. Maybe he can hide with the pigs . . . or the ducks . . . or the horses . . .Uh-oh! Here comes the farmer! Run, Turkey, run!

Thanksgiving Mice! by Bethany Roberts

It’s Thanksgiving and four adorable mice are putting on a play for their woodland friends. Lively verse introduces beginning readers to basic words and rhyming sounds and tells the story of the very first Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrim mice traveled across the sea and settled in America.

One Little, Two Little, Three Little Pilgrims by B. G. Hennessy

Ten little Pilgrims and ten little Wampanoag boys and girls are getting ready for the harvest feast. In colonial Plymouth, the young Pilgrims hunt ducks and geese and dig up turnips and carrots. In a nearby village, the Wampanoag children dig for clams, fish for cod, and gather nuts and berries. Finally, it's time for the meal. Turkey, cornbread, cranberry stuffing, pumpkin, and Indian pudding are all on the menu-yum! First, everyone gives thanks, and then it's time to eat and celebrate. The simple, rhythmic text and autumn-colored illustrations are just right for sharing the history and fun of Thanksgiving with young children.

Setting the Turkeys Free by W. Nikola-Lisa

A young boy uses his hands, paint, sequins, and everything imaginable to make beautiful turkeys in his picture. Soon his imagination takes over, and the turkeys take on a life of their own. But Foxy the fox is on the prowl. How can the boy hold tight to the turkeys he loves and keep them safe from harm? A child's voice and bright bold artwork capture the sweetness and humor in this warmhearted story. (This book never technically even talks about Thanksgiving, but since Turkey is such a big theme of Thanksgiving, I decided it can count in our list.)

Sometimes it's Turkey, Sometimes it's Feather by Lorna & Lecia Balian

Mrs. Gumm finds a turkey egg and raises the turkey, which she fattens up for Thanksgiving dinner. When the time comes, she invites the turkey to join her for dinner instead of eating it.

10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston

Girls and boys will gobble up this hilarious story about ten goofy turkeys and their silly antics. The wild and wacky illustrations accompany the joyful text as readers count down from ten to one.

A Plump and Perky Turkey by Teresa Bateman

Turkeys around Squawk Valley just don't jump into pots anymore -- they are way too smart for that. How about luring one to town? But what happens when the plump and perky turkey is smarter than the townsfolk? They might end up thankfully eating shredded wheat for Thanksgiving Dinner.

What are your family favorite books for Thanksgiving?  

Dot Art--A Lesson on Creativity

I love, Love, LOVE this book, The Dot by Peter Reynolds. A girl named Vashti is frustrated in Art Class and thinks she doesn't know how to draw or be an artist. Her teacher teaches her a very important lesson when she says "Just make a mark and see where it takes you." Vashti angrily makes a small dot on the paper and signs it. To her surprise, her teacher frames the picture and puts right above her desk. When Vashti sees it the next day, she is determined that she can make a better dot, and then an even better dot, etc. Soon she is displaying her artwork in the the school's art show, which makes quite a splash with everyone. This book is sure to help your children understand that they really are artists.

To go along with this book we got out our watercolors just like Vashti did and started by painting dots. Any kind of dots we wanted, any color, any size....It was so much fun that we found ourselves painting several different pages of different dots.

After our dots were dry, we came back to them and used our creativity to turn them into a work of art. Using oil pastels, we made finishing details on our papers, and then signed our artwork. Here is what I came up with using the dots pictured above.

Luke had fun making animals out of his dots...

And he says this is Saturn with the Sun and Stars in the background...

Andrew connected his dots together to make a Pyramid...

And a sky full of butterflies and balloons...

I had fun making a colorful tree...

And a pond full of fish...

Once their creativity started flowing, they had hundreds of different ideas of things they could create with dots. I thought I would put one of their pictures in a frame in their bedroom to act as a reminder to them that their minds are full of creativity and that they are indeed an Artist.

Happy Crafting!

I like to link my posts up to THESE fun Link Parties.

"A Bad Case of Stripes" by David Shannon

Have you read this fun book? It is about a girl who really loves to eat Lima Beans, but since someone told her that was uncool, she decided she needed to stop eating them. One day she woke up in the morning with a bad case of stripes (see the cover of the book). She has no fever or other symptoms other than the stripes so she is sent back to school the next day. Every time someone in her class says some type of pattern her skin changes to it.  After specialists visit her and no one knows how to cure her, an old lady shows up with the cure--to eat Lima Beans. The girl soon discovers she shouldn't fret over what others think, she should just be happy being herself.

After reading this story I thought it would be so fun for my boys to pictures themselves having a bad case of stripes. I found a picture of them from this past Summer wearing shorts and faded it using the Sketch option in Picnik*. This way the skin became more white and would be easy to color, but it left other coloring in the picture. My boys got out their colored pencils and colored themselves a good case of the stripes. It was so much fun!

(*As I'm sure you already know, Picnik no longer exists! I think if you print out a picture from your home printer without fading the colors, it should work ok with this project. Just make sure to print it on regular computer paper, so you can color it with colored pencils like we did. If the skin color is too dark and isn't showing the colored pencils you can always adjust the Saturation levels of your picture in Picmonkey.com to try to fade it some. That is my suggestion.)

My older son's Picture

My younger son's picture

I told my son to make sure to color lightly on the picture but he loves to color dark so there was no stopping him. They are both so pleased with their pictures and they got such a kick out of getting to color each other with the stripes and not only themselves.

Happy Crafting!!

I like to link my posts up to THESE fun link parties.

Polar Bear Masks

We've been learning about Polar Bears this week and to go along with all the books we've read we decided to make Polar Bear Masks. They turned out so cute and my boys just love them!

Acorns Everywhere!

Luke and I spent some time this afternoon re-creating a scene from the children's book Acorns Everywhere by Kevin Sherry.

It's a fun story about a squirrel who hurriedly hides his acorns in the ground because winter is coming. When he is finished hiding them all, his tummy rumbles from hunger and he suddenly realizes he can't remember where he hid all the acorns. There aren't many words in the story so it's definitely more toddler/preschool level. The illustrations really tell the story well though, so not much need for more words.

We've also read the story Nuts to You by Lois Ehlert this week. It's about a rascally squirrel who is up to all sorts of tricks during summer time in the city. He digs and eats and zips and hides, but when he sneaks inside an apartment window, a little boy comes up with a nutty solution to get him out.

To make our craft I started by finding this free squirrel template at All Kids Network and printed it out 8x10 size and made sure to click the option to make sure all of the picture fit in the dimensions (it made it a bit smaller which was what I wanted). The original template has eyes and a nose drawn on it but I wanted to make my own so I opened it up in Paint and erased them before printing it out. I don't think it is really necessary though because the paint and things I added probably would have covered them up anyways.

After cutting out all the pieces we painted them using a pom-pom attached to a clothespin. Not only do my kids think it's fun to paint this way, but by dabbing it with the pom-pom it gave it more texture looking more like fur on the animal.

I forgot to get pictures of how I made my acorns but I simply used the acorn in the template to trace 10 of them on brown construction paper. Then we used dark brown paint to paint the tops of them. I drew a light pencil mark at the top so Luke knew where to stop painting.

While the paint was drying we assembled our layered background. I started by cutting a large hill out of light colored green paper and glued it onto our blue construction paper background.

Then I created another smaller hill in dark green construction paper. It was the same width of the blue paper so it made it easy. On one end of it I also cut out a section of it just like in the book where we could bury some of our acorns.

Only glue half of the dark green hill onto your paper at first so you can see where to glue on your acorns inside the hole.

After gluing down the acorns in the hole, glue the rest of the hill down.

Next we used some brown paint to paint a tree on top of our hills, just like in the story. We also cut out some orange leaves and added them to the tree, along with a couple acorns.

At this point our squirrel's were all dry so we glued all the sections together and glued it onto our background page. We also glued the rest of our acorns on the page, including one in the squirrel's hand.

Lastly, we added details to the face. We could still see the smile outline from the template so we traced it with a black marker. For the nose I cut off a small piece from a black pom-pom and we glued it on and then we glued on a googly eye.

Luke insisted on having a red squirrel.  It's his favorite color so of course I didn't resist and it turned out so cute!

Happy Crafting!!

Linking up to THESE Parties.