School This Week: The Tomten

I mentioned previously that we are trying something a bit different with our school time now.  Instead of being really strict with our Montessori time, I am branching out a little bit.  I looked through the Winter Wonderland curriculum over at Wee Folk Art, and I really like what I saw!  Wee Folk Art has a 12 week seasonal curriculum that is based in literature.  So we are trying bits and pieces of that along with our Montessori time, and so far it seems to be working well.

This week's picture book is The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren.  This was a new book to me and I loved it.  We read the book several times on Monday, and talked about the seasons and how the Tomten made tracks in the snow.  This would be great to do a couple of activities from Montessori for Everyone; I'm thinking the four seasons matching or the animal tracks activity.  Since I am planning on repeating this curriculum next year in the winter as well, I think I'll plan on using those then. 

On Wednesday, when we read through the story again, I pulled out some props and we acted out the story as I read.  I had made a set of rainbow gnomes for E for Christmas, so the red gnome was drafted to play the Tomten, and some of our Little People farm animals got in on the fun as well.  The purple parrot is pretending to be a chicken.  The white playsilk was for the snow, and the Tomten walked through the "snow" to check in on each animal.

After our story, we went upstairs to do some Montessori work.  I had a mat rolled out for E already with the pink tower cubes set up.  At first she did not want to work on that, but I told her she needed to do the pink tower first, and then she could choose a different thing to work on.  She built the tower correctly by herself and then I showed her how the smallest cube could "walk" along the edge of each bigger cube.  E thought that was pretty cool!

When she was finished with the pink tower, she did some good work with the brown stair and red rods before deciding it was time to go downstairs and do some music time.

I'm trying to incorporate some music into our school time each week.  You'd think that would be easy for me, after being an elementary music teacher, but somehow it's always the thing I forget about.  I'm going to save our music time for another post.  I'd like to get some good photos first, so you can see what we did with it.

We did several art projects for our first week of Winter Wonderland.  The curriculum suggests watercolor painting with salt, and I think we'll be doing that tomorrow.  We had a friend over for art and craft time and made the glittery window clings from Family Fun.  Ours did not turn out as expected, they're still beautiful, but I'm going to have to cut them out of the waxed paper and hang them with string. 

The other project we did was something I saw on Art Projects for Kids.  I drew snowflakes with white crayon on white paper and wrote E's name.  Then I cut the paper into quarters and had her paint each piece a different color with watercolors.  This turned out beautifully, and E was so excited to see her name revealed in the white crayon as she painted! (The picture is from Art Projects for Kids, so you could see what it looks like.  I didn't want to post ours since it has E's name all over the front of it)

I'm linking up to Montessori Monday and Preschool Corner.  Please take time to visit some of the other blogs linked up!  :)

Yarn Along

Linking up with Genny again for the Yarn Along over at small things.

No WIP pictures this time, but an "action shot!"  I got 3 mittens done this week - 3 because the first one was way too big, so I had to go down a size.  I'll finish a fourth in the larger size, and then she'll have some to grow into!

Now I need to figure out which knitting project to start next.  I'm thinking it needs to be something for me, but it will probably end up being something for E again.

What have I been reading?  Ummmm . . . aside from numerous children's picture books?  Not much.  I will have a post up on Friday about our books for this week, as part of the reading challenge.  Maybe by next week I will have gotten my act together and actually start a new book!  I even have a couple on my bookshelf calling my name, I just haven't had time to pull them out and say "hello!"

Easing Back into Things

I thought we were going to start school last week.  Hmmmm.  I have noticed that I tend to procrastinate more as I have gotten older.  I didn't get half of the things done that I wanted to over the weekend, and since it was E's birthday week, and we were still recouperating from illnesses, I decided to just wait until this week to start up again.

We did, however, do some activities for Epiphany!  I saw this neat and EASY art project, and thought we would do something similar.  I don't have step by step pictures, but here's what we did:

I only have large white paper, so I had E color the whole page with different blue, gray, and black crayons.  Since I wanted to do this project, too, I chose to paint my page with blue and black paint.  I had E use crayons so she could move directly to the next step without waiting for paint to dry.

I made a star stamp (like our fish stamp) and let her stamp all over the paper with white and yellow paint.  Then we let our paintings dry for a day and I put them under some weights to flatten out a bit.

The next day, I had cut triangles, circles and a star for each of us.  We glued our triangles onto the paper, and topped them with a circle.  Then it was time to decorate with glue, glitter, and sequins!  After decorating was done, we added our star for the wise men to follow.

I put my picture behind our nativity set,

E's went up on our new art display I created on the back of my kitchen cabinets.

Read to Me Challenge

I have a post about our Epiphany activities up my sleeve, but first a quick post about a neat challenge that we will be participating in this year!

We are excited to participate in the Read to Me Challenge over at There's a Book!  The challenge is to read picture books with your little one during the course of the year, and review them and share with others so we can find lots of neat books to read!

We are shooting for the "Harvesting" level: 200 picture books over the course of 2011.  Seeing as how we checked out 20 new books from the library this week alone, we should be able to complete that. 

Check it out and join up!  It should be loads of fun!

Yarn Along

I'm joining up again with Ginny at small things

Working on a small project to keep my hands busy when I am watching the little one play.  The begining of a pair of mittens for her, she desperately needs new ones!  And now that we finally have a little snow, it will be nice to have some warm wool mittens to keep those little fingers warm.  They will match the hat I knitted for her last year - it still fits and should for quite a while with the rate E grows!

Not really reading anything right now.  Between Christmas and birthday I've been at my sewing machine constantly.  I do a lot of knitted gifts, but sewn ones are much faster, and when you have a little girl who insists upon wearing skirts and dresses every day, you have to be able to whip up a few quickly.  I am, however, perusing several books: Basic Montessori by David Gettman, to refresh my braing as we get back into the swing of things, The Essential Montessori by Elizabeth Hainstock, and Mothering Like the Father by Dianne Daniels.  Mrs. Daniels came and spoke to my MOPS group not too long ago, I found her speaking to be pretty inspiring.

A Special Day

Happy Birthday to my little munchkin!!  I can't believe she's three already!  Where does the time go?!

We celebrated her birthday yesterday because I have to work tonight.  She requested a brownie birthday cake (she's never had a brownie before so I'm not sure where she got that from), so that's what we made.  It made me laugh a little because she insisted on making it herself.  Well, helping, at least.  If someone asked me to make my own birthday cake, I would have laughed at them and told them to get busy or go to King Soopers!  E did a great job making the brownies, she poured the water and oil all by herself without spilling, helped me crack the egg, and helped me count as we mixed everything together.  And they tasted really good, too!

Happy New Year!

Hello, 2011!

I'm ready to get back into the swing of things, I think.  Someone in our house turns 3 !!!! on Tuesday, and life can settle down back to normal after that.

I've been thinking of a few goals for the new year.  Do you make New Year's Resolutions?  I prefer to just think of it as long term goals for the year.  Things that I know it's going to take me more than a day or a week to accomplish.  I see a few bloggers writing about a word for the year, I like that idea.  I think I even used it last year, but I don't remember what my word was.  Things can change so much over a year!  Right now, the word that comes to my mind is simplify.  I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by stuff, responsibilities, activities, commitments.  I am hoping this year to simplify my life in general.

1. Simplify stuff!  I want to get rid of 2011 things in 2011.  I'll probably keep track of that here on the blog.  I don't think I'll track the things I throw away, only the things I donate, gift, or sell.

2. Simplify schedule.  Make sure we do preschool (Montessori time or otherwise) 2-3 times per week.  We started off great this school year, but have really started to slack!

3. Simplify health.  Eat breakfast and lunch every day!  I am horribly bad about snacking and never eating a real meal until dinner time.  And I wonder why I have no energy some days . . .

4. Simplify hobbies.  I joined a destash-along on craftster.org, I am really going to try to do my sewing and knitting from what I already have on hand.  I also joined a craftalong doing 50 projects in 2011 - I'm hoping this will help me to actually finish the projects that I start.  Unless they're a gift for someone, a lot of the time they don't get any further than planning and purchasing materials!  Hence the large fabric and yarn stash.

5. Simplify money.  This is the year we need to plan a budget for food/household expenses.  Hubby got a new job (yay!!!) but my hours keep getting cut at work when I need them the most.  So either it's budget and stick to it, or work more days out of the week.  Budget it is! 

I started cleaning out the house with my kitchen.  Today I boxed up 51 items for goodwill, mostly excess coffee mugs and sippy cups.  And I haven't even touched my pantry yet!  :)