Greening Sam and Avery

theme week - ponds - pretend pond play

Today we decided to play pretend pond. 

We grabbed a blue blanket and laid it on the floor. Then I told the girls they had to search the house for anything and everything that they think would live in the pond. 

They found lily pads, frogs, a turtle, a crocodile (okay, not a WI pond but it does live in water somewhere!), ducks, snake, lizard (not sure about this one but they refused to let me take it out of the pond. It is a bath toy for us so I think that may have been Avery's confusion) and lots of fish. 

Then I gave the girl's their fishing pole and let them go to town!

Pause for a personal complaint...do you think my daughter needs a haircut? Why am I SO lazy when it comes to haircuts for my kids?!

Okay, back on track. 

This activity was super fun because the girls went through their rooms, their farm sets, puppets, stuffed animals and everything else. They discussed where things lived and what they could add to the pond. It was a great activity for both girls to work together on. And of course they begged me to leave it up so they could play in the pond tomorrow too!

Now how can I build a forest in my living room...

theme week - pond crafting

We kept working on our pond craft today. Sam decided that the pond needed some plants next.

First we had to look at our pond books to see what the plants that live in ponds look like. We saw grasses, small leaves (duck weed), other tall plants and fallen logs.

The girls are both very excited to start adding all the animals that live in a pond. Now I just have to figure out how I am going to pull that off!

More pretend play and pond visits later this week.

theme week - ponds - pond class at school

This is the second year that I have taken a pond to Sam's school. I visit our nearby pond early in the morning and then bring a pool filled with LOTS of critters to the school yard for all the kids to explore at some point during the day. 

This year we started the program out by talking about what lives in a pond and listing off all the big creatures that we see at ponds. Then we read the book "Pond Circle" by Betsy Franco. This story is great because it starts with the small things, algae, nymphs and beetles. And then moves up the food chain to the bigger animals that live near and often visit ponds. I love this story as a way to learn about the little critters in a pond because you can really highlight how the story starts with the little things. That without the little critters there would be no story, there would be no food for the bigger things that we like to watch. 

The kids got the chance today to see up close dragonfly nymphs, damselfly nymphs, tadpoles, a leech, three different kinds of snails, waterboatmen and a predacious diving beetle. They learned all about each one of these critters and some of the things they do (who they eat, who might eat them, how they move, how they protect themselves, etc.) in the pond. 

It was an awesome pond day! Sorry no pictures to share, it is hard for me to teach and play photographer at the same time. 

theme week - ponds - getting started

We got all our books from the library. I just love when I go with a list and can actually get all the books that I wanted. So awesome.

The girls picked out Box Turtle at Long Pond by William George and Lindsay George and In the Small, Small Pond by Denise Fleming for our first pond books to read.

Box Turtle at Long Pond

This one is not so much a book about ponds as it is a book about the box turtle. The story talks about a day in the life of a box turtle. Some of the things that the turtle does are pretty interesting and can lead to great questions and conversations with your little ones. The story is cute and scientifically accurate.

In the Small, Small Pond

We have read this one before so to hear more about it you can go here.

 

Along with our reading today we made our first trip to a pond. I am taking a real pond (small kid's pool filled with pond water and lots of pond critters) to Sam's school tomorrow so I wanted to head to our local pond to make sure that there were lots of critters there for me to catch. The girls and some friends helped me catch lots of great critters in the pond. This wasn't a long critter catching trip because I just wanted to make sure that there were things there for me to catch tomorrow morning. But the kids loved checking out the critters and seeing what we caught each time we put the net in the water.

 

Finally, we started our big pond craft project. I asked Sam what she thought the first thing was that we needed in order to create a pond. She said we needed water.

We added some green grass around the edge and then called it quits for today. We will continue to add to this pond with all kinds of different materials and types of art!

Come back tomorrow to see what else is new. And don't forget to scroll down and check out the Pond Posts link up. There are already several great posts up there!

theme week - ponds

I found out today that Sam is having a pond week at school so I thought it would be great to extend that learning at home and give her a pond themed week at home as well. 

My brain is bursting with ideas for our week :

• week long craft project to create a LARGE pond with lots of different types of objects and materials
• pond clean up
• kayaking on a pond
• books about ponds
• pond animals
• fishing trip

So, first thing tomorrow we will head to the library to find some good pond books. I thought I would share the list of books that I am hoping to find. Just in case any of you are hitting up the library first thing tomorrow too and would want to read along with us. 

Here is out list (the first two we have read before and I can already strongly recommend, the rest will be new to us and will let you know if I recommend them later in the week):

• In the Small, Small Pond by Denis Fleming
• Pond Circle by Betsy Franco
• Science in Seconds at the Beach by Jean Potter
• Jo MacDonald Saw a Pond by Mary Quattlebaum and Laura Bryant
• A Freshwater Pond by Adam Hibbert
• Song of the Waterboatman and other pond poems by Joyce Sidman and Beckie Prange
• It's A Frog's Life by Steve Parker, Robert Morton, et al.
• Box Turtle at Long Pond by William George and Lindsay George
• Turtle Splash! Countdown at the Pond by Cathryn Falwell

Be sure to stop back by often this week to see how our theme week is going! AND help us out with more ideas for fun and learning by entering the pond themed Link up! It starts today and will run for only a week so be sure to get your link up and share any posts you have that relate to freshwater ponds!

pumpkin week - pumpkin art

Sam slept today! She actually took a nap. This is groundbreaking news in my life! But since we were headed to the gym when she woke up for some family pool time and workout time her long nap meant no time today for crafting. What is a mom (and blogger!) suppose to do?

Have the 21 month old do the project!

You can kind of see the toilet paper tube and the small balloon in the picture. Those were our painting instruments. And a big bowl of orange paint! Her job was to use the two tools to paint a pumpkin patch.

I talked to her about what the pumpkin patch looked like when we saw it, just like I would have talked to Sam. But she had way more fun doing things her own way then sticking with just making the circle, "pumpkin" shapes.

Like watching the paint drip off the balloon.

And smearing the paint all over with the balloon. Plus switching back and forth from tool to tool was really fun too!

 

When Sam finally woke up from her nap she was intrigued by the painting that her sister had created and I had to promise her that tomorrow she could try out the project too.

Really fun to let Avery experiment with new tools and just have fun with paint! And great to see her doing it on her own and not just following Sam's lead all the time.

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The Nitty Gritty!

So there are tons of different ways you can create with the image of the pumpkin and pumpkin patches. The web and blog world is just FULL of them. But some of my fellow preschool and kid-friendly bloggers passed along their great ideas to me and I think theses are just so cute and clever that I had to share them.

Child Central Station - painting a pumpkin patch with plungers and my inspiration for one of today's tools came from pumpkin patch painting with balloons; they also sewed pumpkins with kids as young as 2 which I think is an awesome idea!

Mama Pea Pod - suncatcher jack o'lanterns; these are SO cute and I think could be age appropriate for a lot of kids.

Red Ted Art's Blog - jar jack o'lanterns; and it is a vlog so that is super fun!

Kreative Resources - paper mache pumpkin; an awesome big paper mache pumpkin!

Like I said there are tons more I could have shared but these are just a few that I really liked. Enjoy and happy crafting!

pumpkin week - pumpkin seeds

When you have two families over to carve pumpkins, plus your own giant pumpkin, you end up with LOTS of pumpkin seeds. What do you do with them?

Well, we will be digging holes in our backyard (the VERY back of our backyard) and burying most of them to try and grow another pumpkin patch next year. We did this last year too and we did actually get a vine but it ended up not being in a great spot and was trying to climb all over our air conditioner (not cool!) so we had to pull it out. Luckily our compost pile produced a massive pumpkin patch for us anyway. We are hoping to grow pumpkins again next year and it would be great if they would grow from the seeds from this year. It is a great life-cycle kind of lesson for the girls to see.

But before we do that I thought it would be fun to try out a crafting project with them. My inspiration came from a picture that I saw on Pinterest but the link would not work so I had no idea how they accomplished it.

We started out by drying out the seeds in the oven just a bit (low temp and only a few minutes). Then I mixed some food coloring with vinegar, just like dyeing eggs, and dropped some seeds into each color.

You can see that some seeds are much brighter in color than others. The mixture of vinegar and color was not working out so great so for some of them I did just food coloring and mixed the seeds straight in the food coloring. Those turned out much brighter.

Then we grabbed some cardstock type paper (old cracker boxes) that would be stiff enough to old a seed mosaic.

We used regular white glue and started creating.

Our final products.

Sam's

And mine

Sam had a really fun time with this craft project! And I think the final product turned out super cute!

What do you do with your pumpkin seeds?

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The Nitty Gritty!

Of course I would suggest cooking some of your seeds too but I have yet to find a recipe/way to cook them that I really like. I did buy some roasted ones for the kids at the carving party to try. My girls seem to like them okay, so if you have a recipe that you use and enjoy I would love hearing it.

I found out later that the craft I saw on Pinterest was also listed on Hands On: as we Grow's Pumpkin Activities post. You can see the Autumn tree pumpkin seed craft here.  On the hands on:as we grow post you can also see other pumpkin seed crafts, ways to explore the pumpkin guts and even pumpkin seed math! Love these ideas. 

Lots more pumpkin fun coming!

pumpkin week - carving party

The end result is fabulous!

But getting there was another story.

It started out great, with helpful and happy kids.

But the lure of toys and playtime with friends quickly grew too powerful. Before the pumpkin were even all cleaned out the kids disappeared and left the adults to tackle the pumpkins.

It didn't seem to bother any of the adults too much. We all kind of got into the carving and creativity behind carving pumpkins. I tried out the cookie cutter and rubber mallet method. Awesome way to carve a pumpkin but my pumpkin was too thick so the cookie cutters could not cut all the way through. But they still provided a great starting point to do my carving from. I made a polka-dotted pumpkin!

With an E for "Enlund" too!

And Chris did a great job on my super big pumpkin!

I think the kid's favorite part was the cookies!

(Our friend Taylor!)

So, pumpkin carving was not much of a kid friendly activity tonight but they thought the end result was pretty cool.

What are you doing with your pumpkins this year?

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The Nitty Gritty!

Need some ideas on what to do with pumpkins that is truly kid friendly?  Check out all of these awesome idesa!

Critters and Crayons - pumpkin as vase

Toddler Approved - buttons and ribbons on pumpkins

Nurture Store - looking for a funkier pumpkin? check out this one with glitter, paint and push-pins

The Imagination Tree - beautiful drip-art pumpkins

The Outlaw Mom - no carve pumpkin decorating ideas

And lastly, if you are doing the old fashioned carving thing, like we did, might be a good idea to brush up on the How-To of pumpkin carving!

Quirky Momma - real instructions for carving a pumpkin. I could have used these tonight!

Wow. That is a lot of great idea, with TONS more out there to be found. Thanks to all the great ladies that passed along these fun ideas for me to check out and post for my readers. I hope you will click around and check out what other folks are up to this year with their pumpkins.

 

pumpkin week - upcycle pumpkin craft

Starting a week on pumpkins! And get ready for some awesome ideas! No, probably not the things that we will be doing that are MY ideas, but the TONS of links I am going to pass along this week of all the amazing pumpkin themed stuff that other incredible preschool and parent bloggers are doing out there. I can't wait to share with you all the stuff that I have found.

But first, here is what we did today.

And of course I had to make one too!

I was really impressed with how well Sam took to this project. She loved finding the orange and green pages in the magazines and then cutting the small pieces. She also worked really hard to make sure that the whole thing was covered. And I think the pumpkins are super cute too!

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The Nitty Gritty!
So, I want to start this week of pumpkins and sharing ideas off with sharing some of our favorite pumpkin ideas from the past.

Just recently we made some really cute 3D pumpkins that are still hanging up in my kitchen.

A great toddler pumpkin book and activity - Five Little Pumpkins.

Something fun to do when all the halloween fun is over and your pumpkins are a pile of rotting mush! Plant them!

And of course we have carved them!

Now you can see why we need to have a pumpkin themed week, we clearly have not done enough stuff with these things.

Stay tuned this week for LOTS of great ideas from around the web. And if you have an idea that you would like to share or have blogged about please leave a link in the comments so I can check it out and share it with my readers (if you have already told me on Facebook you do not have to share the link again!).

 

bird week - bird books

I should have started the week off with this post so that you all could see what we have been reading all week while we were studying birds...oh well.

One book that I found mid-week that I wish we would have had last Sunday when we were studying beaks is Birds Use Their Beaks by Elaine Pascoe. It is part of a series called How & Why?. I liked this book because it talked about all the ways that different birds use their beaks. It also introduced Sam and Avery to some new birds that they didn't know before. Some sections were a bit wordy and detailed but it was very easy to just skip a few sentences to make it more appropriate for my little ones.

Other books that we are enjoying this week -

Robins, Songbirds of Spring by Mia Posada

We are loving this book! It is a non-fiction story book about the life of robins. The pictures are very cute and it rhymes! Sam really liked hearing about what they eat and how they cared for the babies.

In the Nest by Anna Milbourne and Laurence Cleyet-Merle

I talked about this one on Monday.

Since we have so many robins in our backyard I grabbed another robin book at the library.

Robins and Their Chicks by Linda Tagliaferro.

Super simple non-fiction book about robins.  No need to cut sentences out of this one, it is the exact right amount of text and information for preschoolers. This is also a great book because the pictures are real photographs of robins.

I found a board book for Avery that is so cute and was perfect for this week.

Find the Bird by Stephen Cartwright

It doesn't have any text at all and is literally just a small board book with a small bird to find on every page. The pictures are of a small girl and her family with a little grey bird that seems to be following them. The reason that I really like this book is because Avery and I can sit inside, read this book and "practice" looking for birds. Then when we go out on a walk and I tell her to find a bird or look for a bird she knows exactly what I mean!

These last two books we got just because I was really interested in checking them out.

Backyard Bird Watching for Kids by George H. Harrison

This is a great book for kids (and families!) that want to get more involved in backyard birding. It has a great section on common backyard birds. There are good pictures, basic information and the common name. The sections that interested me the most were about what birds like to eat, simple ways to feed birds, exact dimensions and descriptions of how to make bird houses that will attract specific birds, and plants you can have in your yard to attract birds. Really a great book with lots of good information that can help kids have fun learning about birds. 

Birds, Nests, and Eggs by Mel Boring part of the Young Naturalist Field Guides

It was the eggs part of that sentence that interested me the most and the book did not disappoint. I enjoyed learning about the differences in the eggs of different birds. Sam and Avery didn't have much interest in this one but I think for a child slightly older this would be a good one. We have a couple of other books in this series and I have used many of their activities and learning experiments with the girls.

For more books on birds you can go to All About Birds page on the sidebar!

 

That is all I got for tonight and after a long weekend I am going to bed!! GOODNIGHT!