We have so much fun when we visit Grandma and Grandpa in Naperville. here is Mary cuddlng with Grandpa.
Author: admin
First Day of At-Home Preschool
On the first day of school, we always walk to Colonial Cafe for ice cream once we are done with our school work! This year, I am doing preschool at home and Paul is 3rd grade/4th grade. We begged to start school sooner so we could get ice cream sooner!!
Visiting Santa at Santa’s Village
The Santa’s village amusement park is Christmas themed. I asked Santa for a Unicorn. A pretend one would be Okay.
Mary is just 10 months old today! But everything here is too big for her, so she’s just hanging out. What a great sport!
Creating with Hearts
We read a book called My Heart is Like a Zoo. In the book, animals were created using heart shapes! Mom cut out some hearts in various sizes and we made our own heart animals!
Next time we may just try making animals with all kinds of shapes!
Finding the Gingerbread Man
Oh no! In the book Gingerbread Man Lost in the School, the kids have to find where their gingerbread man disappeared too! There is a floor plan of the school and Mom and I like to look at it and figure out where he was and each page of the book.
So, Mom decided to make our own floor plan of our basement and search for him in our home! First we made our own gingerbread man.
Then we outlined our basement on paper. Mom would point to where she hid him, and I had to figure out where that was. Doing so helped me gain a little bit of understanding about maps (or floorplans, at least) and we had fun playing Hide-and-Seek with our Gingerbread Man!
Caroline’s Video of Mary and Mom
Chocolate Painting!
A while ago we tried painting with mud because I’m a Dirty Dinosaur was painted with mud. Now that the same author wrote the book I’m a hungry dinosaur, we decided to paint with chocolate, because the author painted with chocolate.
This was a yummy project!
Dancing with the Moon!
In the book Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, Monica is a little girl who dreams of dancing with the moon. The father goes on a ladder to get the moon but it is too big for him to carry down the ladder. So, Monica and her father wait until the moon gets smaller, which it eventually does. Then the father goes back up and gets the moon for her. Then Monica can dance with the moon!
Of course, there are a lot of things scientifically inaccurate about this, but it is a story that introduces to kids the concept that the moon changes over the course of a month. We learned about the moon phases and made our own moons.
Then Caroline delighted in dancing with the moon!
Paul danced with the moon too, but mostly I think he was being a stand-in for Mom to test the lights.
Mary was a happy watcher.
But then she started to wonder: “Can I Dance with the Moon too?”
Nope, Caroline beat her to the moon!
Monica and Caroline: Moon Dancers
Are You My Mother? Games
Caroline loves mamas and babies so I made an animal activity based on the book Are You My Mother?. I made some activity pages. We draw a line to match mother and baby. And we cut and pasted items (such as a snort and a puppy) on a chart: alive or not alive.
We played a matching game with the moms and baby animals. (Caroline’s favorite was the mom and baby human set!).
I also made a barnyard slider match activity.
How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World
We explored where our food comes from (and learned about the geography of the world) by making a map on our driveway. As we read How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World, we acted it out as we traveled to the different places that the narrator told us to travel to.
Paul was our main cartographer.
We pretended we were harvesting the wheat in Italy…
and finding the bark for the cinnamon when we got to Sri Lanka, for example.
Our map ended up in a big circle around our driveway, since we ended up where we started, of course!
Then we found the ingredients in our home, but I gave the kids a twist: we had to make our own butter! Caroline and Paul were happy helping out in the butter churning. And they found the end result to be absolutely delicious.
Even Mary found this a “delicious” outside activity.
It was such a lovely day, it turned out just nice to relax outside too.
