Winter Week Part 2

Well, so far winter week has been a hit! The only thing putting a slight damper on it is NO SNOW!!! It is so much more fun when you can go out and play in the stuff :) But we make up some fun substitutes.

One of the most fun things that we did last year was messy and kind of yucky to clean up after, but seriously so fun! Since we can't have a real snowball fight we got out some bags of big marshmallows and went at it! We pulled out the couches so we could each hide behind one, and then I put mittens in the middle of the floor. The goal was to run out and grab as many mittens as you could without getting hit. If you got hit, you had to drop the mittens and start over. We played this forever, and Skylar was getting pretty good at throwing by the end :) One idea I saw that would be SO fun as soon as we do get some snow is to fill up squirt bottles with colored water and let your kids paint the snow. I think this would also be a good way to work on letter recognition, write a huge letter on the snow and have them tell you the letter and the sound it makes.

Last year I found a cute little poem on www.dltk-kids.com about snowflakes. The direct link is http://www.dltk-holidays.com/winter/m5snowflakes.htm and you can print out 5 little snowflakes to go with it. We laminated them and put them on popsicle sticks so Skylar could act it out with me.

Finally I found two fun things to make on www.familyfun.com. The first is (what else?) a cute snowman treat. Here is the direct link:
http://jas.familyfun.go.com/recipefinder/display?id=50093


And second were these fun snowflakes made out of pasta. Here is the link and picture. Can't wait to start doing all our Christmas stuff next week!!
http://jas.familyfun.go.com/arts-and-crafts?page=CraftDisplay&craftid=10484

Winter Week Part 1

Hey everyone, hope you all had an amazing Thanksgiving! This week we are focusing on winter, and I can't wait! At Skylar's adorable little preschool they just finished their quarterly evaluations, so I am using that in planning this week. Skylar had 3 letters that she had trouble recognizing, so I picked one to focus on this week and that letter is M. So for the first two days of this week we are all about MITTENS!! First of all I went to dltk-kids.com and printed out a template of upper and lower case letter M, then I glue them to cute scrapbook paper and color them. I put this on my fridge so every morning at breakfast we see it and can talk about it, hopefully making it familiar by the end of the week. We are going to the library today to check out the book "The Mitten" by Jan Brent. It talks about mittens and lots of winter animals and at preschooleducation.com they have a link to where you can print out the pics of the animals. I glued them to popsicle sticks so Skylar could use them as puppets while we read the book.

Then we cut out a lot of mittens on different scrapbook paper that is white on the back. We cut out pairs and are going to play the matching game with the different mittens. Finally I cut out two HUGE mittens and Skylar will put her painted handprints all over them. Cute, right?? Wish I could claim I came up with them, but I am strictly a copycat :)

Stay tuned for our service-mitten based family home evening and the rest of winter week!