This week we read Circle, Square, Moose by Paul O. Zelinsky and Kelly Bingham. This book teaching children shapes keeps getting interrupted by a silly moose and then the zebra jumps in to try to chase down the moose. The results is a book that your kids will love.
This book inspired me to focus more on shapes this week with the Dancing Girl and Messy Boy. Dancing Girl has known her shapes for what seems like forever, and Messy Boy has just recently started identifying shapes so the activities can be modified for different ages.
Here are some fun ideas for exploring shapes:
-Cut out shapes from foam sheets and let your kids build pictures with them (We play with ours in the bath tub and they love them!)
-Build with blocks together and name the shapes while you build (One of Messy Boy's favorite activities)
-Cut out pictures of squares, circles, rectangles, and triangles from magazines
We had our first visit to Cabrillo National Monument back in 2012 when I was VERY pregnant with Messy Boy. We checked out the Visitor's Center, saw the amazing views of San Diego Harbor, and Bruce and Dancing Girl checked out the lighthouse (I wasn't about to squeeze my very large baby belly through a little spiral staircase). We had since heard great things about the tide pools there, and had been wanting to go check it out.
A very pregnant me and Dancing Girl back in 2012
So, while the eastern part of the U.S. was battling freezing temperatures this weekend, we headed to the tide pools in our shorts and t-shirts (I know...Carolinians, be jealous). We looked up the tide charts (it's best to get there an hour before the peak low tide), and headed out for the day. Cabrillo is a National Park area, so there's usually $5 fee per car (or you can use your National Park Pass...free for military), but because it was President's Day weekend, it was free.
Cliffs at the Tide Pools
Unfortunately, a free park day also means a very crowded park day. We headed straight for the tide pool area only to find a sign that said parking was full. But, there's no other way to get down to the tide pools(you're not allowed to park in the main parking lot and walk down the street because there's no sidewalk or shoulder to the road) so we had to go drive circles around the parking lot until we found a space. Even then, the actual tide pool parking lot was full and had other cars waiting, so we chose the ocean view parking lot and just walked from there.
Once you get to the path, there are stairs that take you down to some cliffs. I'm going to be honest, there were a few spots that made me kind of nervous with the kids because we were closer to the edge than I would have preferred. I would prefer them to stay a football field away from the edge, but that's not possible. So, we did our best to hug the cliffs and kept a tight grip on the kids, and everyone was fine. In fact, I was the only who slipped, but that's usually how it goes. It was a good thing that we wore our Keens because the tide starting coming back in and there was no way to avoid stepping in water.
Stairs leading down to the tide pools
We were hoping to see some octopuses (I say octopuses, you say octopi. Tomato, tomahto.), but we we were either there at the wrong time or in the wrong spot for those guys. We saw a ton of crabs and sea anemone though. The anemone were so pretty, and since they weren't poisonous, you could touch them and watch them close around your finger. Dancing Girl and Messy Boy refused to touch it, but Bruce and I thought it was pretty cool.
Sea anemones
We were having so much fun that we didn't notice that we walked all the way to the tide pool parking lot. And, by then the tide had come in so much that we didn't want to risk going back the same way. Thankfully, Bruce volunteered to run back to get the car to come pick us up.
By the time we were all loaded back in the car, the kids were starving and exhausted so we headed straight to The Corvette Diner for some burgers and balloon art.
Have you visited Cabrillo? What's your favorite part to see? Have you done anything else with your kids that made you a little nervous but in reality was safe and totally worthwhile?
We checked out a really fun ABC book at the library last week, Peanut Butter and Jellyfishes: A Very Silly Alphabet Book by Brian P. Cleary. My kids absolutely loved it. Each page has fun illustrations with a hidden letter. Dancing Girl had a blast looking for the hidden letters on each page. You can also take it a step further and have your kids identify all the things on the page that start with each letter.
When I started thinking about an activity to do with this book, there were so many different possibilities. I thought about making a spotted D-dalmation or a paper plate jellyfish, but in the end we decided on doing a noodle necklace like the newt wears in the book.
I looked up how to dye noodles. The instructions I found used white vinegar and food coloring, but comments said that it would still stain your hands. But, I added one extra step, and our hands are still clean (aside from the food dye that Messy Boy poured directly onto his hands).
Of course Messy Boy wanted to assist with the messy part.
So, to make your colored noodles, put one to two teaspoons of vinegar (the link specified white but I used apple cider vinegar), 4 or 5 drops of food coloring, and noodles into a plastic baggie. Have your kids shake away to distribute the color evenly, then you're supposed to put them on a tray to dry. This is where I went a step further. I popped my pasta into the oven on a low 200 degrees for about 10 minutes. It was perfect! When I pulled it out, the pasta was dry and didn't rub off at all while Dancing Girl and Messy Boy made their necklaces.
Baking the noodles worked liked magic!
Once the noodles were done, I prepped the strings for them by tying a bead (Thanks to Messy Boy I have a jar full of beads from broken necklaces and bracelets.) to one end to keep the noodles from sliding off and wrapped tape around the other end to make it easier for the kids to manipulate.
I mixed some of the noodles together and had the kids do a little color sorting, and then they started stringing. Messy Boy made one necklace and was done. Dancing Girl kept working until we ran out of noodles. I tried to talk her into making some patterns with the noodles, but she was insistent on keeping her necklaces all one color. In the end, this was an easy and fun activity to do together!
Now to figure out what to do with these necklaces...
Have you ever done noodle projects with your kids? Or made any yourself back in the day? Macaroni picture frames, anyone?
I was a teacher back in the day. You know, before my little people came along. Now that Dancing Girl is getting closer to kindergarten (and I'm thinking about homeschool vs.public hopefully magnet school), the teacher that's been buried down for the past 5 years is starting to pop up more and more.
I've been trying to be more consistent about doing a "homework" time each day. Dancing Girl is already reading on her own so we've been making making weekly trips to the library to keep her a nice supply of reading material. My goal for now is to try to do at least one book extension craft or activity each week. For this week, we did an activity based on 1-2-3 Peas by Keith Baker.
1-2-3 Peas by Keith Baker
We had already read this book several times. Dancing Girl and Messy Boy were both familiar with the book so when I asked them if they wanted to finger-paint some peas, they were excited.
I printed off large numbers 0-9 for them. Dancing Girl cut her numbers out herself for more cutting practice, and I did Messy Boy's cutting for him because I don't trust him with scissors yet. I can't imagine how many things in my house would have holes in them if he got a hold of scissors right now.
Cutting practice
After all the numbers were cut out, they went right to work finger-painting. Each fingerprint represented a pea, and they were supposed to put the correct amount of peas to correspond each number. This was a piece of cake for Dancing Girl. We used this for number recognition practice for Messy Boy, and I helped him to put the right number of peas on each number.
Practicing the numbers
When we were all done, we let the numbers dry over night. The next day, we broke out the markers to decorate the peas, just for fun. We had such a great time putting silly faces on the peas. Here are our finished results.
They smiled the whole time they made faces on the peas.
Have you read 1-2-3 Peas? What did you think of it? Let me know how it goes if you try this activity with your kiddos. I hope they enjoy it as much as mine did!
I was 23, and I had been just moved to Okinawa, Japan to be with my husband. We had celebrated our 1st anniversary apart (as seems to be common among military families) with me finding out the news that his squadron would deploy to Iraq only two months later. We were able to spend Christmas and New Years together, and then he packed up and headed off to war.
All the emotions come rushing back to me when I remember dropping him off that morning. Tears are welling up in my eyes just thinking about it. I can't recall how many tearful hugs and kisses we exchanged before he finally told me that I should go because he needed to be able to put on his Marine face and do his job. That's not the way he said it, but I knew what he meant. It was breaking his heart to have me standing there crying, and it wasn't going to change the fact that he had to leave. So, I got in his car, and I drove myself home. It's probably a miracle that I made it home because I know that I sobbed the whole way back to our tower.
The emptiness of our apartment hit me like a ton of bricks as soon as I walked through the door. I doubled over on the couch and just cried. Not the pretty eyes misting kind of crying. I ugly cried. I feel like I cried that whole day. If you've ever sent your husband off to war, you know what I mean. If you haven't, it's just as bad as you imagine.
I had my day to cry, then pulled myself together, and got on with life. I flew to mainland Japan with a friend. We had planned the trip in conjunction with our husbands leaving so we had a distraction to get through the first few days alone. I got a few calls and emails from Bruce that he had arrived and was getting settled. I got back to work as a substitute teacher and tried to keep myself busy with my friends who were also newlyweds now finding themselves alone on an island in the Pacific.
The squadron had only been gone about 2 weeks. I was getting ready for bed one night, doing one last check of my email. When your husband is deployed, you check your email a few hundred times a day, waiting for any word from him. I pulled up Yahoo (because I'm old school like that), and before I could click on my inbox, I saw the headline that all air wing spouses dread. "Helicopter Crash in Iraq." I immediately clicked the link, thinking to myself that it wouldn't be his aircraft. I scanned the article to see that I was wrong. It was a CH-46 that had crashed.
My heart sunk, and I immediately got that pit in the bottom of stomach. I cried. I called a friend who offered to come over, but her husband was getting ready to deploy as well, and I didn't want take take her away from him. I called our FRO (Family Readiness Officer) who of course couldn't tell me anything yet. I called my Daddy, who I'm sure felt helpless half a world away. And, I just cried. I prayed, and I cried. I literally cried myself to sleep that night.
I woke after a few hours of restless sleep, and I realized that I was supposed to work that day. I knew that if I stayed home, I would just sit and worry so I went to school. I talked to the secretary and other teachers and let them know what had happened. They knew that I would be checking email and keeping my phone on me at all times waiting to hear word.
I went through the motions with my students. I just drifted through the morning. During a library visit, I snuck over to a computer to check my email. I had an email from a reliable source. All it said was, "I can't say anything else, but Bruce is okay." That's all I needed to hear. I felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off my chest. I could finally breathe again.
It was another couple of days before I heard from Bruce and before we got official word on what had happened. What I remember the most though, is that any relief I felt that Bruce was safe, was immediately replaced with guilt. I was guilty to be relieved because my relief meant that other families were realizing their worst nightmares. My Marine was okay, but theirs wasn't.
Today is the eight year anniversary of that crash. Each year I relive the pain that I felt and still feel the guilt of having my Marine with me while others are missing theirs. Tonight I will hold my Marine a little tighter and hold those families up in my prayers. And, I will choose to remember the crew of Morphine 1-2 so that their sacrifices will not be forgotten.
This was a CNN Special, Chopper Down, about the crew of Morphine 1-2.
Wow! It's February already? In my house, that means Valentine's Day is sneaking up on me. Because we are a military family, we have so many friends scattered around the country that Dancing Girl wants to send cards to. Unfortunately for me, that means we can't wait until the day before Valentine's Day to throw something together. So, I did some internet perusing last night and found these adorable kitty Valentines at Blissfully Domestic. We had all the necessary supplies (I mean, who doesn't have googly eyes just lying around the house?), so Dancing Girl got to work today.
I think ours actually turned out more like mice. What do you think?
We pretty much followed Blissfully Domestic's instructions except that we made out card a bi-fold (is that really how you explain it?) and glued our "You are a purr-fect friend" inside the card. Tomorrow, I will let Dancing Girl and Messy Boy go to town and add stickers and draw pictures if they like. Then, we can hopefully get them addressed and in the mail before next Valentine's Day.
Adding the whiskers...
Messy Boy didn't care too much for making the cards. He mostly wanted to put stickers everywhere (Anyone want to come clean stickers off of my furniture?). Dancing Girl had a lot of fun though and made a dozen cards in an hour's time. And, best of all, I don't have to spend extra money buying Valentines. Just don't tell Dancing Girl they look like mice. Then, we would have to start all over.
Do you have any fun Valentine's Day crafts you enjoy doing with your kids? Send me a link so we can try it. We still have a week to cram in cute Valentine's projects.
