Catch up!

Despite my hopes of making this a monthly blog, I currently have not posted in about 6 months. Here's a little catch up to tell you what we have been doing school wise with some fun stories of the boys development over the last six months.

 

In January we celebrated Martin Luther King Day talking about love and acceptance of all peoples. We did a project with a picture of MLK a the top and cut out pictures of people of all colors from magazines to paste underneath. We also watched a few videos online about his speech and what the day in about.

 

 

For Presidents day we did a fun money matching project. We started a chore chart with Monster which he gets money for completing each week and he has been picking up the names of coins pretty quickly.

 

We also did a presidents project and made these two lovely gentlemen.

For Chinese New Year we made homemade sushi (yeah, I know, kind of the wrong country...) and noise makers out of paper plates and beans. I wrote words in English and in Chinese on the plates and we talked about different things they do to celebrate in China. 

 

We managed to do the most school activities in the last six months for St. Patrick's Day. Although I never got corned beef and sauerkraut (one of my favorites) we did make some green play dough, make four leaf clovers, and leprechauns. Thanks to Grammy who came to visit most weeks through the winter, we had a few other green themed crafts in March.

Epic example of Monkey's "stinky" face.

Clovers and glitter. A big hit with the boys, a not so big hit with my broom.

 

 Leprechaun!!

Also thanks to Grammy we had a St. Patrick's Day themed cupcake decorating kit and so we made some tasty green banana muffins that we frosted.

March also brought a few sensory projects. We talked about different senses, played eye-spy, had a taste test snack one day, made loud and soft sounds, and make a scent plate with spices.

Monster has become addicted to craft books. He pours through them four hours and begs every hour of the day to make another project. In April we made junk robots adapted from an idea of using photos of random objects to make robots. I dug through our junk drawer in the kitchen and came up with washers, screws, tin foil, rubber bands, paper clips, safety pins, and so much more for them to use to make robots. Monster's came out super awesome and Monkey's came out how his projects always do- a pile of art pieces glued to the middle of the paper. :)

In April we covered Easter with a discussion on why different religions celebrate, who the Easter Bunny is (Monster let us know he is the bunny that lays chocolate eggs and gives it to you in a basket) and we made some really pretty ribbon decorated eggs.

Unfortunely I didn't take a picture of the finished project it looks like, but here Monster is contemplating which ribbon to put on his egg next. This project was really good for Monkey, whom I placed glue on his egg and he just got to stick stuff places. We have been doing more projects where he can just stick objects in glue and it comes out looking nice. I think he feels much more inspired when his project looks like Monsters in the end.

May has snuck up on us fast! Not only are we less than three months away from meeting baby number three now, but the last six months have just flown by! We missed celebrating for May Day since we were getting over a cold; however, we are busy preparing for Monkey's upcoming birthday. He will be two this month and it totally shows. Every thing he says starts with "I want to do it!". His vocabulary has grown so much he is on par with Monster, I think. He has an amazing knowledge of how the English language works and can put completely, grammatically correct sentences together almost better than I can. :) To celebrate him we are having our family and friends together for a Rainbow Art party and to keep in coordination of our all art year of school (or at least it's come down to just art projects this year), I have rainbow themed projects for every day this week to make decorations. Today we made paper scrap rainbows and did some painting with rainbow colors.

Our paper scrap rainbows are going to look nice in the windows.

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Monster potty trained in February and his favorite place to pee is outside in our yard. It's been interesting trying to teach him where is ok and where it isn't ok to pull your pants down.

Monkey is super interested in using the potty currently as well, and in result of that we have let him run naked a lot more often to hopefully encourage potty training before the baby comes. However, it has instead resulted in him peeing in the most random places in our house, including the toaster, off the dresser in our bedroom, and in the heater vent.

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Hopefully in the months to come I find time to keep adding to the blog. Also, I hope to be better at writing down the silly stuff the do so I can share that as well. Here's hoping your spring has been as warm and fun as ours has been! :)