12 Days of Christmas Reading... and a Button Christmas Tree craft!

   In light of what happened this past Friday in Newton, Connecticut, I was too heart broken to post  on Friday and offer up a Freebie. I will post it another day.
   As an Early Childhood teacher and a parent, all I can say is that I cannot even begin to imagine what those families are going through. My hearts, thoughts and prayers go out to each and every one of them during this very difficult time.

    It has become a sad world to live in, hasn't it?  It serves as a reminder of how precious life is and how we should always stop to count our blessings and never, ever take anything or anyone for granted.

   On that note, I will quickly share a new tradition that I started this year with my little munchkin. "12 Days of Christmas Reading". I wrapped up 12 books (most purchased from Scholastic, some were taken from my classroom stash and given to her). We began our Christmas Reading on Dec. 12... The first book she unwrapped was Little Critter: The Night Before Christmas!

  And here is another Christmas tree craft that she did this past weekend.  As I was cleaning house to prep for our family (who will be here this coming Saturday), I gave her some red & green buttons, a sheet of cardstock paper and some glue. I drew a triangle on it and told her to glue the buttons to make a tree.

And that was all I had to say! She knew how to start and went right to work!

         It was time consuming but she finished it all by herself!
Now, I need to go get another picture frame, b/c this one is definitely going on the wall!

Now to get settled for the night and get ready for the last few days of school before 

Christmas break! =)

(I will be back later this week with the FREEBIE I promised...it needs some tweaking!!)

R is for Rainbow

Button Rainbow Activity

     One of the things that my little munchkin and I explored today was Rainbows.

     We talked a little bit about the Letter Rr and spent more time talking about the colors of the rainbow. We looked at pictures of rainbows on the internet and read the book: Dora and the Rainbow Kite Festival.

   The Button Shamrock that we did for St. Patrick’s Day, was a fun fine motor activity and she likes to glue things onto paper--- so we decided to make a Button Rainbow!

Just look at that concentration! 

And here is the beautiful finished product!  

(And this one only took one morning to finish!)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

      In the spirit of St. Patrick's Day, I learned how to color rice for my munchkin’s sensory tub- another fun idea from some fellow bloggers! So about a week and a half before the holiday, I made green and yellow rice and added some fun little toys I found at Party City for her to play with in her sensory tub.

As you can see… she loves it! She asks to play with it like every other day....  I think it will just be her sensory tub fun for the entire month of March! 












On Friday, she helped me to sort buttons by color, for her St. Patrick’s Day art activity.

 

After she found all the green buttons, she carefully glued the buttons onto a wooden shamrock shape that I bought at an arts & crafts store on one of my many visits last month!

She started this on Friday evening and she was going strong BUT then she lost interest. So we put it aside and took a break.

She continued working on it Saturday morning after breakfast!

 

Working hard the next morning…

I had some leftover green glitter paint in my classroom from my preschooler munchkins’ St. Patrick’s Day artwork, so I brought it home for my own little munchkin to use to paint her Button Shamrock. 

Finally! A finished product!  That only took 2 days to make! =) 

That’s my little munchkin…doing things on her own schedule!

Ha! And here’s the best part of our St. Patrick’s Day fun that turned out to be an EPIC Fail ---- Green Shamrock Jello Jigglers!!

They DID NoT turn out very jiggly… =(

I think I needed either a smaller dish or more jello because it was just not happening for us!

We only managed to get ONE good looking Green Shamrock Jello Jiggler!

Better LUCK next year, I guess!

Hope everyone had a great St. Patrick’s Day weekend!!!