Fall KCWC 2012-Day 7

Today I made the other tutu for the costumes I am making for girls at church.

I also made a new bib for James using this tutorial and pattern.  James ate snack using this bib before I had a chance to take a picture of it so it is wet where he spilled yogurt but it worked well so I may need to make some more!

Fall KCWC 2012-Day 6

Today I did a couple of random projects.  First I mended a few of James' hand-me-down clothes that had holes or I had to modify a little bit.

I am also making Halloween costumes for two cute little girls at church so the first tutu was completed today.

Fall KCWC 2012-Day 5

We have a friend who is adopting their second child.  I decided that their oldest needed a Big Brother shirt.  That was my project for today.  I freezer paper stenciled the letters on.

Fall KCWC 2012-Day 4

Today I made the final part of James' Halloween costume.  The hat!  I used orange fleece for the hat and felt for the embellishments.

I guess you can tell now who he is going to be.  Ernie!

We had limited time to get photos of the costume this afternoon so the pictures didn't turn out great.  In fact he is screaming and crying in this last one.  I'll have to try again before Halloween but I wanted to go ahead and blog about it.

Fall KCWC 2012-Day 3

Today I made the pants for James' Halloween costume.  Again, probably not enough to let you know what he is going to be but another piece to the puzzle.  His pants should actually be blue but I didn't have any thrifted blue pants so this brown/green will have to do.

For these pants I used Dana's basic pant pattern and tutorial.  I used a pair of men's thrifted dress pants for the material.

Fall KCWC 2012-Day 2

Today I started on James' Halloween costume.  I made the shirt today.  You probably can't tell who he is going to be just from seeing the shirt (most people who read this blog already know what he is going to be) but stay tuned for the next couple days and you will find out who he is going to be.

Again, I loosely used Dana's 90 minute shirt tutorial to make the shirt.  I thought I was going to have to use paint or piece together fabric to make the stripes look right for his shirt.  We went to Goodwill and found a shirt that almost had the perfect stripes for his costume.  I was really excited.  It turned out the shirt didn't quite have enough fabric for the sleeves so I had to improvise a little.  I can't wait to see the whole ensemble!

Fall KCWC 2012-Day 1

I am taking the Kid's Clothing Week Challenge with Elsie Marley this week.  The challenge is to sew kid's clothing for at least 1 hour each day for a week.  In truth, I am attempting to complete one article of clothing each day which will probably take more than an hour.  We'll see how much I get accomplished!

For Day One I decided to make a t-shirt for James.  James loves Garbage trucks and talks about them all the time.  Whenever he hears a loud truck he looks at me and says "What's that Mommy?  Garbage truck?"  Mondays are the most exciting day at our house.  Our garbage gets picked up on Mondays.  James is normally napping when the garbage truck comes which is very upsetting.  Sometimes it comes just after James has laid down and it makes it very hard for him to actually go to sleep.  He would hate to miss a single garbage truck.

I made this shirt loosely using Dana's 90 minute shirt tutorial.  I used a thrifted t-shirt for the fabric to make the shirt.  I found the picture of the garbage truck online and cut it out and used the freezer paper stencil method to paint it on the shirt.  I had some problems with the neck being too big because the fabric stretched but Lee helped me figure out how to fix it and I think it turned out pretty cute!

Mission accomplished Day One!!

2 Year Old School

September was a home/family theme.  I'm linking up with Tot School and Tot School Tuesday to share this post.

Our curriculum comes from Hubbards Cupboard.  Here are some of the activities we did this month.

Our sensory box was filled with shredded paper.  Hidden in the paper were plastic insects to find.  They had a magnifying glass to look closer at the bugs and scissors to cut up shredded paper.

We made a house out of big blocks.

We compared numbers with a game.  The boys rolled the dice and counted the dots to see how many people to put in their "house" (box).  Then we talked about which house had the most people in it.

K is for keys.

family picture puzzle

shapes family picture

We walked around the house and made a graph of the things we saw.

Each week we have four centers for the boys to use.  Here are our centers for this month.

1-using tweezers to put small erasers in an ice cube tray

2-ordering canteen pictures from largest to smallest

 3-jumbonetics

4-one to one correspondence-putting pillows with sleeping bags

 1-pattern cards with counting bears

2-using tongs to put balls in a muffin tin

 3-fishing for different colored fish

4-putting foam curlers on a pipe cleaner

1-matching colors with clothespins and paint chips

2-practicing pouring split peas

3-sorting number magnets

4-using spatulas to flip bean bags

1-lining up colored blocks on letters

2-putting cut up straws on a geoboard

3-using tweezers to put plastic flies in a bug jar

4-Very Hungry Caterpillar plastic sticker clings

Counting

James magically learned to count to 10 several months ago.  We had never worked on it he just all of sudden counted to 10 one day.  I'm pretty sure his little phone he played with when he was potty training was the teacher for this skill.  We decided since he could count to 10 we would work on counting to 20.  We have counted with him several times and now he can basically count to 20. He often gets stuck on 14, skips 15 and never says 19 but he's 2 so I figure that's still pretty good.  The other day Lee counted with James up to 30.  The next day I heard him saying 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 (we also heard a 20-14).  I think it is so neat that he seems to have figured out the basic pattern of counting.  I had Kindergartners who couldn't do that!  His little mind amazes me in some way every day.

Bible verse for September

Colossians 3:20

"Children obey your parents, in the Lord, for this is right."

Tennis

James likes balls and sports.  He has previously been obsessed with football and basketball.  He got his hands on a tennis racquet recently and was hooked.  We decided we needed to buy him his own racquet.  We have done very little besides play tennis since he got his racquet.  He has really improved and can hit the ball pretty well sometimes!

Bible verse for August

For the month of August James' Bible verse was Genesis 1:1.  I modified the verse to make it more toddler friendly.  However, James learned the verse really quickly and loved practicing it so I think in the future we'll try the real verse!

Genesis 1:1 "God made all things!"

Two-Year-Old School

Our theme for the end of August was camping.  We set up a campsite in the playroom and read lots of fun books about camping.

the campsite

We made s'mores for snack one day!

F is for fire

We went on a nature walk and the boys had binoculars.

nature rubbings from our walk

We learned about nocturnal animals and made owls.

CENTERS

1-using magnet letters to make their names

2-matching camping themed pictures

3-making our letters for the month from foam pieces

4-concentration with letter cards

1-sorting paper clips by color and putting them on the paper
2- sweeping beans
3-putting lanterns in order from largest to smallest
4-golf tees with marbles on them

The Baby Treatment

For the month of August I have been watching a 3 month old baby a couple of days here and there.  James has been practicing his daddy skills and his Bobos are getting the baby treatment.  He carries them in a cradle hold, burps them, puts them in the bouncy seat, boppy, and play mat.

He's going to be a good Daddy someday (if I let him grow up!).

Bossy

James has gotten kind of bossy lately...he loves to tell us what to do...
"Mommy stay!"
"Mommy wait!"
"No, Daddy"
"T'mere" (come here)
My favorite is when he is doing something he isn't supposed to do, like say jumping on his bed, and I tell him no.  He very nicely says "Mommy go downstairs!"  I have wised up to this trick and realize he is just trying to get rid of me so he can continue doing something he shouldn't!

Two-Year-Old School

This year instead of reinventing the wheel I found a curriculum for 2's online here.  I have been using this curriculum and supplementing it with activities found other places on the web.  I will do my best to create links to the activities I found.

Basically this curriculum has two different themes each month.  The first theme was the beach.

making shell impressions in play-doh

O is for octopus

ocean themed snack

beach sensory box

sponge relay

field trip to the pet store to see the fish

We have also decided to do "centers" this year.  We have four that the boys can work on each week.  I just pull them out for a short time each day when I need them to focus on an activity and slow down a little bit!  :)

                                     

1-using tweezers to move small fish erasers to an ice cube tray (1 to 1 correspondance)

2-fishing for paper fish and practicing color recognition

3-sorting links by color or putting them together and taking them apart

4-sorting counting bears by color

 1-practice cutting paper

2-matching colored octopus

3-transferring "sea urchins" with a spoon

4-using pom pom magnets on the magnet page

One-Year-Old School

Summer=Insects

 I need to quickly get updated on one-year-old school because two-year-old school has already started!

bug eyes

bugs that grew

 helping bugs escape from a block of ice

G is for grasshopper

I is for insects

I am sure I didn't take pictures of many of the activities we did for our insects unit but oh well!