Countdown to Christmas

Who's excited for Christmas!? We are!! Last year, when M was 2, we had a great Christmas. She was just starting to understand the idea of Christmas and really enjoyed spending time with family and opening presents. This year is even more exciting. M is loving all of the Christmas decorations, reading Christmas books, watching Christmas movies, and making lots of Christmas crafts. There's nothing like a 3 year old to get you in the Christmas spirit! She wants to "play Christmas" every day, so we have been on the lookout for lots of fun activities!

Christmas Festivals and Events

We have started attending local Christmas events, and have plans to go to several more. We drove to Asheville, NC for a tree lighting and parade, and my parents took M to a live nativity. We also loved Rudolph at Greenville Little Theater. We are looking forward to some great light displays, a visit with Santa, and other fun events as Christmas approaches. If you're in the Greenville area, check out The Ultimate 2013 Holiday Guide from Kidding Around Greenville.

Christmas Crafts

Origami Christmas Tree
We got a library book with directions for Christmas origami crafts. She enjoyed helping me follow the directions to make the tree, and then she decorated the tree with buttons and sequins. You can find the directions I used here, and another 3D origami tree here.

Christmas Ornaments

M is a big fan of stringing beads. I put out different kinds of beading activities on a regular basis, so it was an easy choice when I was coming up with ideas for homemade ornaments. I put out a variety of pipe cleaners, different types of beads, and small glass ornaments. I showed her how to bend the pipe cleaners into different shapes (snowflakes, triangles for trees, circles, etc.) after she had threaded the beads. She also started making her own designs with short pieces of pipe cleaners threaded through the top of the glass ball ornaments. She probably spent close to two hours making ornaments that day.

Paper Christmas Trees
We go to a regular art program at Creating Artists for Tomorrow, and were excited to find some Christmas projects at the latest Table Time.  Aside from other great projects, M completed this Christmas Tree project two different ways!

First, she glued a pre-cut brown rectangle to the background sheet. I helped her rip some green construction paper into strips, and she glued the ripped paper onto her tree trunk. Finally, she painted some gold glitter onto the tree, which was her favorite part!

Later, she found some green paper and scissors on a table and wanted to cut it into small pieces. She sat at the table for close to 10 minutes cutting the paper. She worked so hard cutting the paper, so I didn't want to throw it away. I suggested that she glue the cut pieces onto another tree trunk to make a second tree, and she liked that idea. After she glued all of the pieces, she asked if she could put it up on the easel and paint some ornaments onto her tree. I love how it turned out!

Christmas Tags
M also made some gift tags at Table Time. She used Christmas stamps to decorate the front of the cards, and sprayed and dripped paint on the back to make fun designs. She was really proud of these cards. I'm planning to write names on the backs of the cards, hole punch the corner and attach them to the gifts she makes for family.

Marshmallow Snowman

I pulled together a couple of easy craft projects to take with us to visit my parents for the day. I knew they would be in and out during the early afternoon, so I wanted to have a few things to keep her busy until they were home. We had already done Christmas trees, so I decided a snowman and Santa would be perfect.

The snowman was really easy. I just drew a snowman (3 circles with a top hat) on a sheet of construction paper, then outlined the circles with glue. I gave M a bag of mini marshmallows and she took it from there. There were quite a few marshmallows going into her mouth along the way, but she managed to outline the snowman too. We decided to color the top of a few marshmallows black for the eyes and mouth, and one orange marshmallow for the nose. She glued some buttons down the middle as well, then went outside to find a couple of small twigs to glue on for the arms. She filled in the rest of the body with the remaining marshmallows. It was pretty heavy when she was finished - we probably should have done it on a small piece of poster board or cardstock - but she liked how it turned out.

Santa's Beard
I meant to grab a paper plate to take with us for this classic Santa craft, but I forgot, so we made it on construction paper. I used this Santa from Mama Bear's World as a guide. I cut out the shapes for Santa's face and hat, then M glued them in place and added cotton balls for the beard. We found that stretching the cotton balls apart a little before gluing them helped them blend together and looked a little more realistic.

Christmas Decorations

M had a blast helping to decorate the house this year. She helped us pick out our tree, put the ornaments on the lower branches, and put the angel on the top. She also helped my husband decorate the outside of the house, and rushed in when they were finished to tell me that I needed to add more decorations on the stairs. She was so excited about decorating that we bought a small table top tree for her playroom (which is where she hung all of her homemade ornaments).

We also do a modified version of Elf on the Shelf. M's elf is named Puck (she chose it from a list of names last year, which is pretty cool because we can use that as a jumping off point in the future to learn more about mythology or Shakespeare). I'm not a fan of the whole Santa is watching you and you only get presents if you're a "good girl" thing, so we don't play up the elf-is-watching-you theme. I'm actually hoping to make a new book for her for next year to replace the book that came with her elf - something specific to her elf with more of a fun spirit.

Puck made his appearance on December 1st, which was also the first day that our advent calendar was filled. We told her that Puck returned from the North Pole with treats for our family to help us count down to Christmas. She loves finding Puck in different places each morning, although she doesn't really believe in the "magic" component. In fact, when I tried to explain that she could talk to Puck and Puck would listen but couldn't talk back, she replied, "Yeah Mommy. That's because he's a stuffed animal. You know he's not real." We still have fun with it :)

Sometimes Puck can be found in silly places, and sometimes he takes out supplies for projects or suggests nice things to do. Have you seen the Kindness Elf from Imagination Tree? Love it!

I hope you're enjoying the Christmas Season as much as we are! Merry Christmas!

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Unplanned Math Activities

I love math. There, I said it. Call me a nerd, but I just think math is cool. And I can't understand why it intimidates so many people. I find it interesting that a lot of homeschoolers that unschool or use unit studies make an exception and purchase a curriculum for math. Like somehow you can't learn math if you're not doing pages and pages of practice problems. One of my goals with M is to make sure that she discovers math in the world around us. That shouldn't be very hard - math is everywhere!

Counting

We count everything. I always counted things when I was bored as a child - especially on a long road trip. I would count cars, lamp posts, exits, anything I saw. I just naturally find myself counting things, and now I count out loud so M can listen and join in with me. We count how many times I push her on the swing, how much food is on her plate, how many flowers she picked, how much Halloween candy she collected, how many rungs are on a ladder or how many hops it takes to reach the other side in hopscotch.

Sometimes she will count as high as she can until she doesn't know the next number, then I will pick up. Sometimes we alternate - I count evens and she counts odds. Sometimes we count together, or repeat after one another. Recently she has started counting larger numbers. She doesn't know all of the numbers up to 100 yet, but she understands that numbers follow a pattern. I love listening to her count, especially when she gets caught up in what she's counting and throws in a "twenty-eleven."

Soon we'll start skip counting - counting by twos or threes or tens. It's a great precursor for learning multiplication.

Division

Multiplication and division do not have to be scary concepts. They also don't need to be all about memorization either. We practice grouping as a form of division: How many groups of two can we make with the ten marbles we have? We also talk about sharing - if three friends are coming over and you have six cookies, how many cookies can each friend have? (These same situations could be used to practice multiplication, of course. If three friends are coming over and you want to have two cookies for each friend, how many cookies do you need?)

Here you can see M counting out the number of fruit snacks in a bag, and dividing them into equal groups to share with me. Of course she checked her work to make sure it was fair!

Fractions

Fractions and percentages also seem to intimidate a lot of people, yet they are found everywhere! Calculate the tip on your restaurant bill, figure out how much you'll save (or how much you'll need) when merchandise is on sale, determine how much you're actually paying on your house (or car or credit card puchases) when you add in interest charges (ouch!).

M has been really interested in money lately, especially coins (everything on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse costs coins). I gave her a handful of coins and had her sort them into groups. We talked about what they looked like and how she could tell them apart. I told her the names of the coins and how much they were worth. Then we talked about how many of each coin was equal to a dollar (one penny is 1/100th of a dollar, one nickel is 1/20th of a dollar, one dime is 1/10th of a dollar, and one quarter is 1/4th of a dollar).

She likes the quarters the best (smart girl), and I showed her different ways to count them. I also drew some pictures and wrote out the fractions on her easel and showed her the number of quarters that corresponded to each fraction. We talked about why two quarters was the same as 1/2 (she already somewhat understands the idea that half means two equal parts).

 

Measurements

M has always been interested in measuring things. She wants to know how tall things are and how much they weigh. She liked playing with my husband's tape measure so much that we bought a small one for her. She loves helping to measure ingredients when we cook, and has her own set of measuring cups in her play kitchen.

I like to get M involved in helping me measure whenever I can. I have a small postal scale that I use to weigh packages so I can ship from home, and she helps me weigh things on the scale (which is also a good opportunity to talk about how postage is calculated). We weigh fruits and vegetables at the grocery store (even though I'm not usually looking for a certain weight). We weigh and measure ourselves at home and when we go to the doctor.

Shapes and Patterns

We talk about shapes all the time, and not just the normal circle/square/triangle, but hexagons and pentagons and trapezoids and quadrilaterals. I don't dumb things down. I want her to be exposed to the proper vocabulary now so she's not intimidated by the "big words" later. We also love this Melissa & Doug Shapes Sound Puzzle that says the names of the shapes as you complete the puzzle. M likes to say the name of the shape first, then put the puzzle piece in the right spot.

M is also really interested in patterns (which she pronounces pat-er-rins). I'm not sure that she totally gets the idea of the repetitive nature of patterns, but she likes putting different things in order and naming the objects and calling it a pattern. You can see her marker "pattern" that she is creating below.

I try to find lots of opportunities to nurture this interest, so I point out patterns in nature or on packaging or store signs. We color different patterns (like on her castle) or line up her animals or play foods in different patterns (fruit, vegetable, fruit, vegetable, etc.).


So tell me, how have you "taught" math through everyday experiences?

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Halloween... Better Late than Never

Everything in our house is moving in slow motion right now... so about a month later, here's what we did for Halloween! There are TONS of great Fall and Halloween festivals and events in our area (Kidding Around Greenville was my go-to source for events this year), so we had quite the line-up for a couple of weeks leading up to Halloween.


Children's Museum of the Upstate
My parents got M a membership at the Children's Museum for her birthday, and we have been taking full advantage of everything they have to offer. They had some great Halloween-themed art activities, including glow-in-the-dark flubber and paint (the pictures are grainy because it was completely dark in the art room!).

We also went to their "Cosmic Candy Capers" show, which was a mini-musical about space explorers who crashed onto Earth on Halloween and got sick from eating too much candy.

Fall-themed Birthday Party
M had a blast at a friend's birthday party right before Halloween. There were so many awesome games - pumpkin bowling, spider fishing, can toss, painting pumpkins, and a giant tub of corn with hidden pumpkins.

Halloween Decorations and Crafts
Most of our minimal decorating for this year involved pumpkins (see our pumpkin post), but we also did a spider web lacing activity that was fun and easy. I punched holes all the way around the edge of a paper plate, tied a piece of black yarn through one of the holes, and let M lace the other end of the yarn however she wanted to create a web. It helped that we had been exploring spiders recently after watching a large barn spider that made its home on her swing set in the back yard. (We also read Charlotte's Web after researching and discovering that Charlotte was also a barn spider.) We added a few plastic spider rings on the web and were done! M liked hanging it on the front door, then running away from it screaming "Ahhh!!! There are spiders in the house!!!"

Boo in the Zoo
We love the Greenville Zoo. My brother gets us a family membership for Christmas every year, and we go a lot. It's just the right size to see a good number of animals without feeling overwhelmed or rushing to get through everything. This was our second year going to their Halloween Boo in the Zoo event, and M enjoyed it again this year. I like that they give out some little toys in addition to candy, and they have some really neat decorations that M loves to look at. We actually went to the zoo a few times leading up to Halloween just to look at the decorations!

Enchanted Tracks at the Pavilion
This was our second year attending Enchanted Tracks as well, and we learned a few lessons last year that served us well. We signed up for our train time slot immediately, and worked our way slowly through the carnival-style games to buy us some time while we waited for the train. Aside from the train ride, M loved walking through the woods to collect candy from some of her favorite fairytale characters.

 
Trick-or-Treating

Greenville Place Assisted Living
There was no shortage of events on the day of Halloween. We started off by meeting some friends at Greenville Place Assisted Living. I thought it was such a neat idea that the assisted living facility was hosting a trick-or-treat event to make the holiday more enjoyable for their residents, and encourage more visitors! I try to expose M to people of all ages, so this was also a great opportunity for her to interact with people she may not normally encounter.

The residents spent weeks making decorations and games for the kids to play. She won a stuffed elephant at the bean bag toss game, and liked watching the ball fall through the bottle chutes. She had a blast! We'll definitely be back again next year!

Publix
We stopped in Publix to waste some time between the assisted living event and the start of trick-or-treating at the mall. I didn't get any pictures, but they had some cute little games set up around the store (bean bag toss, ring toss, guess the weight, etc) for the kids to play, as well as candy and cookies that they handed out.



Haywood Mall
We probably overdid it a little this year, but I was definitely successful in finding trick-or-treating events! We walked all the way around the mall, and most of the stores were participating in the event. M collected a TON of candy (maybe too much). She did get tired at one point and decided to sit down right in the middle of the floor for a break - haha! I moved her a chair and we took a break while we waited for Daddy to come to the mall after work to meet us for dinner.

 

Goblin Fest at Heritage Park
This was a free Greenville Rec event, so it was REALLY crowded, but it was well done. If we go again, we would definitely plan to get there much earlier to avoid waiting in the long line and to finish earlier in the evening. By the time we got there, M was pretty much trick-or-treated out, so she wasn't even interested in collecting the candy - she just wanted to hang out with her friends!

Sorting and Counting Candy
M had quite the stash after her full day of Halloween fun! She was too tired by the time we got home to do anything but change into pj's and head to bed, but we had a good time the next morning sorting her candy and counting everything!