Sunday, November 17, 2013

I Spy Books

In the midst of studying the five senses, my good friend had the idea to make an I Spy book on the day we were talking about the sense of sight.  So, of course, I consulted Pinterest! :)
Delia Creates had a great post that I found on DIY I Spy Books.  Our neighbor girls didn't have school that week because of transportation strikes here (not your typical idea of a strike but that is a tangent; point is, they were home from school).  So, it seemed like a fun project to have the kids all do together.
My oldest son is an arranger.  He has, from a very young age, loved to just set up toys and arrange them in scenes, but he has a VERY specific way he likes to do it, so I was glad I actually had arranged several areas the kids could work at because this was a project, he really thrived working on his own.
We set out a few big pieces of poster board, and then the kids arranged groups of toys, and I took a picture.  Then, as Delia Creates suggested, I pulled out a few toys from each scene while they were occupied with something else and took a picture of those.
I am not great at putting together documents, and my friend's looked much cuter in format than our does, but the kids really enjoyed it.  My youngest (2 1/2) has actually been the one to look at it the most, but the neighbor girls carried theirs around with them for a couple days.
Now, it was a fun process making it, but it also was a bit of time and effort, so I thought I would go ahead and share the one we made, and if you'd just like to use ours, feel free to print it and enjoy!

Here is our I Spy book!  It's far from professional, but if you'd enjoy it with your kids, feel free to use it!

(One of the train scenes my little and I created for the book)




(If you print it, you could print more than one page per sheet, but if you do that, I would recommend printing the cover separately because the "Can You Find?" page should be on the same page as the scene in which you are trying to locate the items.  I printed one page per sheet and then laminated them with page 1 on the back of the cover, page 3 on the page of page 2, etc., so the theme pages are facing each other when you open the book.)

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

N is for Nest

I have gotten quite behind on posting anything for school lately, and I can't say that we did anything terribly original for our nest unit.
Our neighbor girls did join us for some, and that was fun, including them all building a giant nest out of blankets and pretending to feed each other plastic worms and bugs!
We tried to make our own little nests.  They were mostly mess piles, but Isaiah got really into it.  He really wanted a bird to use his nest.  Um, no, we don't have any tropical birds around here--those bright things are craft feathers.  I don't really let the kids pick up real feathers at our place since the only ones we tend to find are from dirty pigeons.  Bleck.
Of course, Zeke had to get a dump truck in on the nest-building action.


There was a "nest" snack suggested in our curriculum, but it involved chow mein noodles, which we can't buy here.  We ended up using these local snacks.  I had actually never tried them, but they looked like they might work, so we broke them apart into "twigs."

Then we added some shredded coconut (which wasn't in the original recipe but seemed like it might work to seem like grass) and some melted chocolate and peanut butter.  We stirred them together, made a pile for each kid, and then we tucked two little mini marshmallows (imported) to be eggs.

Isaiah was really pleased with his work and excited to eat his yummy treat!

My little Nepali guy, Zeke, was really upset that I had covered his snacks in chocolate (what?!) and just wanted to eat the rest of the local snacks that we hadn't mixed in!  Ha.