L Stuff

Great week for books! This is because we discovered Little Pea and Little Hoot by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. New favorites. I think I might frame some of Jen Corace's illustrations from Little Hoot to hang in Talmage's room.



Looking For a Moose by Phyllis Root was also a winner. Plenty of Ls with long-leggy moose.

Activities

Cyanotype Leaf Prints



My very favorite activity yet. Cyanotype prints are a basic photograph printing process that uses a photo-sensitive solution on paper that when exposed to light turns blue. Any area that is covered when exposed stays white.

We talked a little bit about leaves--that they are green, that most things growing outside have them, and that that's how a plant eats--and then gathered leaves in our yard. Inside we compared the shape and size of the leaves. Then we made prints from the leaves.

The Internet explained to me that it wasn't hard to make my own paper. What was even easier, though, was ordering some inexpensive paper from this website.

Since I'm painting my room blue to callously cover up Stockton's masterpiece, I think I might display some of these prints.

Lion Puppet.



Okay, Tyler pointed out that my creativity is waning when I make an animal puppet weekly. But I did add my own flair to the instructions for this lion.

I printed off a face from this template (in white, blue, and orange) and arms from this template (in orange) and glued them to a brown paper bag.

Rather than use this template for a mane, we cut strips of paper from red, yellow, and orange paper and curled them by rolling them around a pencil. we then attached them around the face part.

Voila! I thought they kind of looked like The Cowardly Lion after he gets gussied up in the Emerald City.

Ladybugs. I was so excited to see ladybugs for sale at the garden center in my local grocery store, and I had big plans to release them in my garden at this point and examine real live ladybugs. But the store was out. Don't worry, the kind lady assured me, they'll be in next week. I'm not sure she understood me when I whined, "But next week is M week."

So instead, we made these guys:



We found rocks outside and painted them red. When the red paint dried (with the aid of a blow dryer) we painted a black head and black spots. Talmage felt it important they have googly eyes. We affixed the eyes with super glue that was kicking around our house from when we superglued Talmage's head together.

Treasure Hunt. library books, lemon, lamp, lawnmower, leaf, laundry. The treasure was lifesavers.

K Stuff

Want to throw a curve ball at your toddler? Teach him that K makes the same sound as C.

Since the last several letters have been less common letters, I've adopted the approach of searching the library catalog for specific words when looking for books. For K books, I searched kiss, kangaroo, koala, and kitten and came up with several great books.

Activities

Kite



No big project here. Cut a paper into a diamond shape, attached yarn for a string, let Talmage decorate it. Done and done.

Three Little Kittens.

I thought this was a fantastic project. Talmage found it a bit less fantastic. It was a little long and took us two days.

First, I printed three copies of this template and this template on white paper. I let Talmage color those as he wished and assembled and then laminated the kittens. Then I printed this template on three colors of paper, two copies of each color (for a total of six copies). I cut the paws out of three separate colors and laminated those and then "dirtied" the other three paws and laminated those.

I put sandpaper on the back of the kittens and velcro on the kittens paws with the other side of velcro on the colored paws, or mittens. We then acted out the poem "Three Little Kittens."

Insert video here.

Kangaroo Puppet



We got the template for the head and joey here and the arms and pouch here. I took the website's suggestion and folded in the flaps of the bag to make the head more triangular.

The joey in the pouch was particularly fun.

Treasure hunt. kangaroo, kite, key, kid, kitten. The treat was KitKat bar.

J Stuff

The best book we found was One, Two, Three, Jump! by Penelope Lively.

Activities

Jellyfish.



I got the idea for this from several different sites (google jellyfish craft) and kind of made up my own. I took a styrofoam cup and poked two holes on the top. I strung yarn so I could hang the fish. Talmage then affixed tissue paper squares of various colors to the cups and we then hung strips of tissue paper to the mouth of the cup. I also included strips of plastic (from a Ziploc bag) so it would have some sheen, but I think those just disappeared.

Jack O'Lantern.



Do you know how hard it is to find pumpkins in May? Very hard.

Talmage's friend Benji came over and we decided to make paper Jack O' Lanterns. They both embraced a Picasso like approach to faces. After we did the pumpkins, we moved on to bats, ghosts, spiders, and sea monsters. The boys hung up the pictures as decorations and got in costume. Talmage was a dinosaur. Benji was a king. We had prettytend Halloween.

Unfortunately, I again failed to figure out Tyler's camera.

Jet.



The above picture is missing a tail fin because this picture was taken several days and several crashes after we made it. We printed off the template from this website, cut out the pattern, and traced it on a styrofoam tray, the kind meat comes on (well cleaned). After cutting the pieces out of styrofoam, we simply put the pieces together and painted it. Note that tempera paint doesn't work; acrylic will do the trick.

Treasure hunt. jacket, jack o'lantern, jelly, jar, jellyfish, jewelry, juice. The treasure was Junior Mints.

I Stuff

We checked out Hank Finds Inspiration by Craig Frazier for H Stuff last week. Because we hadn't been to the library yet, it served double duty. It was an okay H book but a phenomenal I book!

Other great I books? I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff, Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears by Verna Aardman, Imogene's Antlers by David Small, and Isabelle and the Angel by Thierry Magnier. What a great week for books!

Activities

What's that? A wedding cake? A volcano? A teepee? A tower? A beehive? A tholos tomb? No, it's an Igloo.



Compare the above picture with the one on the Family Fun website:



Then read Family Fun's instructions here and let me know what I lost in translation.

Iguana.



Here are the instructions. Our craft store didn't have all the necessary Woodsies, so we simplified and improvised. Talmage thought plain old green was a little boring, so he added several purple iguana tattoos.

Insects. (I cheated and did butterflies).



I originally saw this idea on TV for coffee filter butterflies, but I did the activity before I could go to the store and buy coffee filters, so I improvised. I think they turned out pretty cute.

We talked about what insects are and identified ants, mosquitos, bugs, and butterflies as insects. (I'm pretty sure a bug in his head is a fly.) Then we took a sheet of paper and painted it with watercolors. I dripped water on mine and sprinkled it with salt. We then accordion folded the paper and fastened a pipe cleaner around the middle. After we fanned out the "wings." We made a paper plate mobile out of the butterflies and hung it up in Tal's room.

Instrument.



Pretty simple. I saw this at the craft store when I was buying things for the iguana. It cost about two dollars. We painted it.

Treasure hunt. inside, igloo, iguana, infant, itchy. The treasure was Mike and Ike's. I know, it doesn't start with a short I sound; I'll take suggestions for alternatives.

H Stuff

H week was pretty fun. I randomly had a lot of ideas for this week, which made it fun. Books were actually kind of tricky. These are the best we found: The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood, Dream Hop by Julia Durango, and Hank Finds Inspiration by Craig Frazier.

Activities.

Hippo Puppet.

To continue with the paper bag puppet theme, we made hippo puppets. These were a little different (and inferior in my opinion) because they didn't have mouths that opened and closed. But we colored them instead of painted them, which was a fun turn of events. Here is the template for the head (to be glued on the flap) and here is the template for the body (to be glued on the bag part, just under the flap).

Heart Attack. I am a photography idiot, and I took pictures of this with Tyler's camera without a chip in the camera.

Pretty simple. We cut multi-colored hearts out and I let Talmage and our friend Benji who was over that day decorate them. They mostly used crayons, but I had our usual craft bling--feathers, googly eyes, buttons, and poof balls. We then gave Daddy a "heart attack" and attacked all the doors upstairs with hearts to celebrate Daddy's first day of the LPP program. I envisioned them on the bedroom door, but Talmage wanted a wider ranging heart attack.

This is the heart Talmage made for himself that day. You'll note an abundance of googly eyes.

Hand Painting.

This was really fun and really messy. I rolled out butcher paper in the driveway and we dipped our hands in paint and made prints on the paper. My original vision had us placing our prints in a circle, but Talmage of course got a little more creative and branched out.

Mental note: I need to get an old sheet for driveway paint projects. There are a few green footprints in front of our house now. Oh well. It's washable paint.

Hat (the newspaper variety).

These are the instructions I followed. Originally I thought I would buy a visor from the craft store and we'd decorate it. If I have a girl, that might be fun. This was nice and simple though.

Hungry Hungry Hippos. The game. We played it.

H treasure hunt. house, hot dog, hammer, hair, hat, hanger. Treasure was Heath bar.

G Stuff

G proved to be our most difficult letter yet; we had a hard time shaking the soft G sound. Also, the funky swirly lowercase G that some fonts use was almost unrecognizable to a 3 year old. I'm a little behind in posting this, so I can't remember all the good G books we did. Grown ups Get to Do All the Driving by William Steig was one.

Activities

Go Fish. The game. We learned it. It wasn't as successful as Uno, our current game of choice. (See here.)

Two-faced gorillas.



The template for this is here. I printed the yellow side on yellow paper rather than coloring it. We painted the black side black and left the smile white. Googly eyes for that googly effect. I tried to pull a child's psychology "Let's talk about our feelings" activity by asking Talmage what makes him sad and what makes him happy, but he just had fun making funny faces.

Shape Goose.

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Here's the template. This was kind of fun because the goose is made up of different shapes. Talmage knows his shapes pretty well, but it was a good review.

Giacometti Figures.

Okay, if I'm honest, we didn't do these for G week due to the soft G sound. But we did do this this week and I thought we should document it.

We made the base of the figures with pipe cleaners, heads with paper balls, and then covered them with tin foil. Had we used putty for the feet, they would have stood up.

G treasure hunt. garden, grass, glass, glue, glasses. The treasure was Mr. Goodbar.

F Stuff

Now that I'm a year into this project and I'm doing phoenetic sounds like FR and FL, I realized that I did F all wrong. Frame, frog, and flag belong in a later week. Remember this next time.

I found great F books. Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Conner and The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss were perfect. Ugly Fish by Kara LaReau was excellent for Fs, but the plot line (where a fish doesn't want to share his tank, so he eats all the peppy fish who are put in there with him) was a bit alarming for a toddler. Talmage's review? "I don't want to be swallowed."

Activities

Frame.

When I went to the craft store to stock up a couple of weeks ago I found a wooden frame for about 99 cents. Perfect.

Talmage painted and decorated it. And I did a good job letting go of creative control. I think it turned out rather well.



Frog.



To continue our paper bag puppet theme, I found a frog. Here is the template, but I'm sure you could improvise one just as easily.

Flag.



This may have been Talmage's favorite activity yet because of the stickers involved. White paper. We glued red stripes on. Blue square. And all the star stickers you want!

Family ABC book.





I stole this idea from my sister-in-law Sarah. I spent WAY too much time scrapbooking papers with each of the letters of the alphabet. Then we glued on a picture of someone in our family whose name started with that letter. We included grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and immediate family. Maquel, I would like to suggest you name your twins Ursula and Veronica.

Wheeler Farm. It was a fun time to go to the farm because all the animals have babies right now. I was probably the most excited.

F treasure hunt. family, fridge, food, fire truck, face, fingers, fur. The treat was Swedish fish.