A Farmer and his Tractor

Another activity that E worked on this week was this tractor picture:

I got the idea from here, although I didn't use their printout (we don't have a working printer, so I didn't even look at it). I just cut out the shapes myself. It was good practice for E in identifying colours, shapes and sizes, as well as a little bit of counting. It was all pretty easy for her, though.

The farmer and speech bubbles were hand-drawn by me and were to reinforce our latest Latin lessons.

-Polly

Building Furniture

Lately, E's favourite things to do are to go for a picnic in the park or to "build something". Whilst she likes her Duplo and her wooden blocks, she has been working on more complex projects including her new bed and wardrobe.
E's dad took these photos of her putting together the wardrobe:

Bang, bang, bang.

Checking her work.

Bang, bang, bang.

E was very excited to get pink furniture for her room. Pink is her new favourite colour. We bought the pink 'Mammut' bed and wardrobe from Ikea and just managed to squeeze all the pieces into our little car. (The girls and I caught the train home to leave space for it). We may have bought the matching drawers, but they were sold out.

-Polly

Green Garden

Happy St Patrick's day. I don't have anything holiday-related to share, but I do have a 'green' post for you. :P

I love how the garden is refreshed after only one day of rain.

I had recently pulled out what was left of last year's silverbeet and left a couple of roots behind. Now we have nice, fresh silverbeet without having to replant.

We have a rockmelon that seems about ready to be picked. Not bad for a store-bought melon that we buried as 'compost'.

The second lot of chillies are fruiting at the moment (we've had jalapenoes for a while now). It's always nice to have fresh chilli to add some kick to a meal. We had a big, red one chopped up in our tacos last night.

I love Autumn. :)

-Polly

Hearts and Crafts

Did everyone have a good valentine's day? It's not something we celebrate around here, but I couldn't resist a few love-heart crafts.
First I collected up some craft supplies in shades of pink and red and set them out on E's table:

I included some papers, foam shapes, shredded crepe paper, cardboard hearts, pipe-cleaners, pom-poms, wrapping paper, tulle, felt, pencils and crayons. E was excited for all the pink. It's been a while since we've done a colour theme.

E used the wrapping paper to wrap and unwrap imaginary presents. She thought it was a fun game. The rest of the supplies were used for collages and ornaments.

E also did some painting and learned how to make pink by mixing red and white paint together. We painted her feet and made heart-shaped footprints:

When it was dry, I drew the heart around the footprints and cut it out for her. It was added to a painting/collage that included hand-prints, brush-painting, crayon drawing, the words "E Loves Daddy" and a photograph. E gave it to her Daddy as soon as he got home from work and she was very proud of it. She also spent all evening saying "I love you, Daddy," which was adorable.

I did set up one other 'heart' activity. E is currently learning to spell her name, so I cut out some more cardboard hearts and wrote one letter from her name on each heart. I then got a long strip of paper and traced around the right number of hearts as a template for where to place the letters. E had some fun with this. She loves finding the letter "E" everywhere.

-Polly

Shapes, Colours and Numbers

E's been having lots of fun and learning with her blackboard and chalk lately. She's also discovered KidsTV123 on Youtube. Here's some of the activities we've tried:

Shapes:

I drew some different shapes onto the board and had E identify them. We counted the sides together and spoke about each shape. I specified a colour to use and she tried tracing or colouring each shape, or she'd choose her own colour and name it.

E's favourite shapes song: "Shapes Song 2"

Numbers and colours:

We drew this fun little number rainbow and sang "10 Little Numbers," pointing to each number as it came up in the song. E can name all of these colours and numbers quite easily. Some more favourite numbers songs are "Numbers Song" and "The Big Numbers Song".

I wrote E's name onto the board so that she could trace it, and again so that she could attempt to copy it. She had a go at writing "Mum" and her dad's name, too.

Cleaning the blackboard can be as much fun as writing or drawing on it:

One more favourite song around here is "The Solar System Song".

-Polly

Orange

Last week, we had yet another colour-themed day in our house. This time it was E's favourite colour: Orange! At first, I thought she simply liked to say, "Orange... orange..." It is a rather strange-sounding word, but then, many words are when you repeat them over and over. It turns out that orange really is her favourite colour at the moment. We went fabric-shopping not long ago and while I was choosing fabrics for myself, E and her Daddy headed to the other side of the store so that E could choose some fabrics for a new dress. They came back with the brightest orange fabrics that I have ever seen. Here's a picture of E using her new dress fabrics as blankets and tucking in her dolls. She's on an orange pillow, too:

I seem to have a lot of sewing projects going at the moment, but I always love to make things for E and my new pattern books arrived in the mail yesterday. :)

For our orange day, breakfast was easy: Orange! I cut up some orange and some mandarin for E to have a few segments. The rest was made into 'very orange' juice, which this time had orange, mandarin, tangelo and carrot. We served it in cups with pictures of oranges on them and used orange straws.

When we got dressed, I wore an orange t-shirt and E wore her favourite orange dress. Then we walked around the house, seeing what orange things we could find. Amongst other things, we found some orange balls, some orange blocks, some orange paper and a doll with orange hair.

We made some orange flowers using pipe cleaners, craft paper and crepe paper. I cut out the flower shapes and E pushed them onto the pipe cleaners. Each flower used one pipe cleaner, one craft paper flower and two crepe paper flowers. E then arranged them in a plastic vase with some wild lupin flowers that she had found the day before.

E had a great time swirling about some streamers that I made from some left-over crepe paper. She also spent a lot of time playing with orange play-dough and some more orange straws that I had cut into smaller lengths. We then used some more of the orange crepe paper, cut and torn into little pieces and stuck onto clear contact, to make another window decoration.

-Polly

Pink Day

Yesterday was "Pink Day" at our house. As the mother of a little girl, I find it difficult to think "Pink" without thinking of tacky, plastic "girl" toys, "Barbie" and "Disney Princess", yet, thankfully, we have none of these in our house (yet?). I'll refrain from going into a rant about pink overload and marketing to girls and instead go straight to a glimpse of what our "Pink Day" was really all about.

Here's E playing on the slide in her pink outfit:

The pink "piggly wiggly" hat is her favourite hat at the moment. It's crocheted and I bought it on etsy over a year ago. I was going to add a link to the shop, but it seems that either the seller is no longer making them, or is selling them elsewhere. The pants, top and jacket are all hand-me-downs from a friend. E has mostly hand-me-down clothes and a good chunk of them are pink. Evidently, she wears at least some pink most days. I have no problem with that. She's super cute no matter what she's wearing. ^_^. Comparatively, the only pink clothes in my wardrobe at the moment are my pajamas and some socks.

Aside from clothes, we have surprisingly few pink things around the house. We did manage to find a pink rubber duck, a pink tricycle and a giant pink teddy-bear. There are also a few pink blossoms in the garden.

For a pink themed craft, I cut out paper shapes (flowers, circles and 'petals') in different shades of pink. E had fun moving them around and making different patterns. After a while, I got out a glue stick for E to make a more permanent collage on a piece of cardboard.

Here's what she came up with:

As is E's style, a bit of extra colour was added with blue and green crayons and a bit of black pen. She's a mixed-media artist, didn't you know? I put it up on the wall and E still points to it and says "Flowers!". I guess she's proud of her work.

Unlike our blue cakes, our pink snack was quite healthy and free from added food colouring. We made berry smoothies with frozen raspberries, strawberry flavoured yoghurt and soy milk. I usually prefer my smoothies with more fruit and less yoghurt, but it was certainly more filling this way. E enjoyed it, even if she did pour half of it out onto a plate and try to eat it with a spoon. (It wasn't that thick). I guess she was just experimenting... There was a little bit left over, so I froze it in an ice-block mould along with some coconut ice-cream.

Part of the reason that I chose pink for our colour-themed day this week is that my new hair-dye finally arrived in the mail.
Here's me with my new, pink hair:

[Hey, Maple, you were right!]

My husband took a few days off of work this week, to be with us, and therefore had a couple of hours spare to colour my hair for me. :) E was a little mystified when she first saw it and kept saying, "Pink... Hair... Pink... Hair..." and wanted to touch it all the time. I found an episode of Lazytown for her to watch on tv to remind her that Stephanie has pink hair. (I didn't even have to point it out to her). She was okay with it after that. My hair is getting kind of long now, so I probably should have bought 2 bottles of dye. Mine certainly isn't as bright as Stephanie's (but hers is a wig - shh!).

-Polly

A Blue Day

blueberry smoothie

...literally, as we're all quite happy here. :)

Colours make good, easy theme days. Today's theme, in our home, is "Blue". E and I got up this morning and put on some blue clothes. We made blueberry smoothies for breakfast. I know that blueberries are technically purple, but they are called blueberries and blue isn't exactly a colour that is generally associated with food. We used blue straws. E likes banana smoothies and although we did add a banana to our smoothie this morning, she took one sip and said "No!" pushing her cup away. So E had regular, not blue, toast.

I printed the word "Blue" in block lettering and we coloured it in using blue markers and blue crayons.

Next, I gave E a blue bucket and we walked around the house collecting anything blue that we could find. We collected toys, blocks, bowls, books, a cup and a hat. We arranged some of them on our blue couch to get these photos, which were in part inspired by Maple's gorgeous photos here and here...

...and we made some little buildings with the blocks after that.

Yesterday we had clear blue skies, so I thought that I'd be able to point that out to E today. No such luck, as it was raining all day and the view from our back window was decidedly grey.

grey sky

For another blue activity, we baked blue cupcakes. I know, I know, I said blue wasn't a colour for food. What was I thinking?! I usually avoid artificial colours in our food, especially blue. I've even refused to give E blue frosted cake at a birthday party. We had just about every colour patty cases except for blue, so we used pale, purplish, stripy ones. The cupcakes did turn out quite pretty, don't you think? They taste nice, just like normal vanilla cupcakes... but they're blue. That's just not right. We had one each, anyway. E gets excited about cake.

 One other blue themed activity that we did today was about the easiest yet. I gave E a piece of blue bubble wrap to play with. Pop, pop, pop!

Playing with bubble wrap.

-Polly