Seth’s Week In Review – Thanksgiving

I have decided that since I have Alyssa’s weekly post on our family blog and I have Aaron’s weekly tot school post here on this blog I need to also do a weekly post for Seth!  My goal is each year at their birthday time to make a blog to book from blurb.com for them every year!  I am hoping this will help me do better at documenting their life – the funny and cool things they say and do that you always want to remember!

So here is Seth’s first week in review – officially!  Last week we did not do any school due to Thanksgiving but we did have a fun day at the park one day and we had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I do have to tell a funny story about Seth from this weekend!  Seth has really gotten into Recue Heroes.  It is a cartoon that they play on Qubo and it is about firefighters and policemen and other rescue heroes that save people.  I am so excited about him liking them so much because I would much rather him look up to these heroes than some of the others like power rangers, spiderman, etc…

Anyways we were at my parents this weekend and Seth spilled a glass of water on the carpet.  When it happened he stood up and held up his hands and said “everyone remain calm.  It is just water that spilled.”  We all were cracking up!!!  He is so cute!!

Tot School - Thanksgiving

 

We took a week off of school for Thanksgiving so we didn’t do any tot school this week!  We did enjoy a day at the park and got some really good pictures!  Aaron loves playing at the park!

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!!  I am hoping to have a month full of fun Christmas activities :-)

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Tot School – Dinosaur Pack

Aaron is 28 Months Old.

This week I introduced the dinosaur pack that I made for Aaron and Seth!!  They LOVED it!!  Aaron is IN LOVE with Dinosaur Train right now so this was right up his alley!  I have a feeling this one will be played with a lot!  I can’t really call it a tot pack because I put in activities for Seth as well…along with a few early elementary activities for down the road!

I got all of my printables from 1+1+1=1 and File Folder Fun.  I will probably continue to add to this pack since the boys love dinosaurs!!  In fact I may just have to make a dinosaur box because my folder is already full!!  :-)  But everything is laminated so it should last!

(I took all the pics on Monday when I introduced the pack and then we played with it all week!)

here is a view of the folder…told you it was full!!

Of course we are continuing to learn our colors so we had a lot of focus on the color matching game.  Aaron has learned the color green!! (we are still working on the other colors)

We did the name cards too.  Even though Seth is no longer a tot I went ahead and made him name cards too.  He was very happy about that!!  :-)  (I have even already made name cards for Alyssa for when she is old enough to do this pack!)

Both boys really liked the dinosaur puzzles!

We had a lot of fun matching heads and tails too!

We played with the sequencing dinosaurs…but Seth decided instead of saying largest to smallest we named them Daddy (the biggest), Mommy, Seth, Aaron and Alyssa!!

I printed off the color matching file folder games from File Folder Fun.  Aaron did pretty good at matching the colors.

I went ahead and printed and laminated the word cards for the color matching so as they learn to read this game can grow with them :-)

They had fun putting the numbering sequence cards in order.

I went ahead and printed off  and laminated the addition and subtraction file folder game from File Folder Fun so that they will have a fun math game as they grow up and learn addition and subtraction.

Here are some fun pictures I got of Aaron one night when we were getting ready for bed!

He is doing a good job at brushing his teeth!!

 

Laying on his pillow ready to go night night!  So sweet!

The other day I put my picture card in the computer to pull off pictures that I had taken and apparently Seth got hold of my camera again and was taking pictures!  Here are a couple that he got of Aaron!

This one cracks me up!!  His pose is so funny!! 

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

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Turkey Sandwiches

I saw on the ABC & 123 blog today the idea of turkey sandwiches and thought that would be fun to surprise the boys with for lunch today.  So here is our version of the turkey sandwich  (not as pretty as the others…but the type squeeze bottle that my ketchup had didn’t cooperate very well)

The important thing is the boys loved it!!  It had their favorites – cheese and ketchup!!! 

Blessings Posters

Once again I LOVE the decoration we did today!!  I really am liking the way it turned out.

I once again got the idea from a craft book…this one was from a book we got from the library.  The book stated to take a piece of fabric and glue cut outs of fruits and vegetables and then fold over the top edge and hem and then stick a straight stick through it, tie on some string and hang it up…

Ours ended up being a bit different from what the book said…but I think I like our end results better!  It should last longer :-)

What I did is go to the library and use their die cut machine and made fruit and veggie cut outs from cute patterned scrapbook paper.

We then went to Wal-Mart (not knowing what I was going to end up doing before we got there) and ended up getting  a couple cute fabric fat quarter (that you use for making quilts), some stick on glittered foam letters and a poster frame.

When we got home I used my scrapbook adhesive and stuck the fabric to the back of the poster frame.  We then stuck on letters (made the words “Harvest of Blessings”) and stuck on the fruit and veggies using the scrapbook adhesive tape runner.

We then assembled the poster frame and ended up with a very nice looking picture to hang on the wall.

And…it fits so well on the wall that I put it on that this just may turn out to be our seasonal poster wall…we can make one for each season or holiday!  Looks like we will be making a Christmas one soon :-)

Here are some pictures of the finished product (sorry for the flash glare)

 

Soft Sculpture Turkeys

Our Fall Decoration craft was super fun today!!

I found this idea from a craft book.  They said to get a pair of gloves and stuff them with poly-fil stuffing then either sew the wrist of the glove together or glue it.  They then said to take craft feathers and stick through the fingers of the glove and then embellish with google eyes, a gobble, etc…

I originally wanted brown gloves but when I saw that Target had these black gloves on the $1 aisle I couldn’t pass them up!!  Of course Target did not have any craft feathers and I wasn’t in the mood to go to Wal-Mart when we were out yesterday so I came up with another idea for feathers.  I cut out feathers from construction paper and then taped toothpicks to the back of them so that we could stick them in the fingers.  It worked like a charm!

I also realized today that I didn’t have any google eyes that were a size that would work with our gloves but I did have brass brad fasteners.  Not only did it give the turkey a nice brass eye…I let the back of the fastener stick back through the glove to make the beak!  It worked perfect!

The boys sure loved sticking their feathers in their turkeys!!!  This will be fun to bring out year after year…we could even change the feathers every year!!

Here are some finished pictures.

You can kind of see how I did the brads to make the beak in the pictures below  (there is a brad on each side of the turkey)

Fall Craft Day 2

I am so excited about how our craft for today turned out!!!  For those who didn’t see yesterday’s post…we are starting a new tradition in our house…we are making seasonal decorations that we can keep and put out every year and add more to every year.  That way in years to come we will have a treasure of memories decorating our house.

Today we made a fall leaf stained glass picture that I found in a craft book.  Where we live we do not have trees that produce pretty fall leaves…most of the trees around our house are mesquite trees.   But the library has some HUGE trees with big beautiful leaves.  So I decided we would gather our leaves there today since we would be there for story time!  :-)

In the craft book it stated to arrange your leaves in between two pieces of waxed paper and then iron with a steam iron to seal the waxed paper around the leaves. 

I am fortunate to have a laminator and thought that it would look better and hold up longer if we laminated the leaves instead of use the waxed paper. 

So I opened up a laminating sheet and had the boys arrange leaves on there.  We then cut out strips of paper and put around the edges (the book said to glue the strips over the edges after you iron it to create a frame but we decided to laminate it all).  Since Seth has started writing his name I had him write his name on one of the strips.  I wrote Aaron’s name on his picture and then dated them both.  Then we put them through the laminator. 

The boys loved them so much that they wanted to make another one – so we did!!!

Don’t you think they turned out pretty?!?!

Raising Rockstars – Our Seeing Eyes

Weekly Theme – God Made Our Seeing Eyes

Well we were finally able to get back to our Raising Rockstar lessons after our couple of weeks off due to the big kitchen remodel!!  The boys were super excited about getting back into their normal routine again!

We are still focusing on how God made us and this week we talked about how God made our eyes so we could see his beautiful creations!  We had some really good discussions about all things we can do because we have eyes and all the wonderful things we can look at.  We focused a lot on God’s creation.

Memory Verse

We learned this verse using hand motions.  for “The hearing ear,” we pointed to our ears, “and the seeing eye,” pointed to our eyes, “The Lord hath made” we pointed up “both of them” we put one finger on an ear and the other on an eye.

I was very proud of Seth memorizing this entire verse this week!

Books We Read

We read the bible again, of course!   We read our memory verse (Proverbs 20:12) and talked about how God made our eyes. We read Psalm 25:15 and talked about how to keep our eyes on the Lord.   We read in John 9 about how God healed a blind man.

Oh – I have to put this in!!  There was proof this week that my son listens to his lessons at church :-)  On Monday when I introduced our lesson before we even got in the bible Seth said “God healed a blind man by putting mud on his eyes”.  I was so proud of him!!!

I checked out some books dealing with the seeing and the 5 senses to read during our lessons to learn more about our eyes.

 

Songs We Sang

Our song we sang all week this week was “Oh be careful little eyes what you see”.

We also sang “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes”  (this is one of Aaron’s favorites)

Activities We Did

I checked out one of those I Spy books from the library and the boys enjoyed using their eyes to find all of the little objects in the pictures.  I have to admit it was quite hard at times.  Mommy even had problems finding some of the objects.

We went outside and talked about all the things we could see with our eyes.

Crafts We Made

We didn’t really do any crafts pertaining to our rockstar lessons but we did make an eye snack.  (sorry for the picture…it really didn’t turn out well.)

I cut a piece of bread in an eye shape (or the best I could since I was free-handing the cut).  Then we spread cream cheese on it.  We put a kiwi slice in the middle for the iris and then a blob of raspberry preserves on top of that for the pupil.

I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this post that I didn’t get any pictures this week of us and our lessons.  But you know what…that’s not important.  The important thing is that we did spend time together this week in bible lessons and learning more about our Lord!

Next Week’s Theme – Our Listening Ears

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Note: I am getting most of my lessons and craft and activity ideas from Danielle's Place.  This is a great site that has so many good ideas.  I am using their resources as my core and then adding in additional things as I think of them or come across them from other sites, stores, etc...

Fall Decorations

I have been wanting to start having the boys help me make decorations for the house for the different seasons.  I think it would be so fun to pull out the decorations we have made in the house and then make new ones to add to the collection. In just a few years we could have a house full of reminders of fun memories!!

We are hosting a dinner for our Sunday School class on Saturday night at our house so I decided to go ahead and make some fall decorations for the house and start this tradition!  We are going to try to make at least one decoration every day this week if we can!

Tonight we made a wreath and mantle garland.  I will admit both ended up being advanced for my 4 year old and 2 year old but I did my best to get them to help where I could and it must have worked because they feel proud and really feel like they helped!

The wreath started off to be like a wreath that I found online somewhere (can’t remember where) where they took a wire coat hanger and made it into a circle and then put slits in toilet paper rolls and slid them on and then glued leaves all over it.    You turn around the hook of the hanger so that it can work as a hook for your wreath.

Well I got the wreath prepped with all of that (I got it in the best circle that I could…it is hardly a perfect circle though) and pulled out my box of fake fall leaves that I had.  Well I had in there some decoration sticks that had apples or pumpkins or pine cones with flowers and leaves (don’t know what you call them) and thought they would be pretty.  But of course they were too heavy to glue on the toilet paper rolls…so I ended up attaching them straight to the wire coat hanger with pipe cleaners (had to work with what I had – HA!).  We then glued the leaves on the toilet paper rolls in between them.  I can’t believe that we actually got it to work in the end.

I had Seth pull leaves from their plastic stems and then Aaron would hand them to me and point to where he thought I should put it.  I glued them because I used hot glue so they would stick better. 

Here is the end result.

The other decoration we did was a mantle garland!  I actually saw this idea on the Rachel Ray show today (this is my show that I tape and then relax and enjoy while the kids are napping :-)).

On the show they took a ribbon and some decorative paper clips and silk leaves (they gave the idea of using real leaves for it to).  All they did was paper clip the leaves to the ribbon and then hang the ribbon on the mantle.  It was super easy and super cute!!

Well I don’t have any of those fancy paper clips and doubt my wal-mart in my little town would carry them, but I figured – hey why couldn’t we just staple them on!! 

I gave Seth some leaves and Aaron some flowers and I had them alternate giving me leaves and flowers for me to staple on the ribbon (it actually was a good little lesson in patterns…we may try this again for Christmas garland and maybe find something that would be more than two objects to do a little bit more difficult patterning exercise!). 

Here is our garland!  I LOVED how this turned out!

Tomorrow we are planning on doing some stained glass leaves.  We don’t have good leaves around our house because we have mostly mesquite leaves but we are going to library tomorrow morning and the library yard has some HUGE beautiful leaves!  We are going to make a point to pack a bag so we can pick up some leaves!!

I am really excited about this new tradition…I hope and pray I keep up with it because it really could be a treasure a few years down the road!!