Night Sky Themed Bath

This bath makes a great surprise for bath right before bedtime, or anytime! It's easy and frugal to create as well. All you need is yellow craft foam, white craft foam, scissors, and blue food coloring. Before you run the bath water cut out a crescent moon shape from the white craft foam, and some stars from the yellow. Once you've got those ready, fill up the tub with water. Once it's halfway full add in some blue food coloring until you get the desired color. Then set the craft foam moon and stars on top of the water. 

Your little one will be delighted by this night sky scene in their bath! They can take the craft foam pieces and stick them to the walls of the shower as well. Just getting craft foam wet makes it stick to the shower walls like magic! That's what makes it frugal. Craft foam is not that expensive, and when used in this way it dries and can be reused again and again and again. Between uses I store ours in labeled Ziploc bags.

A perfect compliment to this bath is our Shimmering Night Sky Bath Paint.

Baby Food: Exploring New Textures And Combinations. Carrots & Peas

Don't those textured purees look delicious, especially side by side?

Baby will surely love these! Carrots are safe to introduce to babies 4 months and up, while peas are safe to introduce to babies 6 months and up. You also want to only introduce one new puree at a time in case there's an allergy. But since both of these purees are more textured (usually started around 8 months) to help baby learn to chew, you've probably already introduced both, making them a safe side-by-side choice.

Now, our pea purees were always pretty textured due to the peels and all that. So peas always offer a new texture for babies. Carrots don't exactly puree perfectly smooth either, but to make them more textured and even have some soft lumps to start baby off on some real chewing, follow this method:
Wash, peel, chop and steam the carrots until they're pretty tender when poked with a fork. Then pulse them while you puree them. Most food processors/blenders have this option as one of the buttons, and the Baby Bullet manual explains how to do it. This will puree some and also leave some soft chunks in there for baby to begin chewing! Make sure you're nearby when they're eating (you'll probably be feeding them anyways).

Serving foods side-by-side like these helps baby get used to a variety of flavors in their daily diet and get more nutrients since both veggies offer different ones. You could even try pureeing them together if you think your baby would like that.

Pond Bath

I made a pond themed bath for Charlie to help her learn about what animals live in a pond. I combined a little bit of literacy too by adding the word "POND" to the wall of the shower with some green bath paint that I made.

I added some of her bath toys to the water that represented animals that would be in a pond. I also made some lily pads out of green craft foam and set them on top of the water. Oh and I colored the water with green food coloring!

She really enjoyed her pond bath!

She liked to put the toy frogs on the little lily pads.

Quinoa with Honey and Fruit

I'm sure you know quinoa is one of the healthiest foods you can eat! So you may be looking for more and more ways to get it into your toddlers diet. Last night for dinner I made Quinoa with Honey & Fruit.

Ingredients:

- Cooked quinoa (however much you want your child to be served)

- Organic honey (I used Clover Blossom from Trader Joe's)

- Organic strawberries, washed and cut in half

- Organic blackberries cut into small bites

Just put the quinoa in your kids bowl, then squirt in a little bit of honey and stir it in around. Then add in the fruit. Serve!

Couldn't be more simple and so very healthy! Everything in this recipe has health benefits that are great for your kids.

Medieval Times Lapbook

So this week we're beginning our medieval times study. It'll be a one week unit just like all of our other themed studies are. To kick things off, I put together this Medieval Times Lapbook for my baby daughter. 

It would have been a lot better with pictures added to it, but our printer is on the fritz and I wasn't able to go print at the library before this lapbook needed to be made. I used a manila folder, white paper, black sharpie markers (fine tip and regular), scissors, and a glue stick.

I used the regular Sharpie marker to write "Medieval Times" as a title for the lapbook. For each section I wrote on the white paper, then cut it out, and then glued it onto the manila folder. 

The information I have on each section was found on a few different websites about medieval times and the middle ages. 

I made sections about hobbies, weapons, heraldry, women's fashions, Marco Polo, cooking, foods, knights, instruments, sports, art, famous castles, centuries, and general idea about the time.

I didn't include EVERYTHING from every subject or even all the subjects there could possibly be since there's so much information about the middle ages. I just had what I wanted for my daughter to learn this week right now in our study.

Instruments:

- church organ

- harp

- fiddle

- rebec

- psaltery (cross between harp and guitar)

- dulcimer

- hurdy-gurdy

- flute 

- trumpet

- shawn

- recorder

- bagpipes

Knights had to know how to fight and play instruments and dance.

Hobbies:

- hunting

- hawking

- gambling with dice

- backgammon

- chess

- story telling

- dancing

Foods:

- barley, oat, rye for poor

- wheat for the wealthy

eaten as bread, porridge, cruel, and pasta

- fava beans

- veggies: onions, garlic, beets and carrots

- pork, chicken, beef

- cod, herring

- food preserved by drying, salting, smoking and pickling

- almonds to thicken soups, stews, and sauces, almond milk

- two meals: dinner big midday meal, supper in evening

- everyone ate together (including servants)

Weapons:

- bow and arrow

- mace

- axe

Time of violence. Power and wealth were sought after.

5th - 15th centuries. "Middle ages."

Famous castles:

- Tower of London

- Warwick Castle

- Windsor Castle

- Cooked over open fire

- ovens only at bakeries

- kitchens in the middle of living area to provide heat

Showed off with heraldry.

Sports:

- form of soccer

- wrestling

- archery

- early form of bowling

- ice skates were cow shins

Marco Polo

Italian merchant wrote detailed journals of his travels to China, India, and Japan. Giving Europeans their first idea of it.

Art:

- church mosaics

- women became artists 

- illuminated manuscript

- sculpture

- stained glass

Women's fashions:

- long cloaks

- closed and pointed shoes

- gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones were lavished onto clothing.

- hats were of wire framework covered with embroidery or lace

- long trains on dresses

- long sleeves, hanging and fringed. 

Comparing and Contrasting Stories with Venn Diagrams

Venn diagrams are a very useful tool to help kids learn to compare and contrast. Since we're in our fairytale themed week  we've been reading lots of stories! We've got a book called Once Upon a Time with some great versions of many popular tales that we've been sticking to for this week, but we've also got some Disney books with collections of some tales as well. I wanted my daughter to see that there can be multiple versions of one story so we read both books version of "The Little Mermaid."

After we finished reading I decided that we should make a venn diagram so we could list out the differences and similarities together. Yes, Charlie is only two years old but it's very important for kids to get used to seeing that things are written out a lot in life. It helps with literacy skills overall, expanding vocabulary, spelling, sight word recognition, and like I said just getting used to the fact that we live in a print-rich environment. So, we did this on our big dry erase board.

Note: Not claiming that my handwriting was perfect, as I was writing pretty quickly.

It was actually a fun thing to do as well as very educational. I asked my daughter provoking questions about the stories to get her thinking. I explained how when you list something on one side of the venn diagram it's good to list something similar that's different/the opposite on the other side. And of course how the things that are in the same in both cases goes in the middle. Doing this also helps with reading comprehension skills. You might be surprised at how much your little one will remember from stories you read to them.

What's in the Dirt? Science Lesson

I recently picked up this SID the Science KID DVD for my daughter. 

It features 4 episodes. One is about animal communication, one is about birds, one is about leaves, and one about dirt. This activity was us expanding on the episode about dirt and bringing what we learned to life with a hands on experience. I think any time kids can get outdoors is really beneficial, I believe the same for sensory play, and of course science is a very important subject for kids to gain knowledge on. This activity combines all three of those wonderful things. Hands on activities really do help kids learn so much better than when they just hear or see something during a lesson!

In the episode the kids collect some dirt in a bucket, pour it onto a tray, explore it with a magnifying glass, and then draw what the saw in their journals. We did the same thing!

To start, I had my daughter in her swimsuit doing some sprinkler play. We eventually used the sprinkler to get a section of dirt in our yard wet. This created mud! That in itself is a wonderful science and sensory experience for kids. When water is added to dirt it creates mud! How fascinating. Once it became mud I gave my daughter her Minnie Mouse cultivator and shovel. She used the cultivator to loosen up the mud a little bit and the shovel to get it into her bucket. Try and make sure your little one(s) doesn't get a bunch of grass their bucket, which is especially easy to do if they use a cultivator and put that straight into the bucket. You don't want that grass throwing off the result of what is IN the dirt.

Once the bucket had enough mud/dirt in it we took it over to her outdoor table, which had one of our plastic tot trays waiting on it, and dumped it out onto the tray! She started to touch it immediately, kind of flattening it down as if it was play dough. We used our hands and the cultivator to spread the dirt around on the tray so we could find out what was in it.

I encouraged her to use her magnifying glass to get a closer look. She was very eager to do so! This and other fun science activities are great for getting kids used to using magnifying glasses, which are a very important tool in the science world.

 

We found that our dirt, still a little wet, was very clay-like. I was able to roll it into a very smooth ball. My daughter thought that this was neat. We discussed the similarities some dirt has to clay.

We also realized that our dirt, at least what we got from the first inch or so of the ground really didn't have a lot of things in it. There was no little rocks, no worms, no different colors (things they found in their dirt in the SID the Science KID episode). We did see some little pieces of grass and what seemed like roots. After playing with the dirt for a while though, we did start to see some ants, and then we saw a VERY SMALL gray insect of some sort. They're so tiny they are hard to see. It's great for kids to get to see that there are some living things in the world that are that small. It's a very impressive thing.

After we were all done exploring our dirt we hosed off our tray, bucket, shovel and cultivator and set them out in the sun to dry.