Making a Piñata!

     The boys love Curious George, and thanks to Netflix, there are a ridiculous amount of episodes available. There is one particular Curious George in which George and another kid whose name escapes me, make a piñata for Mother's Day. Ever since, Wyatt has been insistent that we make one. Now, he wanted me to attempt to make a donkey... but that wouldn't have gone well... so we went simple. Here is the steps I followed: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Pi%C3%B1ata
 I got some balloons and we blew one up. Then, we covered it with newspaper strips dipped in  a flour, water, and salt mixture, and stuck them to the balloon. Then it had to dry for a few days because they weren't great at the removing some moisture before putting it on the balloon part.

Next, we painted it to try to make it a more even color and texture before we put our colored tissue paper on. After we painted it, it dried for another day. 

 When that was dry, we hung our piñata up and used glue and some paint brushes and decorated it with colored tissue paper! We didn't really mean to, but it ended up looking like an Easter egg without even trying! Once it was dry, we added some candy in, poked two holes on either side of the opening and tied string to it.

Then we took it to the park around the corner, tied it up on the monkey bars, and had fun! They loved it! We're definitely going to try again sometime with something a bit more difficult than an egg! Haha!

Library Day - 3/13

Last week we started something new at the library. We're making our way through the library, picking a book off a different shelf until we slowly pick a book from every shelf in the kids section. So far we've done 3 shelves, and got some interesting reads out of it. Backhoe Joe and It's Hard to be Five (by Jamie Lee Curtis by the way... random...) are the one's we got through this week. So far they've all been pretty good, and we have some to read the next few weeks that look cool. It's always interesting to see what they find interesting to read just by the pictures. 

Of course, they also loved the Magic Tree House books, (though we didn't read ANY this week...weird...), and Wyatt even requested to go back in the series and re-read book #10.  I think they may be getting tired of how long the treehouse books are getting, but they always like them once they get started. Looking forward to another library day tomorrow!

Sight Word Dominos

     The boys were having some trouble remembering some of their sight words that we had learned lately, so I went to my Pinterest board to try out one of the sight word practice ideas I found. I saw the Sight Word Dominos activity, and decided to give it a try since they like playing their Ninja Turtles Domino game.

     Here is the link to what I found: http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2013/01/sight-word-dominoes-speed-racer-game.html.  Plus I have a bunch of notecards that I'm not using, so I didn't have to go buy any new materials! So, one night after they went to bed, I picked 16 words, and made enough dominos that each word was used three times. It worked out perfectly, and they looked pretty good. So, we got them out the next day, and just played like regular dominos. It worked out really well, and it seems to have really helped! They have been doing much better with them since then, so no complaints from me. :-)

Library Days - 2/27 & 3/6

   Well, I'm not sure how I managed it.... but somehow last week I completely forgot to take a picture of the books before we returned them. Which is fairly annoying since they read another book by themselves and I didn't get a picture of it. Argh. So, instead I found a picture of the book they read alone, and I guess we'll just move on and forget about what those other one's were...

Here's the book they read! It's essentially those same four words repeated in different variations, so it wasn't terribly difficult, but I was impressed that they both sounded out pear correctly instead of calling it pier. Definitely a confidence booster, which is always good! 

Now, here are last weeks books:

We read quite a few longer books this week, with two Tree House books and a few other chapter books thrown in. Of course they love Jack and Annie. But also, last week Wade asked me to reserve "The Cap Book" aka Caps For Sale because he wanted to read it again. We read it for school once and I think we've reserved it twice since then so it must be a winner. It is a pretty cute book, definitely worth a read. We also read How Rocket Learned to Read together as a read-alone type book, but we all read it together. The book is about the dog learning to read, so there are words sounded out on some pages that I had the boys switch off reading. They did great!