Rock Painting!

      Awhile back, Wyatt saw a book at the Library about painting on rocks, and he REALLY wanted to give it a try. So, we planned a hike at one of our favorite areas that has a river and a trail that runs along it that has a ton of the size rock we were looking for. I didn't manage to get any pictures of our actual rock collecting... mostly because I forgot my camera and my phone battery is evil... but I did get pictures of our painting and our beautiful rocks!

Here is the book we used. There are quite a few ideas in here, I went with the fish design and the bug design since they seemed somewhat simple, and the boys would like those. 

Here are some pictures of the painting in action!

Here are our results! The blue/red fish Wade did, and he called it a Night Salmon, the teal/yellow fish was by Wyatt and it's his Summer Trout! :-) The other one's are my demonstrations... lol!

The bugs turned out great too! The purple/green one is mine, the one with the purple/yellow/orange is Wade's and the light colored one on the right is Wyatt's. I drew on the eyes, mouths and antennae. 

Here are all their rocks! The last picture is all the rocks we collected on our hike! Lots of fun! 

Library Days - 4/3 & 4/10

Here are the books from 2 weeks ago. Quite a few from the "pick any book from this shelf" plan, like; Drum City, Two Left Feet and Josh's Halloween Pumpkin. They tend to pick A LOT Of Halloween/Fall themed books for some reason, but whatever works for them. Wade really wants me to get the "dot book" (Press Here by Tullet), but we're on the waiting list for it, so we got Mix It Up instead, which is by the same person, but about mixing paint colors. It's a good primary and secondary colors review for sure. 

This book was on a display at the Library a month or so ago, and Wyatt wanted to give it a try, so we checked it out. More on this one in another post!

They also really liked these books the most this week. I really liked the Tree House book this week, because it reminded the boys of a school lesson, and they remembered it! The book has four important scientist in it from history, two of which we learned about in school; Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell! They heard the names and knew who they were and even a few things they invented! My little homeschool mom heart skipped a beat! Haha! 

Here are last week's books. A lot of repeat books since they love to re-read the super hero and Scooby Doo books over and over, but a few they liked and one they asked for a second time. 

These were their favorite books this week. Spider Sandwiches we've gotten before, but they saw it on the shelf and Wyatt really wanted to read it again. It's silly and the boys always end up saying "Ewwwww" or "Groooooooooooss" about all the things the monster was eating, but they thought it was hilarious. Boys. Oy. Anyway, they also really liked Andrew's Loose Tooth. Partly because the name of the kid is Andrew, and partly because Wyatt lost a tooth recently. :-)

Library Days - 3/20 & 3/27

Here are the books we took back on 3/20. I know, I'm behind. But we were building pinatas and stuff. Lol! Anyway, We didn't get to any Tree House books that week, but the one book we read that they REALLY loved (especially Wyatt) was Yoko. It was about a cat that took sushi for lunch, and all the other kids made fun of her, until one of them tasted it and realized it was really good! Of course, my boys LOVE sushi. Like ridiculously. So now Wyatt already wants me to get this book again! :-)

Here are the books we took back last week. There are some good and interesting ones in there; some of which they picked from the shelf that we had to choose a book from this week. Don't Spill The Milk and Kindergarten Coundown were both from that, and were both good! No absolute favorites this week though. Now that I'm caught up, maybe I'll post this weeks before next Friday! :-)

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!