Happy Memorial Day!

In honor of the soldiers who have given their lives for our country

and for the lives they left behind - Happy Memorial Day

HERE is a link that describes the history of this day

Memorial Day with Kids!

Facts -
For most of us this is a day to celebrate the beginning of summer activities. Truly this is a day that dates back to the end of the Civil War and is dedicated to the men and women who served our country and gave their lives for our freedom. With that being said Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer season.

Fun -

We will be celebrating Memorial Day in the traditional way by having a BBQ. Grilled vegetable kabobs, Turkey Burgers, Corn on the cob, patriotic cones filled with blue, red and white corn chips! Yummy! Of course with any good and successful BBQ you need a fabulous dessert and have we got the perfect Memorial Day dessert. We will be using freshly picked strawberries, blueberries, homemade whipped cream and delicious short cake to create a delicious, phenomenal, fun and patriotic desert. For those who do not want the short cake, we will be using skewers to make fruit kabobs. So fun and very occupational for Lauren who will meticulously place fruit onto the skewer in a pattern that we will draw for her to follow. She will be encouraged to try to skewer the fruit through their centers and in a pattern.

Crafts -

One of the crafts we decided to make is something we saw on Martha Stewart's website. This craft is a great way to use the Fringe Scissors we bought for Easter Crafts we did back in April. As we love things that can have many uses we will be using these wooden BBQ skewers for both decoration in and around our plants and for our meal. You can place these paper fireworks in your plants or you can fill glass jars or cups with play sand in patriotic colors of course, and use them around the table setting.

Whats great about this holiday is that you can reuse your crafts or decorations for more holiday to come like Forth of July and even Labor Day!  We will post our own pictures after we make our crafts and tablesetting for you to see soon!

Horseshoe Crabs with Kids!

Activity:

After checking the moon phases and the tide schedule we found a good day to go to a beach in Delaware to see the horseshoe crabs. These are amazing creatures that spawn on the beaches of the Delaware Bay every year around the full moon and high tide. There are a few weeks you can see this fabulous display of survival. The Crabs lay their eggs in the sand and then the Red Knots (bird that fly from South America to the Arctic every year) come and feast on the eggs before continuing their flight north. This is a wonderful display of nature and we really enjoyed our day.

Education:

There are a lot of great facts and fun things to learn about

Archeology with Kids

For Matthews’s end of the year project, he chose to do a study on shark fossils and the erosion of land into bays and seas. For the research section of this project we took him down to a beach where we spent the day panning and searching for fossils.

We found many sharks teeth, ray plates and barbs that Matthew will sort, organize and find the Latin names for. He will then further sort the teeth by where they are located in the shark’s mouth and then create a final project/presentation that will show the organized teeth and some history on the erosion of land into the bays and seas.

This was fun to be involved in the research part of this project. Though it was raining, we were able to find lots of cool fossils and had a good time doing it!

Archeology is such a huge field today; there are many sites that the kids can check out. You can also take your kids to a dig and see archeologist at work if there is one going on in your area.

Below are some cool sites for kids to further learn about Archeology that give some great information for kids:

Archeology for Kids

http://www.nps.gov/archeology/public/kids/index.htm

Fossil information for Kids:

http://www.fossilsforkids.com/

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/

Dig Magazine – The Archeology Magazine for Kids!

http://www.digonsite.com/

Fun Archeology Games:

http://archaeology.mrdonn.org/games.html

Archeology Lesson Plans (including Video, PowerPoint Presentations etc):

http://archaeology.mrdonn.org/lessonplans.html

Seed Packets - FREEBIE

Check out these adorable FREE Seed Packet templates from Weeds & Wildflowers!  You can download them HERE

Happy Mothers Day!

Happy Mothers Day to all our Mom's! 

Some participating TCBY stores are giving free cup or cones to Mom's, more info HERE

                                                               

Arbor Day with kids!

April 30, 2010: Arbor Day is always the last Friday in April.  Although we haven't picked our tree yet we are going to plant a tree today. We live in Pennsylvania and our state tree is the Eastern Hemlock Tree. Here is a great site that displays all the state trees that you can use to find your state tree by clicking HERE

 

This day’s activities will focus on trees. We are going to take a visual stroll through the world and find out what kinds of trees grow in each hemisphere. Our focus will be on the differences and similarities. We will discuss the rainforest, remembering we are keeping our studies to trees. And we will create a list of how trees help us in our everyday lives, oxygen, paper, habitats etc.  We will research our state tree and recreating our own hemlock tree to display in our house.  You can print this poster out that has the state trees listed HERE.

Here are a few more interesting things...

 

Smokey the Bears 65th birthday is this year. Click HERE for resources for forest fires for kids and teachers

 

**** Official Website for Arbor Day *******

 

April 1 - May 15, 2010, consumers that purchase three Hanes® products will receive a free Earth Day t-shirt with proof of purchase through mail-in redemption. For every t-shirt redeemed, Hanes will make a $1 donation to the Arbor Day Foundation. For every $1 of Hanes donations, the Arbor Day Foundation will plant a tree, up to 20,000 on Hanes' behalf. Click HERE for more information.

*** Free Trees, is that possible?  Non Profit "Free Trees and Plants" says it is click on link to find out how it works.  Says you have to pay $7.95 for shipping so its not that free but we think its worth a try. 

Here are some website that will help with the planting of your new tree: (click on links)

http://www.tree-planting.com/

http://www.backyardgardener.com/

http://www.treeplantingguide.com/

Poetry Reading Day with Kids!

The kids are going to choose their favorite short story or poem today and read it out loud. I will choose a really creative new invigorating poem to read to the children today and we will be acting out certain parts of the poem after I am finished reading. I believe it is always good for the children to act out characters and parts of poetry and stories. They really get into their parts. They will work on remembering certain lines and actually creating the character to who they think the character should be.


I am going to explain again to the kids the art of creating a haiku. We will then be coming up with a few of our own. A haiku is a poem that does not rhyme. You have to actually paint a mental picture using words. I like this lesson for kids and I am planning on having the kids draw or paint what their haiku is about.

A haiku is actually very easy to write. They are a 3 line poem. The first line is 5 syllables, the second line is 7 syllables the third line contains 5 syllables. With these 17 syllables the author of a haiku paints a mental picture.

Who or what am I? This is always fun to do with a haiku, you use the haiku outline and lots of facts without writing who or what you are describing and then everyone has to guess. This is going to be a fun and educational part of this day

To learn more about Haiku click HERE

Poetry for Kids has a couple of free e-books. You can check this great site out HERE

National Pretzel Day with Kids!

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…………………………. Today is pretzel day!!!!!!!

We all love pretzels and boy did we enjoy today. We started off by painting a banner and Lauren painted the salt on the letters. Very occupational, placing all those dots on the letters. Believe it or not pretzels are tricky to twist and create so we knew the kids would have to practice. So, we broke out the playdoh and practiced rolling and twisting the pretzels.

Then we came up with a work mat from posterboard and brown paint that the kids could work on and follow to make the pretzels. We covered the mat with contact paper and taped them to the table to create a work station for each person. When the dough was ready to twist we used a pizza cutter and cut each person a strip of dough to work with.

The mats were the greatest idea for this day; the kids used them to roll the dough and twist it and really did a good job creating the pretzels. Into the oven for 10 minutes and we had hot yummy pretzels to work with. Next came the very fun part, we dipped the pretzels into melted butter and then into a pan of cinnamon sugar, Yummy! This was so fun. The kids had a great time doing all the work and we all had a really fun dessert for all of us to eat. We utilized all of the senses today, smell, taste, touch, hearing (classical music today) and of course the visual. This created an atmosphere where all of us could work and truly enjoy our day.

FUN, FUN, FUN, We can't wait to do this again next year!!!!!!

Cinco De Mayo with kids!

Technically this is the day where the Mexican army defeated the French army at the Battle of Puebla. This is not a celebration of the Mexican independence as many think (that is celebrated on September 16th) but a celebration of the Mexican and Hispanic culture. We will be having a lot of fun with this day.

We just love Cinco De Mayo, what a fun, colorful, festive holiday to celebrate. We picked up a few wall hangings we found at our local party store and can’t wait to put these up. It will really give the room a lot of ambiance and this celebration is definitely one that should be a feast for the eyes as well and traditional Mexican food, music, crafts and dance.

Kids CRAFT:

Wendy has a friend who is Mexican and a few years ago she made a project for her kids school. She called this “ojos de Dios” loosely translated it means “God’s Eyes”. We researched these on the internet and found an interesting fact. “God’s Eyes” predates Mexico to the Huichol Indians. They used to weave these and every year until a child turned five they added a layer of thread. This is such a beautiful decoration. We both remember how much we loved the colors.

Here is my take on how to make these.

You will need sticks, glue and colorful yarn. Green, Red and White would represent the Mexican flag but you can use any colors you like. Now you need to either weave thread around the sticks to form a cross or glue the sticks together to form a cross. Now you need to fasten a piece of yarn to the center of the cross on what will be the back of the project. You then wind the first piece of yarn over and under all the sticks then tie that off, again at the back of the project so it will not be seen from the front when you are done. Do this and alternate colors as you wish until you are completed your Ojos de Dios. These can be done in any size from small pin size to large wall hanging size. Found this website that has incredibly detailed ones that you can see – HERE

Decorations:

We will be making a Pinata for our centerpiece to go along with all the other decorations we picked up at our local Party Supply Store.

Food:

• 
  
  Mexican Taco Salads
• 
  
  Tortilla Soup
• 
  
  Non-alcholic Margarita's or Daquairi's
• 
  
  Mexican Wedding Cookie - Recipe Below - We make these every year they are so good!
• 
  
  Cinnamon Churros with Mexican Chocolate Dipping Sauce Recipe

Mexican Wedding Cookies

FOR THE DOUGH                                                   FOR THE GARNISH

1 cup pecan halves                                                       1 cup confectioners' sugar

1 cup all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

DIRECTIONS:

1.In a food processor, pulse pecans, flour, granulated sugar, cinnamon, and salt until mixture resembles coarse meal; add butter and pulse until a dough forms. Shape dough into a disk, and wrap tightly in plastic; refrigerate until firm, 30 to 60 minutes.

2.Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Pinch off and roll dough into balls, each equal to 1 level tablespoon. Space 1 1/2 inches apart on two large baking sheets. Bake, switching sheets from top to bottom halfway through, until cookies are just golden around edges, 20 to 25 minutes.

3.Cool 5 minutes on sheets; transfer to a rack to cool completely. Place confectioners' sugar in a bowl. Roll cookies in sugar twice to coat thoroughly, tapping off excess.

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We will be researching all of this and coming up with the finer points to our day of celebration.  So remember to check back on this post :)