More Seuss

Tuesday was Green Eggs and Ham day. Of course we made skillet for breakfast with green food coloring. Potato, pepper, onion, ham, and scrambled eggs. Most of the kids really enjoyed it.

Tarzan did eat two bowls. I just caught him chewing or something. :)

Pretty sure I shouldn't be eating this, but it's tasty so here I go!

I do so like green eggs and ham, Thank you thank you Sam I am!


And of course, since I recently said Mater loves breakfast and eats a ton, he had to prove me wrong today. He was highly disturbed that the eggs were green. He would not eat them off his tray, instead he cried and said no way. He does not like green eggs and ham, he does not like them Sam I am!!

During the week we also read Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and Cat in the Hat. Tod and Copper's big brother was the Cat in the Hat for Halloween last year so they brought me the hat and bowtie and gloves. I also have a fish in the pot puppet. That day was lots of fun. It was also Dr. Seuss's actual birthday, and celebration days for O'Malley and Alice as well, turning five and one. My plan was to make these cool Thing One and Thing Two cupcakes I saw on pinterest, where you use blue cotton candy for the topping. But I couldn't find any, and let's face it, as long as there's cake, the kids don't care what it looks like.

So there we go, silly silly Seuss week in the bag. My kids went and saw the Lorax that weekend too. Pretty environmental topic for a book written in 1971. I'd never actually read it so wasn't expecting that. And his 91 year old widow was a producer. Kind of crazy. I assumed it was maybe a granddaughter till I googled her. Good for her to still be doing well!

Ten Apples Up On Top!

Dr. Seuss's birthday is this week, and so we are celebrating every day this week with a different book. He wrote 46 of them and it's easy to find five I love to focus on. He'd be 108 this year... what a cool legacy to leave behind, right? I think it would be hard to find a kid who gets read to regularly, who hasn't read at least one Seuss book.

Today we did Ten Apples Up on Top. This is one of my personal favorites, and we've done units on it before- see here. O'Malley and Roo are the only ones still here this time around though and they don't remember doing that, although they loved seeing the pictures of themselves.

This time we had a lot more trouble getting apples to stay on their heads. I'm not sure if I just needed an apple with a different shape, or if they were too wiggly to make them stay. Maybe both. But they had fun.

This was really leaning against the back of the couch and not so much actually on his head. Trifles....

Hercules was the most successful, I think, managing both a smile and the apple staying up there.

Tarzan apparently thought that "be still" was code for "look super serious and scared like I'm gonna throw the apple at your face..."
Tigger kept laughing and ducking it off so Tarzan helped.

Now it works. With a little help from the couch again.

Hey wait, where did that apple go?

Here, take this please. It doesn't work!

Mr. Ham and Cheese, needing me to take his picture one more time!

Next we took their old pictures off their cubby box and glued it on a piece of paper, and used thumbprints to put apples on top of their heads. They turned out pretty well.

We got a lot more than ten apples on top, I think!

Hard at work!

For snack we're having apples and little pieces of tootsie roll that are put on the back for spots and a head, and hopefully it will look like a ladybug. It's not officially in the book, but it's an apple snack. :) A fun day!

Friday Focus: Tarzan

Wow, I went back and looked at the last focus I did on Tarzan, and he looks so much older in just a couple months! He's saying I instead of me now, and counting in the right order, and working on workbooks and patterning and all kinds of big kid stuff.

Since O'Malley is getting ready for kindergarten, I'm doing more work on writing with him. I really think Tarzan is not to the stage where it's necessary- in six months it would be a lot easier and more natural for him. But he WANTS to right now, to be the same as O'Malley, and so we're going with it. I had gotten him a workbook for ages 3-5 and he blew through the first 30 pages or so pretty easily. Now we're getting to parts that have concepts he really doesn't understand so well yet, so we're doing concrete patterning and sorting and talking through the ideas before we go back to the book. He's chomping at the bit to get back to it- he doesn't think that the "playing" we do is as good as the "important work" in the books. I would disagree. :) In fact I think it's more important. But hey, we work with their interests, so there you go.

I put up the big play yard we have and let the older ones do their patterning in there so the babies couldn't eat the pieces. They felt super cool and had lots of fun.

I've started a ticket system with O'Malley, Tarzan, and Roo for their work. When they listen to books or complete a task or get some writing done, they get to put a ticket in the jar. On Thursday afternoons we count all the tickets, and for every five they have, they get to pull an activity out of another jar we made. Then we do all that stuff on Friday. Yellow slips are snacks and orange ones are activities. They are loving it.


Example of one Friday's treats: Make popsicles, play dress up, watercolors, and sidewalk chalk. They earned 23 tickets that week so 3 went back in the jar toward next week. I try to hand them out pretty liberally so they feel productive. :)

One week we drew the activity of making masks from paper plates. They had a really great time with that one. I am so terrible at artsy stuff like that, but I managed to make a Batman for Tarzan and something or other for O'Malley. It was fun.


He's very into Toy Story right now- lots of Buzz and Woody. My kids loved it last year and asked for a lot of the figures for Christmas, so we have a ton. It's really fun to pretend you're Andy and do creative things with all the toys. We've been doing some of that too- lots of Potato Head and silliness. I'll have to get some pictures to put up. And also buy the last of the ones we NEED with some of the supply fee. They're wanting a Bullseye.

And in other lists of things he wants, a sister is at the top right now. He has mentioned several times that he thinks he'll be getting one soon. :) No news on the home front, but hey, a guy can dream!

Feasting

Here we are, very serious about our mashed potato jobs:


Tarzan and O'Malley took charge of the washing and drying. Duchess and I peeled and chopped.

Silvermist scooped them all up and put them in the pot.

Aurora ran the water. (I was beginning to run out of jobs at that point, but she thought she was the bee's knees so it worked out fine.)

And then we ate tons of lovely food! I survived! Poor Kanga has bronchitis and had to stay home, but Mrs. Potts helped out and I did more of the cooking last night than I ordinarily would have, rather than letting the kids help. They like it a lot, but they are SO SLOW. :)

I forgot to take pictures while everybody was here. That makes me sad. But it was a little busy. I said 11:30, and it was closer to noon by the time I had everything on the table. I think it went well though! Some people were asking about various menu items, so here's what I have links to:

the Pioneer Woman's mashed potatoes I put much less butter than it called for.
cornbread dressing
Ellie Krieger's cucumber salad
candy apple pie

We also had smoked turkey breast, sauteed green beans, and a lime jello salad that my family always makes for holidays. Real coca-cola is the key to that- all I had in the house was diet coke and so it separated into layers. Still tasty though. And I have to say, I'm kinda proud of myself that with the exception of the graham cracker crust on the pie, the entire dinner was gluten free AND soy free. (not dairy free though. I live for cream cheese dishes on holidays. My record is 8 blocks in one meal, spread throughout various dishes. I think only 3 this time. Maybe 4.)


Copper was trying really hard to get to Mater's lunch. But he had already eaten most of it. Plus it's not so sanitary to just let them all feed off the one tray. :) So I put Copper in a chair of his own and gave him some mashed potatoes.


I love the look on his face. Okay. I have successfully hunted and trapped my food. It is squishy. What the heck do I do with it now?

His answer? Finger paint awhile, then throw it on the floor. Don't think he ate one bite. But he had fun. And also ended up with potatoes in his eyebrows. Nice.

Thanksgiving Countdown

Menu is set! I'll have a signup sheet for ingredients in the living room today, just because people are asking what they can bring. Don't feel like you have to though- I know this week is going to cost more at the grocery store and I plan accordingly. :) It's something I just like to do every year. But help is nice too, if you want. I'm good with it either way.

People were also asking why I start so early and what on earth I'm doing with the kids all that time for weeks ahead. Their attention spans aren't so long for most things and I don't want to overdo it, but they're perfectly happy to work on something everyday for fifteen minutes and then it takes us a month to get it done. For example? Turkey place mats with leaf feathers for all the guests.

After this day, I realized it was somewhere between lunacy and suicide to set that many of them loose with Mod Podge at the same time. I'm still cleaning up sticky. So, one at a time now, we go outside to choose leaves from the neighbor's yard and then come in to stick them to the paper turkeys. After all the kids have made one for themselves and for the babies, then we go with round two, and three, and sometimes four, to make sure that attending family members can have a place mat too. They're turning out cute and I'm going to laminate them all. You'll get to take them home after the feast is done.

So that takes a long time.

Then, as I mentioned before, for a week or so we were looking through grocery circulars and cookbooks and Pinterest at different recipes, and reading books about Thanksgiving to give them ideas about traditional foods. We get on all kinds of tangents explaining what various vegetables are, and what they taste like, and if they have gluten and I can or can't cook them.

Now that the menu is done, we'll do things like put graham crackers in ziploc bags for them to beat into crumbs with plastic hammers. They'll beat happily for twenty minutes, I'll have to transfer the pieces into new bags two or three times as they rip through them, and when they're done? We have ONE tiny step of the candy apple pie done. So I put the crumbs away and we do another step later on. Takes awhile.

The day we do the mashed potatoes, every kid who wants to help has his own job. I've got somebody at the sink washing potatoes and one with a towel to dry. For awhile I had to be the peeler, but now that's Duchess. Yay third grader! Then I chop them, and somebody else puts them in the pot. After they cook then we have mashers and mixers and butter people... it's a huge affair and takes all morning.

And then we take days off to do important motor skills work like hammer golf tees into a big pumpkin.

They hammered for almost two hours over the course of the day. Then I pulled all the tees out and they started over. Fun times.

Sum Up

In Inigo Montoya's voice... no, there is too much... let me sum up...

I have gotten completely bogged down in the fact that it is Tigger's turn for Friday Focus, but my computer ATE about fifty pictures that included four really cute ones I was going to use of him. I'm at a stall while I keep thinking of the post in my head that makes no sense without those pictures, and I couldn't possibly write a post about anything else while it's HIS turn...

I'm one of those people who make a lot of rules for myself in my head and then feel terribly guilty about breaking them, even though very few other people even know them or would care if they did.

So. I'm just gonna move on.

We're getting ready for our Thanksgiving feast. O'Malley, Aurora, Tarzan, and Silvermist are super excited about doing some cooking and planning. Hercules and Tigger are able to help some too, even though they're a bit clueless about the reasons. We've been looking through grocery store ads and I've been trying to talk to them about traditional holiday food. Turkey has sunk in. That and pie. Other than that, they keep thinking we're planning a tea party. They want to make cucumber sandwiches and cookies and strawberries and tea. You can tell we've had tea parties before. :) And those things would be fun, but I really want to do the whole big holiday meal. Hopefully today or tomorrow we'll have the menu settled and I can start having them do things to freeze.


In the meantime we're practicing on breakfast. They love to help me pour and stir.


Hercules is happy to be tall enough that he can climb up and help with the preschoolers but he's not quite sure what to do when he gets there. :)

We're also doing some fun fall crafts that I found on Pinterest. I am SO loving that website. I have a board now for daycare ideas. We take walks and save leaves to make all sorts of things, and I think we're going to do some other stuff for Christmas presents for moms and dads. We're just about done with the Mother Goose body work and instead of buying something else before the holidays we're just filling in with crafty stuff, reading, and cooking. It's nice.

Words

I got out the dress up clothes yesterday- they've been in the attic for awhile so it's like they're brand new. Silvermist and Tarzan have been working through gender issues with the costumes.

Tarzan: "Silvermist tell me this not for boys!", waving a magic wand with a glittery star on the end.

Me: "You can use that if you want to! It's a wand. Like Harry Potter! He's a wizard."

Tarzan to Silvermist: "YEAH! See? I need this! I a LIZARD!!"

Body Work

We're working on the Mother Goose Time's "My Amazing Body" this month. I have two weeks of curriculum left still because of all the sickness and nice weather. :) Either they're feeling bad, or it's too nice to stay in. But on days that we've been doing our MGT box, they're having a really good time. Tarzan is especially excited about it. He comes in every morning and asks me, "we do body work today? do circle time?"

The last few days have been about the senses. Yesterday we did smell, and we talked a lot about skunks. I really enjoyed the discussion. It's fun for me to try to explain things in a way that they really get. They wanted to know WHY the skunk smells so bad. And yeah, I could have used the phrase "defense mechanism" and left it at that. But I talk a lot. We looked at a photograph of a skunk and I asked them if he looked nice. "Yes! Like a kitty cat!" Tarzan tells me.

Okay, I say. So does he have sharp teeth? NO! Does he have sharp claws? NO! Does he have long legs for running fast? NO! So... what happens when another animal wants to fight him?

...crickets chirp while they ponder... and then O'Malley yells, "OH! He will get REALLY hurt!! And maybe DIE!!"

um, yes. Leave it to a four year old boy to make it about the murder death kill. So, I ask, "Do you think any fierce animals will want to come close to him if he smells REALLY bad?"

They were totally delighted. It made me laugh. OH! He can protect himself because he is so stinky! And he doesn't have to fight and die!

We're also working on the word "texture" this week, and talking about how different textures feel. Bumpy, sticky, stuff like that. Easy and fun to reinforce at home if you're so inclined. :)

Blue Tube, Bones, and Skin

We bought a puzzle awhile back, thinking that soon the kids would be big enough to work it. It got put away for a few months and just recently returned to the playroom. Tarzan, Aurora, and O'Malley are now LOVING it. They still need a little help with it, so I do it eight or ten times a day while we sit and talk about it and they hand me pieces.

I've never seen this brand before, but now that I'm looking it up, there's a whole set. Very cool. There's even a pregnant lady one. We have the girl layered puzzle. The bottom layer is the skeleton, then organs, muscles, skin, and clothes. It's led to so many interesting discussions and teaching them about body systems. They started out with thinking the skeleton was gross- I guess their only frame of reference for it is Halloween and gory stuff. So we talked about how everybody has bones inside and how they protect your squishy parts. :) Tarzan is excited about his skull to protect his squishy brain and goes around knocking himself on the head and yelling about his hard skull. It's pretty funny.

O'Malley's favorite is the organ layer. It shows all the main organs with the systems in different colors. You can trace each color through and see the functions. I love it. At dinner the other night he choked on his food and then told me how his food went down the blue tube to his lungs, instead of going down the green tube to his belly like it was supposed to.

We haven't talked much about muscles except to poke their biceps and talk about how muscles make you strong.

The skin layer weirded them out a bit at first too. Such the stigma on being nekkid. The puzzles are anatomically correct so we talk about how it's a girl and how everybody has skin to hold all that other stuff inside.

I love finding cool stuff like this. I never would have thought about teaching preschoolers the digestive system, but with this puzzle they really get it, on their level. It's so fun!

Time off For Good Behavior

Tarzan tee-teed on the potty! Woo hoo! :) We use whatever motivation works around here, and what he wanted for a reward was getting to play some Wii with O'Malley. They had a really good time!

Friday Focus: Tarzan

Tarzan boy! Thankfully he does not swing from chandeliers or anything like that. :) When I think of him as Tarzan, I actually sing the Backyardigans Tarzan song in my head rather than the Disney one- "I'm Tarzan, I'm Tarzan, I'm Tarzan the very strong...." He's been here most of the summer and I haven't done his own post yet- but now it's his turn!

He's an extremely cheerful kiddo most of the time. In fact, even when he's instigating something he ought not to be doing, or taking something from Aurora, he's got the sunniest smile. It's hard to fuss at him because he always looks so genuinely happy- not a malicious bone in his body. Just not so much paying attention sometimes and not sure of his own strength....


I have a "Who's on First" type conversation ongoing with him. He says "me want" most of the time, and I keep trying to tell him that it's "I want". But when I say that, he says "No YOU want. Me want!" And then I say, "no, you say I want instead of me want..." So far the nuances are kind of lost on him. But he speaks way better Spanish than I do, so I guess you can't have it all when you're not even three. :)

He talked about his new monkey every day for quite awhile after our event. It made him happy. That makes me happy too.


"Look! Me on scooter board!"

I also love the way he counts- it always starts 1, 9, 6. I have a feeling there must be some important number that goes that way, maybe a phone number or something, because no matter how many times we discuss that 2 is supposed to come after 1, he never says it until after 9 and 6. Wish I knew what he was thinking when he counts, because I can tell there's a reason. I just can't figure out what it is.

Noah's Ark Animal Workshop

We had a home field trip yesterday! I don't know why more companies don't do this- it's so great for small operations like us. I do not transport. Ever. There are too many littles who need car seats and aren't independently mobile, and I'd need a bus or something. Craziness. So when the Noah's Ark lady called and asked to set something up for us, I jumped on it. It was really nice to have something new and different for the kids to do. They've been excited about it for a week! We asked everybody to wear a shirt with an animal on it to get into the spirit of the day. We had monkeys, fish, frogs, pandas, lions, and a mouse, among other things.

I'd never heard of Noah's Ark before- it's set up similarly to Build-a-Bear Workshop, except she comes to the house like a Tupperware party. The kids get to choose an animal, stuff it themselves, do a little wishing star ceremony thing, and get a birth certificate. There's special pricing and just a few choices for daycares, but we were happy. She said the tie-in right now is that Zookeeper movie, so the kids got to pick a giraffe, monkey, or lion. The lion was super cute, but everyone wanted giraffes and monkeys.

After all the kids got their animal skins, Miss F talked about how to stuff them. They were careful to listen to the directions- it was actually pretty impressive. Here's Aurora and O'Malley, taking notes....

Okay, I got it! We put the fluffy stuff in here!

Tarzan begins the stuffing process...

Everyone joins in...

After the animals were all stuffed, Miss F handed out rainbow wishing stars, and they did a little bonding ceremony. It was pretty cute. First they held the stars up in the air and made a wish.

After that she asked the kids what they wanted to do with their animals and then they would rub the stars on themselves and the animals.
If you want your animal to know your voice and listen to you, you have to rub the star on your ears! Then rub it on your animal's ears so he can hear you!


Animals recognize people by their special smell, so rub the star on his nose so he will always remember what you smell like...


The most important part of all- you want your animal to always love you, so rub your wishing star over your heart, and then tuck it inside with the stuffing!

Okay, give your animal a big hug- you're all done!


We tried repeatedly to interest the younger boys in this project, but it was no use. Hercules screamed and kicked when I tried to make him sit in my lap to stuff his monkey. He and Tigger were much more excited about getting to hang out in the living room with O'Malley's big kid toys that they usually don't get to use!
At least they'll get the future benefits of having the animal to snuggle at home. It's doubtful any of these kids will actually remember making them after awhile anyhow, except for maybe Duchess. :)

Then later on in the afternoon we made foam picture frames with animals on them. I took a picture of everybody with their new special animal friend and once I get them back from Apple I'll send them home to go in the frames. We made one for all the babies too, even though they didn't make animals with us. Mater helped a lot.



Love me some chunky Mater!!