G is for...Grass Head Family

Cristi from Through the Calm and Through the Storm and Meg from Adventures with Jude are hosting this great weekly party called Blogging Through the Alphabet. All are welcome to join in, just make sure to keep your posts family-friendly. I am determined to stay faithful this time around. I might not always post on the same day of the week, but I have every intention to post something each week.

Here is how I decided my "theme" for this round of Blogging Through the Alphabet. As I was going through old blog posts recently, I noticed I have some neat ideas for activities and crafts that I did with in the past. Unfortunately, I always included them in my weekly wrap up posts or more recently in Poppins Book Nook posts, so they sort of got buried. I can't really share them as individual activities or create pinnable images to promote them and share my ideas, which is why I started this blog in the first place (to share my ideas with others who work with children). So, I am going to make new posts for these ideas.

I have found there is a huge benefit in this strategy. I am remembering  ideas that I had forgotten, which means I can now do these activities with the younger children. I will be sharing the old pictures and possibly sharing new pictures of the younger children participating.

Several years ago, during our letter G week, the girls got to make Grass Head Families.

G is for. . . Grass Head Family

I cleaned out egg shells and the children got to turn them into a little family. They drew faces on the shells.

Then we added potting soil and grass seed. 

About a week later, the Grass Heads had quite a decent amount of hair. 

School Time Week 27 (Gg lessons concluded)

This week we focused on the letter G.  We didn't get any of the art lessons done this week, except for a shape hunt (and I didn't get any pictures of that).  We started the week with our G Muffin Tin:

Then they made their G collages. Our words this week were: glasses, guitar, gate, grapes, goat, and gorilla.

This next project wasn't very original, but we had fun.

I drew some dotted G's:

Put dots to show the girls where to start tracing:

Then they traced the G's:

I applied glue to their traced lines and they added glitter:

Amelia wanted to use her puppet to put on a puppet show of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Unfortunately I couldn't find the book so I botched the story up a bit, but Amelia didn't mind.  Then because the love seat cushions were already out I decided to put together an obstacle course.

Up and over the cushions, around the rocking chair, balance on the wrapping paper tube

Around the chair, around the chair

over and over again

And under the table

(Yes I led them and went under the table and followed them on their turns as leader and crawled under the table.  I had a lot of energy that day)

Then we got to the end:

Each time we did it the girls had to write "The end."  You can see we did it a few times.

We spent some time on worksheets.  Here are Tabitha's Gg's from the BeginningReading.com site:

Amelia used her wipe off ABC workbook.

While Tabitha worked on some counting worksheets. (Also from Beginning Reading)

I finally pulled out the sensory tub I made for Valentine's Day that I never made time for.  I am so upset with myself.  They LOVE this activity.  I got some Valentine's erasers and red pompoms.  Then I got 5 heart containers and numbered them 1-5.  They have to make sure each container has the correct number of gems. I added some measuring cups and a lid for scooping and they have added baby food jars.  They've made pies (cinnamon, soda, chocolate and fairy dust pie).  They also filled the jars with rice and called it milk (well... I used to drink rice milk)

It also gave a great opportunity to practice our practical life skill of 

SWEEPING:

I added the tape square on the floor as I learned at the Montessori, that way the child knows where to sweep to and they are not randomly sweeping all around the room:

I also found a great idea over at Free Kid Crafts.

We made gumdrops out of Jello and water.

We poured the Jello into a bowl

Made a well and poured a drop of water into it.

Then we rolled the water and the Jello around in a ball until it was saturated:

They were to harden for 15 minutes, so we had them after lunch.  Pretty yummy, though sweet.  It is straight Jello after all.  It did make more than this, but I was just making a few for lunch.

I then decided I wanted to make a Grass Head Family (I was going to do this for E and make them Egg Heads but I couldn't find the grass seed)

We used milk jug lids for bases:

Then the girls each got 4 egg shell halves that I cleaned out earlier.  (We eat a lot of eggs and I believe these were from the quiche for Breakfast For Dinner Thursday).  They drew faces on them.

Amelia learned that the consequence of not listening and playing with the shells when told not too means one might break and she only gets 3.

Now we are patiently waiting for the grass to grow (fingers crossed) so we can give them a hair cut.

And I found some neat color-by-number gumball activity sheets over at Confessions of a Homeschooler

And we played a "Greater Than" game with dice.  I will share more about this later.

And I needed to get back on track and make a g shaped craft.  I have completely been neglecting this for the last few letters.  I found a lot of different ideas over at The Attached Mama's Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection. I decided I liked the one found at The Ramblings and Adventures of a SAHM

Tabitha cut out her own guitar body and then they glued them together and we added 3 yarn strings:

Of course they had to have some fun with daddy and their real guitars they got for Christmas.

And we made "goo."  This is one of the activities out of  60 Quick and Easy Science Experiments With Everyday Items I am reviewing.  Last week we did gravity and this week we did goo.  I even turned it into a math activity.

And the girls had a blast all week with our diaper.com box.

It was a car, a crib (and the girls took turns being mommy and baby), a cave and a house.

It even became a "real" crib for a sleepy girl.

Speaking of the sleepy girl, here is some special Tiny Tot Time:

Hannah is really enjoying coloring lately:

In order to keep her occupied during lessons one day I gave her an empty puffs container

and some ping pong balls.

Here she is squatting and coloring:

She's getting really good at standing from that squatting position anywhere and everywhere.

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