Sweetie pies and cupcakes

   During a previous play date, Sweetpea and my cousin's young daughter spent an entire Saturday afternoon 'baking' some felt cupcakes in her play kitchen. They would mix imaginary dough in a tiny mixing bowl, stick the cakes in the oven for a while and then decorate their creations with the most splendid, invisible frosting and sprinkles. A tea party would follow, and then 'washing' of the dishes, and then they would start all over again, delighting me with their chef-ly conversations as I listened in from the kitchen.

   They had such fun that I couldn't wait to see what they would do if they had the real thing to work with, so about a week later we invited L over for some bona fide cupcake decorating!

Just after lunch and as soon as ArrowBoy was down for his nap, I set up the picnic table with everything they would need...

Bowls of yummy butter frosting in girlie colours...

...and a muffin tin full of goodies for each.

Two super-excited little chefs just itching to get started...

And then they were off!

Some of the creations...

And the very BEST part:

YUM!!

And of course I couldn't resist and had to join in...the Dad was quite happy with that when he tucked into these after work that afternoon.

   As you can well imagine, Sweetpea had a fairly intense sugar rush after all this, and she and I spent the remainder of the afternoon playing running games in the garden to get it all out of her system!!!

Drum roll, please: I am back!!

   It feels SO good to sit here and type up a blog post again...I have really, really missed these late-night writing sessions, a cup of tea next to my keyboard and the quiet hum of the computer.

   I do apologise for the sudden disappearing act, but trust that you will understand when I say that I haven't been feeling up to much of anything  in the past three months, because...

  Yes, God in His infinite grace has decided to bless my womb once again and I am almost 15 weeks along in this pregnancy!! Yet, delighted as we all are here in the Joyful household, the first trimester has been very hard for me, with severe nausea and exhaustion. BUT, as with my last pregnancy, all that disappeared like clockwork the day I hit 13 weeks, and I am so relieved to be 'back in the saddle', so to speak, especially for my children's sake. I still suffer from back aches and really struggle to sleep at night, but I'll take that over the nausea anytime!!

    Thanks for all the caring e-mails to ask if all was well - it is good to be back!

Play and Learn with Mama - Week 2: "Hou vas, Seekoei!"

    Our book for the week was a lovely Afrikaans picture book called Hou vas, Seekoei! (Translated, that would be Hang on, Hippo!)

Hanna and her dad decides that this beautiful, sunny Saturday is far too nice to spend at home in front of the television, so they pack a picnic lunch and head for the beach, with Hanna's blow-up hippo in tow. When a gust of wind grabs a hold of Hippo, Hanna has to run for all she's worth to catch up to him. A snappy crab nearly pinched him, while a crew of pessimistic seagulls screeches discouragement. But Hanna won't give up that easily, and in the end all ends well.

Elements of the book we focussed on:

• Vocabulary: beautiful, descriptive language describes how the wind bullied Hippo!
• Beach clothing: Sweetpea's favourite new word is 'sarong'!
• Seagulls
• Wind, air, breath 
• Sand and beach activities.

Here' s what we got up to:

Pre-writing and fine motor exercises:

Hippo maze from "Dinkie Mazes" by Smile Education

Tracing the letter S and identifying words related to the story that starts with the s sound

Simple dot-to-dot from "Dinkie Dots" by Smile Education

I was very excited when Sweetpea asked to colour the hippos. She has not shown much interest in colouring before, but asked me if we could colour these and if I would show her how. So I coloured the big dot-to-dot hippo, and she followed suit with the mazes hippos - and loved it! About a week and a half has passed since we did this, and she has been colouring every day since. I leave a few colouring books and pencils out for her and she happily spends at least a few hours a day at this.

Learning about birds

Circle all the sea birds.

We also made a little booklet with facts and pictures about seagulls. The pictures were placed in a little basket, and as we read the heading on each page together (Seagull's webbed feet, Seagull's eggs...etc) she would pick the appropriate picture and glue it down in the space provided on each page. (This was self-correcting in a way, as I had made the spaces/empty rectangles the same size as each individual picture)

'Baking'

We made these fun beach desserts inspired by a similar one I saw here. Ours were made with instant vanilla pudding (mixed with soy milk), crushed Tennis biscuits, and we used an apricot sweetie for a beach ball!

Sweetpea's favourite part was crushing the biscuits with the rolling pin.

Sensory play

We made a batch of play dough and mixed in a whole lot of sand, which Sweetpea then used to make a beach with! She used pebbles and shells (both mentioned in our story book), and one of her small pocket dolls was got the role of Hanna, the main character in our book! 

Here is 'Hanna', riding a dolphin to the beach - not part of the original story, but oh, so much fun that I think it should have been!!

'Science'

Our first science activity involved talking about wind, and how we can make 'wind' with our breaths. We looked at a picture of our lungs from Big and Busy Body by Roger Priddy, and inhaled and exhaled with our hands on our ribs. We then tried to see how many things we could blow - not included here is a small blow-up whale bath toy.

We then learnt about floating and sinking and used a diagram on our dry-erase board to jot down which items sank and which floated.

Art

Sweetpea painted a beach scene with paint mixed with sand. I had pre-cut the shapes and afterwards she glued them down herself. I was very impressed with her composition!! (My apologies: I just can't get this picture to upload in landscape!)

We made footprint flip-flops which will decorate the front cover of our lapbook later.

Another possibility inspired by the book would be to do wax resist painting, like the illustrator used for the clouds. 

A trip to the beach!

 Before we took off we did a quick worksheet on appropriate clothing to wear.

Which clothes can we wear to the beach? 

My youngest sister joined us and the children had soooo much fun hanging out with their aunt!

And just for fun...

A cheery handprint sun! You can print the face from here. (I was going to use this for a backyard beach scene, but we didn't get around to it - see below)

More ideas

Things we just didn't get around to:

• Making a backyard beach scene by sticking poster board palm trees and a merry sun against an outside wall, and then drinking juice from pineapples while lounging on your beach towels, the Beach Boys playing in the background!
• Cut beach pails and shovels from bright cardboard and let the child sort them from largest to smallest
• Counting cardboard sea stars.

Godly Play: The Good Shepherd

   As part of our Play and Learn morning routine, we start the day off with a Bible story. As soon as the house is in order and everyone is dressed and ready, I ask Sweetpea to fetch the Bible Blankie (a small quilt I made for her when she was a baby. We take this to church on Sundays and they are expected to sit quietly on it...yea, well...) When ArrowBoy hears the words 'Bible Blankie' he plonks himself down just where he is!

  To help make the stories more visual and concrete, I follow some of the principles of Godly Play. This is a Montessori-inspired approach that I first read about on Deb Chitwood's blog, Living Montessori Now. At Deb's suggestion I bought the book Young Children and Worship  by Jerome S. Berryman and Sonja Stewart. It is a fantastic introduction to this approach and about half of the book consists of patterns for making your own material. I gleaned a tremendous amount from it, and then added my own style to it, since there are a few things about their approach that I find either lacking or too 'legalised'  in comparison to our family's convictions.It remains a wonderful reference and source of inspiration for our morning Bible stories, though.

  To complement our Play and Learn with Mama theme from last week, for which we looked at the book Psalm 23 as illustrated by Barry Moser (you can see what we did by clicking here), we read the story of the Good Shepherd in the mornings. For this one I followed the guidelines from Young Children and Worship, but used a wooden shepherd figure and sheep from a nativity set that I had made last year. Instead of using strips of tan felt for the sheep fold as the book suggests, we made one out of shaped craft sticks.

Here the Good Shepherd is leading his flock through the narrow and dangerous places toward the safety of the sheepfold. 

  On the first day of our week I read the story from a children's Bible and  just briefly discuss it. We then learn a new song that relates to the story (in this case it was the Afrikaans song, Die Heer is my herder [The Lord is my Shepherd]), and then repeat our memory verse for the week (Psalm 23:1).  On the second day I bring out the Godly Play materials and present the story in this way, and we again sing our new song and practice our memory verse. The same goes for the third day. On the fourth and fifth days of the week I invite Sweetpea to present the story using the materials. She is also welcome to play with the set during the rest of the day, but only in a calm, respectful way. I will give her another toy if she is just wanting to play for fun. 

Play and Learn with Mama - Week 1: Psalm 23

   If you would like to know more about how I structure morning play and learn times at our home, please click here.

   This week our launch pad book was Psalm 23, illustrated by Barry Moser.

We read the book everyday and loved looking at the gorgeous illustrations and chatting about things like what it must be like to be sheep, why sheep need shepherds, how Jesus is like a shepherd to us, how the sheep in this book are different from the ones we usually see in our country, and so on. 

Pre-Writing

Mama-made dot-to-dots, and she had to draw in 'woolly coats' for the two sheep in the center.

Counting

We counted how many sheep in each fold by placing a Touch 'n Count cube (please see bottom of post for ordering information)  on each one. We then stacked the cubes to see which one was tallest (i.e. the most sheep!). I was hoping to do a simple graph, too, but Sweetpea lost interest.

Cutting

I drew these pictures on long strips of butcher paper and taped it to the wall for Sweetpea to practice cutting. This was a hit!

Birds and their beaks

We discussed the three types of birds we saw in the book: doves, vultures and pelicans, and how their beaks are adapted to their diets. We watched short video clips online at Ocean Footage and Nature Footage and both children were fascinated and we had long conversations about pelicans and vultures all day long!

I made this simple worksheet for Sweetpea to connect each bird to it's food.

Then she traced the irregular shapes of bird beaks on a page from a cute little book called Pattern Play.

'Sheep' Art

I wanted to do something different than just gluing cotton balls to a sheep's body, so we had a go at painting with shaving cream...because it looks like sheep wool, of course!! Well, it does until you add the colour...This was the highlight of my children's week!

Oh yea, Mama!

It was inevitable, and we had a lovely shower afterwards which was almost just as much fun!!

Little Bo Peep...

I first showed her pictures of shepherds from a few children's Bibles, then helped her dress like one. I had used masking tape to make two corrals on the carpet, and drew sheepy faces on some white balloons. Their feet with cut from black cardboard to make them a little more stable. The idea for the paddle 'staff' is from here. She had to gently herd her sheep from one corral to the next using her 'staff'.

Thank goodness for such a good assistant shepherd to help keep renegade sheep at bay!

NOTE: Many of the toys and learning equipment that I use during our morning playtimes come from the various toy ranges I sell. In today's post, the Touch 'n Count Cubes is such a product. These sell at R45 per 100 (10 of each colour) - price excludes postage. I gladly accept orders for anywhere in South Africa. Please 

email me if you'd like to place an order.