Letters From the Homefront

For President's Day, I definitely wanted to have a couple new things on the shelves to broaden my children's knowledge a bit about the history of our nation's leaders. I realized, quite to my dismay, that most of my children had a minimal amount of knowledge on the subject, due to the fact that I never gave them any! The exception would be my oldest, Little mama, who is the most amazing reader (I mean it!) and has read many books based on the history of our country, but I knew there was still a boat-load of information that she didn't have the first clue about.  The best place to start, of course, was at the beginning. That was an easy one - I know :) I wanted to begin (I say begin, because I think this is a topic that might lose it's headline spot, but won't be completely out of the picture for quite some time - I hope!) with the order of presidents, to give them something tangible to show how many we have had, how long they have been president, and how often

                   I mean, really - who could work all day in this???   Where we live, it doesn't ALWAYS snow, so when it does come, it's best to take advantage of it. So we worked until about noon, and then decided it was a soup and snow ice cream type of day. So we trecked outside to get snow. Since I don't actually have personal experience making it on my own, there was no one better to call than Nana (my mother), who was actually already thinking about doing the same thing.                                                      My masked man! Buddy Boy just had to try on his brother's face mask.    I thought it was funny that when I told her to smile, you could see the smile through the mask.   The kids helped me to get snow, and we only had to filter out one good handful that Bug decided to pick up with her hands - all the way down to the grass. :)            After that, who could resist a little bit of play befor

Rounding off my re-cap of our Valentine's Day - themed work at home today! The number wheel was one of their favorites, which left me wishing I had put it out the first week of February instead of the second! It is fairly self-explanatory - each space had a specific amount of Valentine's Day stickers, and the heart-shaped, glass bowl (it was a wedding present 10+ years ago, so I have no idea where it was found, but the Dollar Tree has similar ones around Valentine's Day) held clothespins with the numbers 1-10 on them. Fine motor skills work for this was the action of using the clothespins and working the grasp needed for good pencil control. There was also a counting concept for Math skills that made this both fun and educational at the same time! I would have to say this is definitely one that would need to be repeated again, with a different theme for the stickers.                                                This is what it looked like on the shelf  Hoss even

Well, I would have loved to post all these fun things oh, say, a week or two ago, when we began all our Valentine's works - or even before that, in case someone saw something that might work for their home. However, seeing as how I didn't get my new camera  until Valentine's Day, I wasn't able to take pictures before today, or catch my crew in action with these. But I figured it's better late than never, as mom used to say, so here goes:     This very beautiful container, which was most likely intended for a dry potpourri at one time, emitted the most wonderful smell for two weeks on our shelves - candy! When Nana gave the kids a bag full of large heart candy, I knew just where it was going and what it was to be used for. One of their favorite manipulatives, these were used for many things.  One was to be accompanied with these: I found these great chunky dice at Target in their dollar aisle, and they were used at all levels - basic counting and one-to-