Making Words: Our Latest Mommy Made Book

I haven't made one of these for awhile. It was SO nice to spend just a few minutes hours making a book for my daughter to practice her three letter words! The process took longer than I had thought- I wanted there to be just the right number of pages for the beginning, middle, and ending letters. Which meant pulling apart the blank flip book (I bought awhile ago from Bare Books) and arranging pages. Then I applied stickers which I promptly ripped off because they were not perfect. And then I started coloring the vowel pages yellow, which I did NOT like, which meant more pulling apart and rearranging of the book....

All for the final result, which I love.

Sure, the little pages are not all the same length, but I am pretty impressed with the outcome. We have had fun reading words with this little flip book, especially the silly words like mab and jum.

It took more time than I thought, but I love making books and instilling the love of reading to my little girl. :)

Happy Teaching!

Countdown to College Graduation

Those who know my little family may also know that my husband is attending a local university. After firmly deciding NOT to go to college awhile ago (gasp! I know!! A teacher's worst nightmare!) he went back to school last year and will walk away with his BA in math this spring. I am SO proud of him. Not only does he go to school full time, but he financially supports our family with a full time job. And he has three calling in church. He does a lot for us! And I wanted to do something special for him, in return.

Then the idea came.
After spending 25 days counting down to Christmas, I thought...why not count down to graduation? There are only 15 weeks in a semester. 15 weeks until graduation. It wil be here and gone before you know it! We have recently had a family restaurant night that you may have read about in a previous post. It was SO much fun! My daughter put on her princess shoes, brought her purse, and was daddy's special dinner date for the evening. I decided that our special countdown to graduation would be a special weekly daddy/daughter dinner at various restaurants. Of course we would be eating at home, but we would bring in the atmosphere (as well as the menu) from each of our restaurants.

Last week, at our first official restaurant experience, we recreated a local pizza parlor. The menu was our favorite pizza, root-beer in a pitcher, yummy garlic bread, and either a chef or garden salad. The dessert menu consisted of our favorite doughnuts from a nearby bakery.

glancing over the menus

My daughter gave me a penny from her wallet for the meal.

It was the best penny I ever earned

It had all the appeal as if we had actually paid money to visit these locations, with all the convenience of being at home. And we still get a fun daddy daughter date night in each week since my husband is on a very busy schedule (we see him two nights of the work week while he works from home- the other three days we don't see him at all!)

It has been a lot of fun so far- one down, fourteen more to go!

Word Family Fun

My daughter has amazed us with her ability to pick up reading at such a young age. She can sound out any three letter word. Of course her three year old attention span allows for small moments of reading time, so we don't push it or make reading something that is not the wonderful thing that it is! (Complete random side note: I have been reading the Anne of Green Gable books again and I can not stop!! Reading is a blessing but can be such a time thief!)

We have spent the past week reviewing some of the -at, -an, -ag, and -ad words. We will read a list of words, then play an activity that relates with one of the words on the list. For example, after we read a list of -at words (cat, fat, hat, sat, mat, rat, and pat) we played a hat game. We ran around a bunch of hats until the music stopped- then we all had to grab a hat. One hat was taken away each time (like musical chairs.) After reading -an words we threw bean bags into a pan. After reading ag words we played tag (and wagged our tails!). These were all fun, quick, easy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants games.

Some other fun reading things that we have done include our latest learning toy- education cubes. If you are interested in purchasing some, I would recommend visiting this site quickly since there is a promotion going on. These blocks have been a lot of fun in our house! We have used the cubes to make simple three letter words. We have also been using the word family cards to play 2 different games.

The first one we throw the cube, run to it, and then my daughter reads the word.

In the second game we have all four cubes out with different word family cards. I would tell my daughter, where is the word "can"? She would then read all four words on the cubes, find the word "can", and tell me the color of the cube "can" was in. She would grab that corresponding color of bean bag and throw it at the word. (Phew! The second game took forever to explain and I am afraid it makes no sense!)

I am so excited to continue working with my daughter in the realm of reading. There may be bumps ahead in this adventure, but I am SURE we will find much joy in this journey.

Happy teaching!

Restaurant Fun

My daughter LOVES the Olive Garden. We share that same love of yummy salad and Italian food! I thought it would be fun to play restaurant at home (you just can't eat out all the time!) My husband was really cute and played right along. While I started preparing the bread, he helped her to color a menu.

And while I set the table and got everything in order, he changed Into a tie and helped my daughter get dressed up. I was told it was a special "date". I was the waitress/cook/greeter (but was called the "cash register" by my daughter) and loved every second of it. Next up- "Daddy Dinner". Who knew restaurant play could be so fun?