July Stuff

In all of the excitement to go to the US for six weeks, I forgot to post this before we left. 

We use letter tiles to spell words.  Even Ryan can do this and he loves spelling the names of people he knows.

Legos and blocks are always favorites.  The boys worked together on this project, which made it a special one.  Anything they can build together without fighting is a miracle!

One of the books Justin read suggested making an x on the floor and throwing beanbags on it.  We added numbers on the tape as well.  Ryan just called out the numbers the beanbags landed on.  Justin had to add up the totals.  The beanbags are different colors and different shapes.  That must make the activity an entire math lesson for Ryan. :)

Ryan kept getting really close to his X.

If you have ever read The Big Orange Splot you may recognize this as Mr. Plumbean's house.  The boys enjoy the story and had fun making the house as well.

Ryan is hysterical to watch as he makes his way through the tires.  We continue to go to the petting zoo to see the animals and to play on the playground.

My boys are superheroes!  Thank you to Alicia for the fun surprise. :)

I line up an alphabet with a mix of upper and lowercase letters and Ryan has to match the mommy letters to their baby letters.  It is also a good activity to make sure we have all of the alphabet pieces before we put them away. :)

Fir some reason it is hard to sing the ABC song while wearing sunglasses.  I guess it is all of the coolness in the way.

Strike!

I made a bowling set for the boys because Justin kept begging for one.  It wasn't hard to make, but it took awhile for me to get it done.  I did, after all, have to drink 10 bottles of Coke Zero for the bowling pins. The sacrifices I make for my children. :)  Once the bottles were collected, I made sure they were clean and ripped the labels off.  I am sure that my boys saw this step as unnecessary, but I figured if we were going to keep them for any length of time they should be clean and not growing stuff inside of them.  I decided to go one step further and put colored bands around them.  I cut strips of red, yellow, and blue cardstock and taped them (glue gun needs more glue sticks) around the bottle.  I figure that this way I can expand the game to ask Ryan to bring me a bottle with a certain color on it.  It could also give Justin the opportunity to count how many of each color he knocks down and then add to find the total.  He can also compare colors of the bottles knocked down and practice using words like more, most, and fewer.  You knew I would try to take a fun game and ruin it, didn't you?

As it turns out, they really enjoy bowling as long as I set up the pins. :(  Ryan takes a bit of a different approach and attacks the pins from above.  That's okay too.  The boys, however, have the most fun picking up the bottles and banging them together, banging them on things, or using them to attack each other as they run through the house screaming.  Oh well.  They are lightweight and inexpensive.