April 2012 Events and Non-Events

Ryan is pretty fast at sorting by color, counting, and graphing (help with graphing) when it means eating jellybeans is the final step of the process.

And there he is, eating away.

Ryan and Justin's graphs in the window.

Easter egg covered with stickers hanging from fan on patio.

Cardboard ovals covered with foil and tissue paper squares.  Not exactly like the samples I saw online, but fun for the boys.

Scholastic tadpole book on a pocket chart.  Ryan can sequence the pictures and Justin can do the words.  Of course Justin often likes to change them around to make them "funny" in his opinion at least.

Our Easter eggs made out of glue covered yarn wrapped over balloons.  Yeah, they looked different on Pinterest and just about every other place I saw them online.  Justin didn't want to touch the sticky yarn and Ryan only wanted to put his hands in the glue.  Sigh.

Mine turned out a bit better, but it looks like a ball instead of an egg.  I thought that the water balloon looked egg shaped.  Guess I was wrong.  Oh well.

We made Easter bunnies and filled with cookies and/or stickers to give to friends.

Our Easter eggs.  I love the brown one on the back row.  Yep, after all the time Ryan spent on the egg he was able to dye the brown egg brown.

Ryan has his Easter Bunny shades on to help him find the hidden eggs.

Justin's basket is full and he is ready to find out what is in the eggs.

After getting his stuff out of the basket, Ryan donned an Easter bonnet.  Very attractive, Ryan.

We got a huge bag of lemons from a friend.  In addition to lemonade and lemon bread, we did some lemon science experiments. We also made some household cleaners from lemons.  Next up, lemon bars and lemon meringue pie.

Playing on the playground at the petting zoo.  Ryan is the faster, braver climber.

We had a wonderful vacation in Cape Town, South Africa.  More about that on the other blog.

We filled bowls with baking soda and used droppers to put in dyed vinegar.  The boys LOVED it.

February 2012 Stuff

Once again, no particular order to the pictures.  Just a few reminders of what we did this month.

Grandma sent these little bear kits.  The boys loved making them.  They decided to give them to Miss Estelle, their swimming teacher.



These are the valentines that Ryan gave to his friends at our Valentine's Day party.  Not a great job coloring the flower part, but he had a lot of fun. :)




I let Justin choose what kind of valentines he wanted to make and he chose these out of several online possibilities. I regret giving him the choice.  What a pain!  I ended up havng to do all of the folding and gluing because they are pillow box alligators,




We made valentine mailboxes at a previous playdate.  Ryan (left) and Justin (right) had fun creating them.



Probably the same books as last year, but here are the valentine books we read this month.

Justin working on a valentine bear photo frame project.  Tanja had purchased these from Oriental Trading Company and had plenty for everyone!



Here are Ryan and Justin's finshed bear frames.  I took the picture of the playgroup on a previous day so we would have a picture to put in our frame.  Getting a decent picture of seven kids is not easy.





We ate heart cookies, red heart jell-o, apples, bugles, and other treats for our snack.  Grandma Pat had sent enough valentine cups, plates, and napkins.



Justin and Ryan have been really into courses.  I think they are meant to be race tracks or obstacle course type things.  Various cars, action figures, or other items try their best with the challenges put in their paths.  In this picture I outlined a course for each boy using blue masking tape.  They set up obstacles as they wanted.  The tape forced them to stay in their own spaces rather than have their courses overlap and cause fighting.



The boys go through SO much paper with their various projects.  I am glad that they don't mind using the back side of previously used paper.  This is a rainbow that Ryan made.



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Justin made this for me to do.  I had to cut out the objects on the line and glue them in place.  At least I could figure out how to do this one.  So many of his things are hard to understand.

 

Ryan was very proud of his giraffe.  The boys built a lot with Duplo since I put their legos in time out.  That's what happens when Mommy has to pick them up!



Ryan was more anxious to eat than to graph.  Those valentine candy hearts are pretty tasty. :)

Hard to see with the glare of the sun, but here are the finished valentine conversation heart graphs.  Ryan was very proud of his work.

We went to the train/transportation muesum at the train station.  Basically it contained things that they used in the past at the train station--typewriters, phones, ticket punchers...  I think it would have been a five minute visit if we had gone alone, but we went with Leah and her mom and the boys thought it was the best museum ever.  Guess a lot depends upon the company.

March 2011

Here are some of the activities that have been keeping us busy during the month of March.  We have also enjoyed swimming/wading, playing in the sandbox, building castles and rockets out of empty boxes, making Thomas train layouts, playing our new  Nickelodeon wii fit game, and a number of other things.

Justin (Cat in the Hat hat) and Ryan (orange hat) listen to a reading of Dr Seuss books at the Embassy community Dr Seuss celebration.  Justin thought it was weird to have a bday party for someone who was not there AND had never even been to Namibia.  He thought it was really weird when he found out Dr Seuss isn't even alive anymore.

J and I flipped a penny ten times and graphed the results.

Justin trying to predict if his penny will land on heads or tails this time.

Our Cat in the Hats.  Justin made his into a thank you card, but realized that he didn't know how to write "thank you" so he stopped trying and wrote "the end" because that is what you put at the end of things.

We put flashcards on the floor and one of us calls out a word and the other person has to shine the light on the word.  I have no idea while Blogger thinks it should rotate this picture sideways.

We sorted some cards in different ways.  Shown is by number of letters in the word.



Ryan was really into coloring with markers.



Justin building with the pattern blocks Meredith made.  Once again, Blogger thinks this picture looks better rotated.

Justin has patterns down, but he does not want to work on his cutting skills.  He has the most awkward grasp!  He was a better cutter 6 months ago when he accepted help with positioning the scissors.

This is Ryan's "leopard-con" which he for some reason thinks looks like Rob.  The hat?  Bushy beard?

Looking at letters with Dad.

Ryan has FINALLY started showing an interest in letters and numbers.  Much later than Justin, but he is getting there.  He knows 16 uppercase letters and some lowercase (like w).

The boys are getting ready to play a game that is based on one of the wii party games.  I don't mind building the game with them, but I can never keep up with the rules.

Ryan working on counting to ten with 1:1 correspondence.

Justin using his feet to manipulate the unifix cubes.  Lovely.

We were experimenting with different ways we could make ten.  Justin finds it fascinating that so many different combinations of numbers can add up to ten.

Ryan thinks he is pretty cool with cubes on his feet.

We were decorating hats for an alphabet safari.  Unfortunately, Ryan decided the letters should go Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and foam letters went flying of the table and all over the floor.

Ryan sporting his alphabet safari hat.

Justin adding the finishing touches to his alphabet safari hat.

We started our alphabet safari.  Each day, I give the boys a list of letters, and we go around the house looking for things that start with those letters.  We have taken many pictures.  When we finish the whole alphabet, we will choose our favorite pictures and put them in a powerpoint.  The boys have been having a lot of fun.

Justin with Brown Bear, Brown Bear manipulatives, retelling the story in his own order.

Ryan has the leters up the coconut tree, but they will come crashing down soon.  Chicka Chicka Boom BOOM!