Good Morning Neighbors!

This has become our morning routine with the (slightly) cooler weather starting to move in.  Practice and some sensory play before breakfast :)

It's a really nice way to spend the early part of the morning!

Just didn't want you to think...

that we were all work and no play around here!

Paint by Numbers

This has been a big hit at our house - they get wiped and repainted several times a day. It's just paint in ziplock bags taped to the window at a good level for little hands.

Little by little

Little by little, we're clearing out the baby things and cleaning out the closets that haven't been worked on in a while.  Little by little, I'm gathering teaching supplies for the next couple of years...maps, art supplies, books, manipulatives...and starting to get organized.

The Chipmunk chose this great map the other day and we've got it hanging in the kitchen now.  What's marked is GrandDad and Mimi's trip to Alaska (roughly, at least!)


The little man's closet was still mostly full of parental stuff so we spent part of yesterday afternoon cleaning all of that out.  It's definitely a work in progress - I'm looking for some artwork and thinking about painting a chalkboard in there and I'm knitting him a quilt for his 'sofa'.  He loves it, though, and is calling it his library :)  I can't wait to get his books all stocked up in there for him!

More science

This is a FANTASTIC activity for a kiddo the Chipmunk's age (he's 27m). I gave him a pan full of baking soda and some food coloring mixed with vinegar. He spent the first few minutes digging around in the baking soda with his hands and with the medicine dropper and then a few more minutes working on squeezing the dropper to get the vinegar out of the jars (and tasting it...yuck!) After that, he started added the color to the baking soda and watching it fizzle!  Once it stopped fizzling, we had to check it all out with our new magnifying glass, too :)



 All in all, I think he probably played with this for more than half an hour. It might be a record for something that doesn't involve a train!!

Making it rain

My little Chipmunk is really interested in the weather right now. We read about Winnie the Pooh and his sunny puddle days several times a day. When I found this little experiment online, I knew it would be perfect for him! We took a mason jar about 3/4 full of water and added a shaving cream 'cloud' at the top. Chipmunk understands that it rains when the clouds get too full of water, so all we had to do was add food coloring with a dropper until it rained. This definitely works better with undiluted food coloring, not mixed with water like we did here in the pictures. He had a great time making it rain and we got the added bonus of playing with the shaving cream too (now you see why I diluted it!)

Alphabet Matching

This has been a really fun game for us for the past few weeks. First we put together the Train Alphabet puzzle and then it's time to match up the blocks with the right letters! I had a lot more pictures, but my little nudist isn't really keen on clothing right now!