We had an impromptu three year photo session the other night. Here a couple of the pictures we snapped of Mikayla. She is so hard to get a picture of these days because she doesn’t like to look at you and she has the cheesiest grin when you ask her to smile. Rotten is what she is!
Poor lighting, but wanted to show her "princess smile"!
Any other toddler school folks struggle with the letter Q? We sure did! I managed to find/come up with a few good ideas, but overall it was a hard one for us. Here are some of our activities from the week.
She painted a question mark with Q-tips. While she was painting we played the question/statement game. I would say something and she would identify if it was a question or a statement. Then she gave it a turn.
We made a Quarterback Q. We talked about what a quarterback does and what sport they play.
Muffin tin math. I used this trick when I was student teaching and pulled it back out for Mikayla this week. She put corresponding jelly beans in the muffin tin to match the numbers.
Letter Q queen. Mikayla insisted she needed a staff (where she got that from I will never know)!
I had intended to do a quilting activity with her, but we never got to it this week. I may try and throw it in next week just for fun! We also played a game where I would call out letters. If I said Q she would run quick, for any other letter she would run slow! Another game we played was she rolled the dice and quacked as many times as was rolled. With the baby here this week, we practiced being quiet a lot! For our snack this week we made a quiche together. As usual, Mikayla loved rolling out the dough for the crust and pretty much forgot about the rest of it!
All in all, not a bad week considering it was a difficult letter. We move onto the letter R next week. I am thinking along the lines of mostly rainbows and rocks, but we will see!
Last week we spent studying the Letter O. This was a fun letter and Mikayla really enjoyed the games and activities we did. And in case you missed my last post, Mikayla learned to write her name all by herself this past week! She is getting so big.
We made an owl family out of toilet paper tubes and scrap paper.
She practiced tracing lines, letters and matching pictures with this handy trick from my friend Lara. Insert paper or worksheets into a sheet protector and they automatically become reusable when paired with a dry erase marker!
Owl number match. The owls had dots that corresponded with the numbers on the tree. She had to match them up and glue on the correct tree. This is one of those games where I wish I had access to a laminator so I could laminate and save for future uses. It is one of the few number games she has actually really gotten into!
Octopus name match. Each octopus had the each of her names spelled out on the tentacles. It just so happened that each of her names had seven letters so it worked out perfect if I added the full name on one tentacle.
Here is a close up. I left the tentacle with the full name intact and cut the tips off the other ones. Then she glued them on in the correct order to spell her full name.
Another simple math game. She stamped dots (or fingerprints really) onto the tentacles of an octopus to correspond with each number. She loves anything dealing with numbers!
Owl letter matching game. The wings had capital and lower case letters on them and the body of the owl had pictures. She matched them up according to sound. To help her check her work I wrote the letters on the backs of the owls. I had intended this game to be a multi-use game, but she insisted on gluing the wings on so the owls could fly!
We made an O look like an owl, but I forgot to take a picture of it! We also played an opposite matching game that her Mimi and Poppy sent for her birthday. And of course we talked about the color orange and had oranges for our snack! This week we move onto the letter Q, a tricky letter if you ask me!
We have spent the last two weeks working on the Letter N. We have been off and on with school, but trying to integrate it into our play more the last two weeks. Here are a few of the activities that we sat down to complete together.
We made a hat out of a newspaper. She got a little confused though because she kept thinking that hat started with N and not newspaper!
So we cut up some newspaper into squares and then glued onto the letter N to help reinforce this.
We found some nests in some trees and made a letter N nest. Then we took her number stickers and stuck on the letter N. I also tried to get her to identify which number was which, but she wasn’t a big fan of this game!
We read and talked about the story of Noah and the Ark, then made our own ark out of paper plates. We painted (she painted the ark and I did the rainbow) and then cut the ark plate in half and stapled on top. Then we looked through magazines for pictures of animals and cut them out to stick in our ark. There weren’t two of every animal, but she still got the idea I think.
For her birthday Sister Barbara and Sister Diane got her a really cool wooden ark and animal set, so we played with it a lot this week! Such a fun gift and I love how it worked into our learning time the last two weeks!
We painted with noodles too! At first it started out really clean and she just dipped the noodles onto the paint and gently placed them on her paper…
But then it got a a little messy when she decided she needed paint directly in the noodles and squished them all up together!
What true artist can’t multi-task. Here she is eating her noodles and painting with them at the same time! Too funny!
We move onto the Letter O next. I am excited about learning all about owls and octopus!
Yesterday evening we celebrated Mikayla’s third birthday with some friends here on the mission by going all out Mickey! Here is a picture recap of the details from the party.
The Invitations
Although we were inviting mostly people right next door, I still wanted to create some invitations and couldn’t pass up these cuties.
The Decorations
These were made from Styrofoam balls painted black and then glued to make a Mickey head. I also painted her initials on them because I had three.
Mickey head plates and party hats. I hot glued two small black plates to a larger one. They weren’t very sturdy, but were cute! The party hats were made from white cardstock (I would have used red if I had it) and then I glued on two circles for the ears, attached a string and was finished. I added a little red polka dot bow to the cups to add a little color to the table.
The door sign – it is no Lara Mattingly banner, but it worked okay! I replaced the "a’s" and dots on the "i’s" with Mickey heads.
She was excited about her party! This shirt was made by Emily Gilliland to raise funds for her adoption (you can have one too, check out her blog for details).
The food
Yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting. We also dipped Oreos and another round cookie in chocolate to make Mickey heads.
Close up of the chocolate dipped Mickey heads.
Minnie’s lavender cocktail courtesy of Joe. So pretty and tasty too!
We had a Hot Diggity Dog Hot Dog bar. Complete with homemade hot dog buns, mustard, ketchup, onions, jalapenos, cheese and chili.
Goofy’s Garden Veggie with guacamole and Minnie’s Mac and Cheese.
Chip and Dale Chips and Dip
Pluto’s Potato Salad
Pete’s Punch, which was really just homemade lemonade made from lemons straight off the tree!
Party favors were homemade caramel corn in Mickey bags.
The Guests
Guest of honor grabbing a quick snack before dinner started.
Ben!
Sister Diane
Sister Barbara
(Joe was here too but I don’t have a solo picture of him or me!)
The Games
We had two games. The first was to see how many words you could make out of the letters in "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse". Sister Barbara is a Scrabble fanatic so she blew everyone else out of the water! We also had a drawing contest to see who could draw the best character from the show. Mikayla was the judge.
Hard at work making some words.
Look at that concentrations!
Mikayla even joined in on the fun and wrote some letters.
Judging the drawing contest.
She chose Joe’s drawing and he was really excited about it!
Some party Snapshots
Enjoying her Mickey cupcake!
During present time she would open the gift and then run over to Joe and put it on his lap. By the time she was finished his lap was piled high with gifts. Then of course she went back over and studied each one individually!
She got lots of clothes from Mimi and Poppy so she played a little dress up game. This is the outfit she ended the day in!
I think everyone enjoyed themselves and most importantly Mikayla had a blast! It is still hard to believe that she is three! Thanks to everyone who came out to the party, sent presents or called to wish her a Happy Birthday. It was a great week of celebrating!
It is still warm here during the day, but at night time it has started to cool off some. So, we have been spending lots of time in the evenings outside playing, reading and enjoying the coolness! This week I introduced Mikayla to mud pies. I can’t believe I hadn’t done this yet, it is such a favorite childhood memory of mine. Sitting in the corner of our yard making mud pies with my sister and "selling" them over the fence! In case you have forgotten how or have never made a mud pie before, here are some step by step directions.
Step 1 – Gather your supplies. You will need dirt, water, a pail or bowl to mix in and a pan to use as your pie pan.
Step 2 – Gather some dirt (or sand) and mix in some water.
Step 3 – Pour into pie pan (or other container you deem as your pie pan).
Step 4 – Add "berries" or extras to your pie if you want (i.e. rocks, leaves, stems, grass, pretty much anything you can find outside).
Mikayla kept calling this her cherry mud pie!
Step 5 – Enjoy and repeat!
She had a lot of fun, although I must say she wasn’t a fan of actually touching the mud with her fingers. If she got mud on them, she wanted to immediately wipe it off. We are working on that though!f If you have kids and you haven’t made a mud pie with them yet, I suggest you go out and do it today! So much fun and great for the imagination!
When Mikayla was a baby we took a picture next to a green giraffe (which has now been named Gertrude) and have continued to do so periodically throughout her life. Here are some growth shots to see how much she has changed in the last three years!
Birth
Year One
Year 2
Year 3
And just for reference here is a picture of her growth chart.
Ben’s finger is showing how tall she was when we got to Africa and the banana leaves above the three are how tall she is now. She has grown almost three inches since July! Crazy!
Saturday was Mikayla’s third birthday and in honor of the big day we spent time doing things she loves. Like eating donuts, opening presents and going to the "park and play". She still has a few more gifts to open, but we are saving those for her big (and by big I mean little) Mickey Mouse Clubhouse birthday celebration this coming Saturday. Here are some snapshots we got from our day of celebrating!
Mikayla woke up to find her floor filled with balloons and "streamers" on her door. We looked all over for streamers and couldn’t find any so I glued some newspapers together and cut them into strips. Not quite a festive as colored streamers, but she loved them anyway!
Then we made donuts and of course we had to put sprinkles. I used this recipe for the donuts and they were delicious! Best the day they were made and well worth the effort it required!
Then she got down to opening her presents. The first is from us and was a toolbox filled with art supplies. She loves "crafting" things and so this was a hit.
She also opened gifts from her aunts and uncles. Here you can see her playing with her Candy Land game (thanks Aunt Chelsea and Uncle Tim) in her rocking new Toms (thanks Aunt Christa, Aunt Sarah, Uncle Christopher, Uncle Kris, Tyson, Tanner and Taylor). There were other games and craft items included in these gifts, but I didn’t get pictures of them all.
After our donut breakfast and packages we hit up a park about thirty minutes down the road. She ran and played and had a great time. After some time at the park we went and grabbed lunch. While at lunch Mikayla met an older couple (with a granddaughter her age) who she proudly told it was her birthday. They then called in the owner and told him to go to the store and buy her a birthday cake…which he did! They ended up inviting us to their house for coffee afterwards. They had a ton of geese, rabbits, chickens, and dogs that Mikayla got to interact with. She had so much fun.
After the park and animals we headed home for a dinner of cheeseburgers and french fries and of course some Funfetti cake!
Daddy continued the cake smashing tradition him and our friend Rod always had, but this year Mikayla took the brunt of it.
She didn’t seem to mind though, and I helped her to get him back!
We had a great day celebrating with her and she will now proudly tell anyone who listens that she is three!
Since we skipped Letter K accidentally, we back tracked and made it up last week. Here are some of our K activities.
This is not a K specific activity, but I try to throw in whole alphabet activities whenever I can. This was originally intended as an interactive letter line to hang on the wall, but I never got around to hanging it so we turned it into a game. On each clothespin is a sticker of a letter. She had to match the lettered clothespin to the correct letter card. Both phonics and fine motor practice in this game. She loved it so much I think we ended up laying it three times this day!
We made a letter K king by gluing a king crown on top an then of course she had to have her very own king crown!
She has really love typing letters lately and has recently asked for me to spell certain words for her to type. As you can see, her number one is her friend Lylah’s name!
This is a color by number picture I made of a kite and the sun. She did great at finding the right number and coloring it, but she still hasn’t caught on to color the whole area and not just the number.
Letter K kite picture.
Kite with her last name (which also starts with a K) down the string.
Kangaroo letter game. I drew out a kangaroo and cut up different letter cards. She had to look at the letter cards and fill his pouch with only the letter K.
We also glued kernels of corn onto the letter K, but I didn’t get a picture. We did some counting with the kernels as well. We move on to the letter N next since we did M a few months back!
When we first had Mikayla I knew that I wanted to start some sort of tradition surrounding her birthday to make it extra special. The first two birthdays we did countdown days based on the year she was turning. Each day she would get a small present or activity to do as a family. For her first day we did a one day countdown to her birthday and her second birthday a two day countdown. In theory this year we would have done a three day countdown to her birthday. But then I got to thinking about future birthdays, when she turned ten we would need to do a ten day countdown and at 18 an 18 day countdown…that seemed a bit daunting! So, this year I instituted a five day countdown for her birthday and will hopefully continue this in years to come. Each day she got to open a small "gift" or as she called them "prizes" (that is how she has been saying surprises as of late). I think she really enjoyed each one, plus it helped her to get really excited about her birthday! Here are what we did for each day of the countdown.
5 – She got a small notebook and several pages of stickers. She loves to stick stickers inside a notebook so this was a hit. Unfortunately, she used most of her stickers that day!
4 – Popcorn and movie night. Ben said up a projector to project the movie on our living room wall. We popped a big bowl of popcorn and let her go to town! She thought it was really neat watching a movie that big and sat really nicely for the whole thing. I think she might be ready for a real theater experience!
3 – Campfire complete with roasting marshmallows and hotdogs. Sister Diane walked over during this "event" and Mikayla told her all about what was happening!
In her bag I put a felt hot dog, a marshmallow and fire made with pipe cleaners. Here she is "starting a fire" with her pipe cleaner fire.
2 – Felt finger puppets. I whipped these out during her nap one day. She hasn’t quite figured out what to do with them and how to put them on, but she plays with them like they are stuffed animals or babies!
1- Mickey Mouse dress up kit made from a little felt and some hot glue! This one was placed in a special purse made from our friend Dacia back home. She is loving some Mickey Mouse lately and so I thought this would be perfect and it was a HIT as was the purse! Now when she watched Mickey Mouse Clubhouse she wants to put on her Mickey outfit. So cute! I wonder if she will want to wear it to her Mickey birthday party next week?
We did lots of fun things on her actual birthday, more to come soon when I am not so tired!