100 Days of School Project 2012 February 17, 2012

This is by far one of my favorite events in school with my kids. This year it was my own children’s turn to make a project. I was so excited to do this, that I started planning in the beginning of the year!

When fall came I started taking one of my children to go collect Acorn tops. We collected big and little ones.  We knew the bottoms fall off the trees way before the tops do.  Once we saw the bottoms on the ground we knew it wouldn’t be too much longer.  We waited another 3 weeks and finally there were a lot on the ground. We did have to get a few from the trees because we needed a hundred of them and not enough had fallen off yet. When we had enough, we put them in a bag in the garage and waited for our 100th day of school!  Finally the week came for the project! Our 100th day of school fell on Valentines day this year, so they postponed the celebration until the 15th.  I grabbed a brownish orange posterboard from the store to use for the body. I drew the acorn first, but found later I should have just drawn a line to show my child where to stop and let her glue them on. My origional acorn was too large for the ammount of acorn tops that we had.  We wound up just drawing the line after a few mishaps.

First we counted out our 100 acorn tops and double, tripple checked our count.  This is important because it is very hard to recount them after they are on the acorn.  I am sure there is a better way to glue them on so you can count them easier, maybe in 10 rows of 10, but we didnt’ think of this until after we already had them glued on.  She painted a thick layer of glue on about 2 inches wide and 12″ long, and then she started to put the acorn tops on the glue.  We added more glue with a paint brush as we worked our way to the top of the acorn and the stem.  This kept the glue from drying too fast on us.

Another lesson learned is:  I would have used Elmers Glue All instead of school glue. It was way too watery, and left the paper pretty wet and hard to dry. By morning it still wasn’t dried, so I turned it over and turned the ceiling fan on and that helped it to dry while we were getting ready for school. It was still a little wet an hour later, but not too bad.  Another thing that was helpful is I put a heavy book on top of the acorn tops to keep the paper from folding and lifting up as it dried.  After she had all the tops on, I cut out an acorn shape on the bottom. I think it turned out great! And she was pretty proud of it too! Her teacher loved it and hung it up in the classroom.  She was the only one who did something like this and felt even more of a sense of pride when she saw her teacher make such a big deal out of it and to hear the oohs and aahs of her classmates.  She collected the acorns herself with a little help from her big sister, and she glued them all on herself, and counted them out all by herself.  The only thing I did was show her how much glue to use and how to put the glue on the first time, and then i cut out the final shape.  We had a blast working on this together, and I can’t wait to do another 100 days of school project with my youngest child next year!

The Giving Tree October 22, 2008

This is in my collection of children’s books. I love this book and have used it in all my teachings. I used it, after many years of owning it, in one of my sundayschool classes that I taught. The story all of a sudden became a clear picture of how Jesus loves us. He sacrificed everything for us by giving His life. But He is still there giving us even more. He listens to our needs, desires, and pleas for help. All He desires in our Christian walk is for us to be still and sit with Him. To just sit. Listen. Be still. Often we are so consumed by our own wants and lives that we tend to ask Him for help and then run off on our own courses again, often with just a quick “thanks”.

Have you ever wondered if we practice more and more of just sitting, listening, and being still before Him, how much less complicated would our lives be?

Shell Sylverstein never intended it to be a book about Jesus, it just became that illistration for me.

Sierra Association of Foster Families August 24, 2008

SAFF  Is a great organization I want to let you all know about.  There are lots of ways we can help Foster Families here in Reno.  You can click on the link to find out more, but here is some of what I know. 

Donations.  Saff Takes donations of monetary value for things like sports activities/lessons for the children, conferences for the foster parents to attend which are like workshops to learn new ways to help your foster children thrive in such a crazy world, school supplies, tutoring and education, as well as for other reasons.

They also take donations of New Toys or gift cards for The SAFF Birthday Closet. The Sierra Association of Foster Families maintains a selection of new, donated toys and birthday gift items for foster families to choose from for every foster child in their home. SAFF usually has a selection of gift cards, movie passes or other appropriate items for teens in care in addition to games, sports related items, personal electronics and clothing items they may choose from.

Rafting on the Truckee River August 17, 2008

Friends and I went rafting today up at Tahoe on the Truckee River. It was beautiful, relaxing, and lots of fun! I laughed a lot as Randy and I paddled the raft and tried to steer us out of the bushes. I wasn’t steering, but there were times the kids were helping and we would get turned around, so we would just sit in the water and spin round and round.

Art Town 2008 Kid Events June 28, 2008

This next whole month is Art Town. There are a ton of great events for kids during this month. I took my kiddos to it last year and we had a blast. We experienced so much culture! I made a great little book out of all our events. I would highly recommend it to any of you who have kids. I made a calandar of events for kids during the weekdays. There are also a ton of events for them in the evenings and weekends. Just check out renoisarttown.com and click on their calandar to see what is happening. But I wanted to post my calandar on here for you all in case you can make it.  Click on the calandar to view it larger, and then you may have to enlarge it once more.  Along with the calandar are pics of our last year experiences. Some of them were with a cell phone or low flash, so they may not be so great.

The events that are free I marked as free.  The art center is the McKinley Art Center on Riverside dr. 

St. Pattricks Day Parties for Kids March 1, 2008

OK, now I know that for some Christians this will be hard because of the Lie that is told.  But man, did my kids have a blast with this last year. 

 The family I work for has Irish background.  So they really wanted us to work out a fun party for the kids.  This is what we did. 

We started by talking up leprechauns to the children.  We simply looked up some of the legends of Leprechauns and shared the ok ones with the children. 

Then when the kids weren’t around we painted rocks with gold spray paint. They look pretty real.  Use jagged rocks all sizes.  Use a Gold metalic spray paint so it really is shiney. 

100th Day of School February 6, 2008

Tomorrow is the 100th day of school for many kids.  My charge had a project to do for this day.  This is what we came up with.  It was a lot of fun, and very easy. 

 

Black poster board cut into the shape of a volcano. 

Twizzler licorice ropes made great Lava!  I glued it on with a hot glue gun.   Parents do this part for the younger ones.

At the dollar store they had foam dinosaur stickers, 300 in a container. 

My charge counted out 100 of them.  Then we double checked the ammount, and checked it a 3rd time.  Because once they were on the volcano, it would be hard to count them. 

Then my charge peeled and placed all 100 dinosaurs onto the volcano.  The picture shows the volcano before we expanded it.  We needed more room so I added the scrap of poster board and made it look like more of the land around the volcano.  It turned out pretty cool.  The best part is that the little boy, 4years old, was able to do quite a lot of it himself, which really made it feel like his very own project. 

Dinosaurs and Black Tar December 27, 2007

My posts in this section won’t always seem like they go with the time of year.  They will just come out as I think of them or do them with my nephew or kids I nanny for. 

 This Christmas my nephew wanted dinosaurs.  I found him a bucket with five or six dinos and trees and such at Toys R Us.  It is really a great bucket especially for the great price of $10. 

While watching him play with them I remembered an activity I did with my class a few times.

We made black tar to go with the Dinosaurs.  The kids loved playing in it, and it was a simple clean up.

What you need:

A NEW Section- Activities for Kids to Play December 13, 2007

I am going to add a new section to my blog on activities that are fun to do with kids.  This will be ideas from my years as a preschool teacher.  Many of these you can find on the net already, but a lot of my readers have kids of various ages, and I thought I would share some of my skills.  Some of them will be ideas of my own. 

ACTIVITIES FOR SNOW:

My first one will be for a snow project since we have some on the ground right now.