Easter Craft Round-up

If you're like me, you're wondering how on earth Easter is this Sunday?! So here are some simple and festive crafts that you can pull together this week for your kids:

🌷DIY Daffodils from Mend & Make New.

🌷Easter Bunny Bookmarks from Easy, Peasy, and Fun

🌷Easter Egg Pom Pom Poppers from Teach Beside Me

Easter Tomb Biscuits by Katie's Crochet Goodies

Here's some of my own previous crafts for Easter:

🌷My FAVORITE: Snowflake Eggs (Hazel and Charlotte are so small in this post!)

🌷Egg Families & Easter Lilies

🌷The Real Meaning of Easter

🌷Alphabet Eggs

This is a great use of all those leftover plastic eggs you'll be stepping on 

in the middle of the night after Easter!

Also, I found this book at Costco and I love it:

You can find it HERE.

Happy Easter Week. 

Letter of the Week

Let's talk about ACTIVITY TIME. I think it's the best thing I've ever done, but I also know it can sound overwhelming. Here's some answers to common questions:

I almost never prepare the night before. I do keep an "art cabinet" filled with basic supplies (funny, it started out as a "Fancy Nancy bucket," but now its a cabinet). I always do activity time in the morning, with the kids that are at home. We do activity time every day, but it does NOT always include a crafty craft. We count library trips, our local museum, walks, etc. as activity time together. Sometimes the days I plan the most are the days that fall apart immediately and I've learned to LET GO and follow what my kids want to do, even if it's just jumping on the trampoline with me until I pee my pants. I go through the alphabet, focusing on one letter a week, but sometimes we go two or three weeks on the same letter, depending on how many fun things we want to do with that letter. I introduce the letter on Monday, we go to the library on Tuesday and find books that are about that letter, and go from there. It totally works for me, and hopefully you can find some helpful tips here that will work for you.

Starting a Letter of the Week schedule was one of the best things I ever did for activity time with my kids. It's simple, easy to track, and gives a nice backbone to the limitless things I want to teach my kids. We just finished our second time through the alphabet the week before Charlotte started Kindergarten and it felt so good to celebrate her big step into school with that much anticipated letter Z. The whole thing was bittersweet to me, but the best part was knowing that I had been the one to introduce all 26 letters in fun, interactive ways. And it really felt good when she would randomly say, "H-H-Horse! That starts with an H!" and I knew I taught her that.

Even if you have your child enrolled in a preschool, doing Letter of the Week activities is a great way to play with them and teach them all kinds of new things, all the while reinforcing those basic building blocks of our language.

With that said, we are starting over now with my three (almost four) year old, Eloise, and my two year old, Edison. I will be posting weekly about our Letter of the Week activities, so come check it out if you need ideas and want to follow along. My greatest resources for our activities are Alison McDonald's No Time for Flashcards, Pinterest, and my local library. I will post our activities on my Instagram as well.

Tomorrow I'll be posting what we've done this week for the Letter A. Has a little to do with ants and a LOT to do with alligators...

Meanwhile, here's a funny video of Edison today (best part is at the end):

How to plan your Activity Time with your toddler or preschooler

Let me go ahead and answer one question I've heard a lot lately: 

How do you plan your activities?

It's taken some time, but I've found a good system that works for me and my kids. Even still, it changes. Some weeks we rock it and do lots of great activities and some weeks I check out and our Letter of the Week turns into Letter of the Month. I've accepted that. My goal is to have some solid one-on-one time with my kids once a day, and it has to happen in the morning. I try at least once a week, sometimes twice, to have an activity planned here at home where we study our Letter of the Week/Month and do a coinciding craft, read books, or a learning game. On the other days, we visit the library, our local children's museum, or (now that's it's spring) head to the park. 

Time spent together with no distractions = Activity Time.   

So here's my method:

Every Tuesday, we hit up the local library and attend their awesome Discovery Time. They even provide worksheets with all the finger plays and songs they teach each week so I can take it home and file it away for another day. Love the library. Then we head to the computers where my girls can hold their own (mostly) while Edison and I search around for books. I usually have a few topics in mind and watch for books that support my ideas for the current letter of the week. I also have great librarians! I usually pull some children's fiction, a fairy tale, a science topic (body parts, astronomy, etc.), and one or two animal biographies.

Then we base our activities around the topics I found at the library. So for the letter K, my book list might look something like this:

Plant a Kiss by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

(I'm a huge Rosenthal fan)
This book goes perfectly with our lipstick-kissed "K" activity above.

Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too? By Eric Carle

You could create a game of pretending to be kangaroos and make these cute kangaroo pouches.

Welcome to the World of Kangaroos

My library has a more toned down series of animal biographies that I love.

Curious George Flies a Kite

With this you could make paper kites to fly outside.

The King's Wish

For a fun snack, make King's "crowns" with apple halves and toothpicks with
mini marshmallows, craisins, and cut up cheese)

I always start our activity time with a review of the date, weather, the alphabet and sometimes one of our favorite songs or finger plays. Then we read our books followed up with a game or craft and of course, a snack. 

That's it! The goal of course is to be present. My best activities are not those that took the most preparation or thought, but rather the ones where we really connect and play together. Planning for an activity time almost every day, helps me to create those moments more often.

Activity Time/Preschool Schedule: How to Plan Time with your Kids

Last fall I enrolled my three year old in a preschool class at an arts academy that included piano and sign language in its curriculum. I was excited for her to get the "classroom experience" and learn from someone other than myself. After a few weeks, I felt disappointed about a few things:

1. After several requests, I was denied a copy of the songs they were teaching in her class (copyright). She was learning some songs I didn't know, so it was impossible to practice them at home.
2. Since I didn't know what my daughter was learning in each class, except for the letter and book of the week, I couldn't reinforce those lessons at home.
3. I didn't know any of the kids in her class or their parents.
4. I just felt plain jealous that someone else was watching my daughter learn new things for the first time. I have to hand her over to a teacher at some point--I'm pretty sure that homeschooling is not for me--but I want to keep her as long as I can. I knew I could handle preschool at home, so I pulled her out and we've incorporated some preschool lessons into our activity time.

I wanted to share my schedule with you because I think it's always helpful to see what other moms are doing. I'd love to hear about your routine as well. Here goes:

Monday: We visit our local children's museum called the Treehouse where they have "Toddler Time" which includes stories and crafts. This replaces activity time at home.

Tuesday: We attend our local library's "Discovery Time." We check out books for the week and play on the computer.

Wednesday: Activity Time/Preschool at home. For more info on this click here.

Thursday: We participate in a local preschool co-op with other mom's in the neighborhood, where five of us rotate teaching. In the fall I'll be joining/creating a Joy School group.

Friday: Activity Time/Preschool at home (review).

That's it. I love doing the co-op preschool because my kids get the social interaction they would at a public preschool, but with kids we know and play with anyway. I also know what the mom's are teaching so I can reinforce those lessons at home. I want to do Joy School in the fall for a more organized curriculum and music.

I think the key is finding what works for you and your kids. I felt so overwhelmed last fall as I considered my options for preschool. Then I realized that we enjoy our activity time at home together and I can prepare her for kindergarten competently. So far, it's working.

Any thoughts on this?

How to Plan your Activity Time at Home

I was thinking about how Activity Time got started in our house and realized that it became "official" with the introduction of three things:

1. a song
One day my 2 yr old was distracted and wiggly,
so I made up a song to help her be interested in me and the activity for that day.

Goes like this:
Activity time, activity time
A-C-T-I-V-I-T-Y!
Activity time, activity time
I love my activity tiiiiiiiiiiime.
(we try to shake our entire body really fast during that last note.)
The tune is nothing special and as you can tell, neither are the words.
Make up your own! Have fun with it and you'll notice that it gives your kids
something familiar and fun to look forward to.

2. a craft box
We call ours the "fancy nancy bucket" because my daughter is a big fan of the fancy stuff.
Call it what you like: craft box, busy bucket, crafty can, etc.
It holds the activity time staples (that are kid friendly):
markers, glue, glitter, stickers, ribbon, string, beads, stencils, erasers, etc.

3. Activity Time closet
Choose a space that is big enough to grow into as you collect more and more stuff.
Keep it within reach of your toddler (if you dare)
so they can help find the supplies for your activity that day.
It's nice to be able to tell them to get some crayons and paper by themselves when
you're busy with dinner (or watching Oprah) or whatever.

Don't have an activity time closet? Get one!

(FYI, mine only looks this organized when I know I'm taking a picture...)

Get started today!
(Send me pics of what you come up with.)