letter r

Rainbows

I told Ellie we were going to make a rainbow. She said "and then we can put it up in the sky!"

We put in the food coloring and then added some dish soap and watched as the colors started moving.

The window in our bathroom lets the sun hit the glass just right to make the rainbows show up. The kids love to watch them.

Recipes

The kids helped me to make some cookies for a Relief Society activity. They also came up with their own recipes. If anyone tries them out, let me know. They sound pretty good to me! :)

Gavin's recipe for Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake

A lot of Chocolate Chips
Spoon to stir
little kids knife to cut up a thing that's small
a lot of salt
strawberry shortcake
a lot of cups of flour
a lot of sugar
a lot of vanilla
5 eggs
lots of strawberries
cook it on the stove a lot

Brielle's recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies

10 Butterscotch Chips
something to stir
1/2 tsp salt
a couple cups of butter
11 eggs
10 Cups flour
10 Cups sugar
11 Cups vanilla
Cook in microwave for 10 seconds

Rabbit

The kids love playing hide and seek. We changed it up a bit and played where's the rabbit.

They are not good at keeping secrets yet, so Brielle was telling Gavin where to find the rabbit.

The kitchen was the favorite hiding place. It's not so hard to find it if they hide it in the same place over and over and over again.

Rocks

We went on a rock hunt to find the perfect rocks to paint.

letter q

It was a little bit hard to get pictures of the q words we focused on this week.  We played more games then doing actual crafts.  I tried to at least get a couple so it wasn't only a word post.

Quick

We talked about the difference between running quickly and walking slowly.  

The little kids LOVED the rhyme that I remember from my childhood.

Slowly, Slowly
Slowly, slowly, very slowly creeps the garden snail
Slowly, slowly, very slowly up the garden rail
Quickly, quickly, very quickly, runs the little mouse
Quickly, quickly, very quickly to his little house.

you creep up their leg and end up tickling them.  They both asked for me to do it again, and again and again.

Quiet

I taught the kids how to 'play' the quiet game.  They thought it was pretty funny.  They can be quiet for almost 3 seconds at a time, and even that is hard. :)

Questions

we talked about questions and question marks.  Brielle is currently at the stage where she LOVES asking questions.  Why are they doing that?  What will happen?  Why can't I go in the Boys bathroom?

Quilt

Queen

 We read a book about the lifecycle of a Queen Bee that was very interesting.  We also played a letter 'q' game.
The Queen looked under the Quilt and what did she see....?
the kids would pretend to be animals and the Queen would have to get the animals to go back to the castle.  Very random, but they loved it of course.

Quills

 We also had a field trip to the zoo.  This is related to the letter Q because a docent had a baby hedgehog to show us.  She showed us the difference between hedgehog spikes and porcupine quills.  It was fascinating.
However, I didn't get pictures of that so here are some other random zoo pictures instead.

letter p

letter 'p' food

have you every thought about how many foods start with the letter p?  It seemed like everything we were eating just happened to be a p food.  Some of that was on purpose, but not always.

Honestly, here are just some of our meals this week:
Potato soup with Potato Bread
Pasta, Peas and Plums
Peanut butter sandwich (on potato bread) and Pears
Poppyseed Muffins and Peach yogurt
Pancakes (w/ plums again)

(That is suppose to be a smile, not a grimace.) 

and snacks:
Pineapple
Pomegranate
Popcorn

So, besides food there is also A LOT of other 'p' words to focus on.

playdoh

we made some fresh playdoh with a monster theme for halloween time.  I love googly eyes.  They just make everything more fun.

puzzles

painting

we made some fingerpaint, which we havent' done for a while.  Gavin doesn't like to get his fingers dirty, so he improvised and used his napkin to paint with. 

polar bears

(we went to free day at the Natural History Museum)

pink polish

Ethan wanted his feet in the picture, but his did not get painted

pumpkins

yes, it was halloween, so this was a major focus this week 

Brielle still obsessed with sad pumpkins

writing practice

we made these yarn pumpkins and used them to practice counting and also for throwing

Planes

we went to pick up James from the airport and stopped to watch the airplanes flying over head.  Ethan still loves airplanes and yelled every time he saw one.

Still more p words we talked about

penguins

pet store (we used the same game we did when we learned about 'm' for money)

Halloween Fun

The fun all started a couple weeks ago when we went to the pumpkin patch.

Brielle was trying to find the heaviest one.

Ethan thought they were fun to ride.

We finally made our decisions and got them home.

Brielle loved to paint, wash it all off and then paint it over again.

And Ethan traded off between painting the pumpkin and eating the paint.

The Friday before Halloween it was time to carve.  Brielle loved scooping out the pumpkin guts.

The one on top is Ethan's.  He just wanted to stick things into the holes in the pumpkin.  The one on the far right is Brielle's.  She really wanted to carve a sad pumpkin.

Ethan thought dressing up was pretty funny. 

He was a frog.  It seemed to be a good fit since he sleeps with a frog animal every night.  

Brielle decided she wanted to be a fairy.  (Well, I might have influenced the decision since we had everything needed for the costume already.  She wanted to be a ghost, a real one not pretend; or a cat.  I told her maybe next year.)

We went to a great ward party on Saturday and the kids were able to do some trick or treating from door to door inside the building.