Sunday School on Friday – Noah’s Ark

I have found that M seems to gain more from our Bible story times when we do activities and talk about the story a little bit before actually reading the story from one his children’s Bibles.

So, on Thursday I let him watch a short (3 minutes) video about Noah’s Ark on his Read And Share Toddler Bible DVD. He really enjoyed this.

There are so many inspiring ideas online for a Noah’s Ark theme. We almost weren’t able to fit everything in!

Friday morning when he woke up, this was waiting for him:

The printout is from Making Learning Fun (a fantastic site, by the way).

M got right to work:

Later we talked about all the colors of the rainbow as we did a little color mixing:

Next we had fun playing “Sink or Float?” in our kitchen sink:

M came up with some pretty interesting things to drop in. :) We made a little boat with a sponge, straw, and foam sail, and tried to see what we could carry on it and what would make it sink.

We talked about the ark and how God kept Noah, his family, and the animals safe on it.

I found these story cards on Sparklebox (another fantastic site!). M has never done sequencing with story cards before, and I wasn’t sure he was ready for that challenge, so I simply told him the story with the cards, and then we did it a second time while he told the story (with me giving some prompts).

I made up some game mats by printing this template out on colored construction paper, and we played an animal matching game. The game we used is one we’ve had for a while, but as we found matches, we got to put our animal couples on our arks. Whoever had the most animals on his/her ark won. :) Very simple, I know, and it was really unnecessary to print out ark game mats, but simple things can make a difference. M felt like it was a brand new game. And he won. ;)

We didn’t end up actually reading the story about Noah and the Ark from M’s Bible until bedtime that evening!

I had a craft planned, but we just didn’t get to it. However, I do still plan to do it with M, and I’ll create a separate post for it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Have a beautiful day! :)

A Little Wisdom from some Wonderful Women

(Ah, I love a little alliteration!)

In my post earlier today, I meant to include some links to other blogs that have given me food for thought over the past couple of weeks, as I tried to come up with the right words for what I wanted to say.

However, at the time I couldn’t find all the links, so I published the post without them.  It is *Thursday Thinking* after all, and it would just be weird to post it tomorrow.  I only get one day a week when I really get to think about things, you know. ;)  That is actually more true than you think.

Here are the links I wanted to share with you – each one is a good read, and I think these women have some real wisdom to share.  Enjoy!

A post about our duties by Jen at Conversion Diary

A post about being prepared for the day as a mother of small children by Amanda at Taking Off My Shoes

And a hilarious yet insightful post about motherhood by Organizing Mommy at Organized Everyday

By the way, I’m putting this in a new post because I just can’t stand the way a post will show up in my Google Reader 5 times because it keeps getting edited.  So annoying!

Have a beautiful day!

Thursday Thinking – Scheduling My Life Away, part 2

Part one of this post is here.

To be clear, the title “Scheduling My Life Away” is referring to the enormous amount of activities I can try to cram into our days… activities that are offered everywhere I turn; activities that carry with them the unspoken message that my child will be lacking in some serious way if I don’t sign him up for this or that, that if I were a better mother I’d give him these experiences regardless of the cost to my well-being (or sanity). It also applies to all the other things we are asked to do, feel we need to do, etc. The craziness with which we fill our calendar pages.

These are the things that can make us so busy, busy, busy, that while we feel we are being productive (because if you aren’t busy you must be lazy!), we can easily lose sight of exactly what our life is – what is truly meaningful in it – normally that’s the people we love dearly: our families. I don’t want to have such a busy schedule that my family’s needs are not being met in the best way possible.

At one point a while after having M, I realized that our home had become quite chaotic (Really? Why didn’t anyone tell me that could happen with a new baby?!) And I realized that it was up to me, as the mother of the home, to change this. I was happy in a way, but lacking a sense of peace that I truly longed for. Longed for in a way I can’t express. It is deeper than the desire to simply be happy.

And so I began to examine all of my activities and my schedule for our days within the framework of this desire for peace in my home. I began to see that at this point in my life, this is part of my “job description” as a wife and mother.

Really, our gifts and talents are given to us to benefit and serve others. Keeping the house clean and life running in an orderly fashion is not a very glamorous job, but out of the three people who live in this house, I am the one best suited for doing it and I can honestly say, I’m the one who can best see what needs to be done and is capable of getting it done. Yep, yep, yep. :)

For real peace, our priorities must match up with the responsibilities we have at our particular season of life. Blogging, for example, simply can not be first on the list! ;) Neither can anything that is just me pursuing my own interests. Because when I do this, anything that my family needs from me is seen as an annoyance, an irritation, and an inconvenience. It’s a struggle because we do need time for ourselves, and we need time to rest and recharge our batteries, but it is so easy to confuse resting with escaping.

What brings true rest for me? Time alone to think (I’m extremely introverted), prayer, proper sleep. Those are things I have to schedule into my days. Those are things that are so much more important than play dates and shopping and everything else!

What can be ok in moderation, yet easily turn into an escape? Time on the internet, reading, shopping, hobbies… anything that tempts me to skip my duties in order to spend time on it.

If only our hearts were in line with our duties, right? Oh, if only.

I need and pray for a conversion of heart when I’m cleaning the bathroom and hating every single second of it, ready to cut down anyone who dares to need my attention at the same time I’m slaving away for them, knowing I probably won’t get even a simple “thank you”.

Yet, I would do cleaning and laundry and cooking for a friend who is ill joyfully, happy to help them out. Happy to help keep their home running a little more smoothly. Happy to take on extra work so that their family had one less thing distracting them.

Why can’t I feel the same joy in taking care of my own home and my own family, the people I love more than anyone else? Why is there this disconnect between my heart and what I do for my family?

I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m still trying to live my own life, pursue the things I want to. It’s because I’m selfish. Apparently I have not yet learned that happiness is not to be found in doing my own thing, it’s to be found in loving others through our actions.

I’m working hard on spending the time at home to do what needs to be done. I don’t want this to just be a place where we sleep and a "base station” for all the running around we do. I don’t want to be so tired all the time that we eat whatever we can find or fast food.

I want to bring peace into our life together, then we can go do all that fun stuff and know that things are ordered correctly in our lives. The opposite of peace is disorder and chaos, after all. The one is achieved only by fighting the other.

I believe I veered away from the track I was on when I began this post… and I know I can be a bit of a chatterbox! If you’ve made it to the end, congratulations!

I hope you have a beautiful and peace-filled day!

Open Ended Art – Mixed Mediums

The theme for Open Ended Art this week is Mixed Mediums… check out the other artwork here!

This turned out to be a really easy art project for us… because I didn’t have to do anything!  One day recently when M was home alone with Daddy, he made this:

Look very closely and you can see one yellow line on the left.  It qualifies! :) 

Apparently M did this completely on his own.  I had some construction paper out and he picked a green piece and put it on his easel.  Then he got a cup of water from the bathroom sink (where was his dad? That’s what I want to know!), and dipped chalk in it then drew on the paper.  As a finishing touch, he added stickers.

So, colored paper, water, chalk, stickers… you can’t get much more mixed than that! :)  Here’s a close up:

Have a beautiful day! :)

Book Review – Read and Share Toddler Bible by Gwen Ellis, Illustrated by Steve Smallman

Let me say right away, I highly recommend this Bible if you have small children who are young toddlers to pre-school age.
The illustrations are colorful and very well done; I especially like the facial expressions, which could easily tell the stories by themselves!
The stories are kept short and are written in very toddler-friendly language. While they are simple, they are still biblically accurate. This book holds my son’s attention, and helps carry the messages of the Bible stories home to him. We will definitely be using this book for some of our Sunday School on Fridays posts!
For a closer look, check out this great little flip book!
A one hour DVD comes with this Bible and it is perfect for a toddler. The pace is just right, the narration is spoken clearly (so important for a young child), and the animation is fun to watch. M was captivated by the story about Noah’s Ark, and would have happily watched the entire DVD!
I love several things about this Bible, and at the top of the list are the activity suggestions written at the end of each story. As you know, I love finding ways to help M internalize Bible stories and remember them. This book is full of inspiring ideas to help me do just that!
All in all, we greatly enjoy reading this Bible together; it is a wonderful addition to our bookshelves!

Art Time - Mixing with Yellow

The Open Ended Art theme for this week was “mixing with yellow”.  You can check out other works of art here.

I am cheating a little with this post because it’s more of an activity than actual artwork.  And we did this as part of our Noah’s Ark theme for Sunday School on Friday this past weekend (the post about Noah’s Ark will be coming this Friday).  However, it includes yellow and there was plenty of mixing involved, so I am hoping it qualifies! :)

M had a great time with this.  It seriously kept him enthralled for an entire hour.  There was a higher than usual danger of messiness, so I had to stay right there with him, but I really enjoyed it too.  It could’ve (should’ve) been done outside; I was just too lazy to take everything out.  There’s a towel on the table for obvious reasons.

I set up several glasses and jars on our kitchen table and filled them about halfway with clear water.  We started with six and ended up adding one or two more as we went along.  I put red, yellow, and blue food coloring into an ice cube tray, gave M some pipettes, and he started mixing. 

Here he is with yellow in his pipette (it’s looking a little green; I think this is due to my camera for some reason):

And… Yellow + Red = Orange:

 

Then he filled 2 ice cube trays with the colored water so he can have more outside ice fun one of these days.

This was such a fun activity for M, and it was fun for me to watch him be a little scientist.  I highly recommend doing this with your kids – just pick a day when you are feeling brave and very, very patient!  I had to remind M several times that this wasn’t an activity we could be silly with.  I didn’t want broken glass and food coloring all over my kitchen! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School!

M is 35 months old.

Whew, what a busy week! I’m having a hard time weeding out tot school photos, because I have about 30 of them! Here are the ones showing the most fun…

We played a game of “what’s different? / What’s the same?” with his toy cars one day. I’d put 3 of them together (2 vans and 1 racecar, or 2 blue cars and 1 red car), and he’d have to figure out which one was different and why the other 2 were the same. The tongs were his idea, not mine. :)

He did his name puzzles with milk jug lids. I finally got around to making ones that say “Mommy” and “Daddy” for him. He just loves these:

Pattern blocks and pattern cards:

He asked to do something with “baby” letters (lowercase), which had me very excited, because he hasn’t shown much interest in them, and has been a little confused. Calling them mama letters and baby letters has helped, silly as it seems. So, we grabbed his ABC poster (Dollar Tree), and his See and Spell letters, and matched them up. He did great with this:

Then we lined them up and sang the ABC song a couple of times. He thought it was neat that we could do that, I guess we’ve never done it before.

Then we got out the See and Spell boards and worked on them for a while.

Here’s an ABC uppercase and lowercase matching file folder game we did. We only did the first half of the alphabet and then he was ready to quit. You can find this here.

We did his favorite truck puzzle cards (Dollar Tree again!):

We bought some $1.00 animal flashcards from Target (2 sets) and used them for a matching game. I loved the pictures on these, and went back to buy the insect and American animals ones.

More matching – this time with his toy cars and a color wheel:

It quickly turned into a parking lot. :)

We played with our Target dollar spot marble run:

Sticker book:

We matched up ladybug designs on the flannel board:

Outside time – getting treasures out of a giant ice cube:

Blowing lots of bubbles right in Mommy’s face:

And playing with his new sand/water toy:

Whew! Hope you had a busy and FUN Tot School week too!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – The Shepherd and the Lost Sheep

This week’s Bible story is from a parable that Jesus told, found in Luke, chapter 15.
We read this story from a couple of different children’s Bibles this week – one in the morning, and then the other one for bedtime. I just recently received the second one and I’m hoping to post a review of it within the next few days.
M was feeling a little emotional about this story; the idea of anyone being lost and alone makes him sad. We actually had tears at one point! Toddlers can be rambunctious and drive us nuts, but they also have very tender hearts!
I told him that the shepherd loved the sheep and kept looking for him until he found him, and that Jesus loves us that much too. For some reason this story really seemed to sink in with him.
For a craft we used this idea and made a paper plate sheep. M tore some cotton balls in half (makes it fluffier) and glued them to the back of a paper plate, then added some googley eyes.

At that point, it was looking cute. My artistic skills apparently need some work, because I cut out ears, a nose, and a small mouth and M glued them onto his sheep, and this is what it looks like:

I know! It looks like it has a moustache, doesn’t it?! I can hardly look at the thing. And those ears… well, I’m not sure what sheep ears look like, but I don’t think they look like that! :) Anyway, the fact that it looks funny is totally my fault, and I don’t want it to discourage you from making one with your child. M loves this sheep and was very proud of it.
We also played a very simple “count the sheep” game I made. There are links to the materials I made for this game at the bottom of this post if you are interested in doing this too.
Each person has a game card – basically a blank grid of 20 empty squares. Take turns rolling the die and then put that many lambs on your grid. Going left to right and top to bottom as you place the lambs on helps develop the habit they’ll need later on when they learn to read left to right and top to bottom. Whoever fills their card up first is the winner.
I’ve been really bad lately about getting pictures of M doing these things, but he really enjoyed it and we’ve played it several times since! After we are done playing he likes to sort the lambs into piles by color.
Next week is Noah’s Ark!
Have a beautiful day! :)
Link to make your own dice
Link to game cards
Link to lamb game pieces

Art Time! Bubble Wrap Printing

I’ve been seeing this done on, oh, just about everybody’s blog lately, and we just had to do it!

I gave M a big selection of paint colors – I was trying to get the last little bit of paint out of a lot of his paint bottles, so he had just about every color of the rainbow there.

We started with little bubbles, and painted a section of the paper with a paintbrush, then pressed the bubble wrap into that and then again onto the paper:

You can see in the picture that we made both negative and positive prints. 

Then the big bubbles (I can’t remember where I found this huge bubble wrap, but it came in handy!):

Hey, did you know that if you mix all the colors of the rainbow you get brown?  I know because I trustingly left the room for just a moment and came back to see this:

So much for the bubble wrap.  Apparently trucks are more fun, hee hee. :)  And painting your arms too.  Not that I was doing much laughing at the time…

So, here’s our bubble wrap / truck-in-the-mud finished peice of art:

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time! Roller Shapes Painting

I found the inspiration for this art project in a post that Michelle wrote at her blog.  (She and Emily did something similar to this with chenille pipe cleaners glued to cardboard tubes.)

Here’s what you need:

• Cardboard paper towel tube
• Fun foam shape stickers
• paint in colors of child’s choice
• paper to paint on
• paper, paint tray, plastic cutting board, or *something* similar to roll the paint out on.  We used newsprint, but in the future I will use our plastic cutting board because paint just soaked into our newsprint and I felt like we wasted quite a bit.  You could use a smooth sheet of aluminum foil too!

Begin by peeling the backing off the stickers and let your little one put them on the cardboard tube wherever they want to.  Make sure they get stuck on firmly; they have a tendency to peel up at the corners.

Put your paint in “globs” on whatever you are going to roll it out on.  At first we were going to use a plate, but quickly saw that wouldn’t work, so we painted the paint from the plate onto our newsprint and spread it out a little with paintbrushes.  I didn’t get a good picture of this, but you can see it in the picture below.

Roll your tube through the paint a few times, then put it on your paper and roll it out:

Keep doing this until you are happy with your art.  If you are so happy doing it that you want your mama to tear off 2 more sheets of freezer paper for you to paint on, then so be it. ;) 

M made 3 beautiful shape paintings. Here’s #2:

(The # 3 painting became a little murky and then the hands got involved, and then there were really no shapes to photograph, so it didn’t make the cut for this post. :)  )

And, when he was at the sink cleaning up, he said, “I really loved painting today, Mommy!!”  And that made my heart swell. 

Have a beautiful day! :)

P.S. I am so pleased that ABC and 123 featured one of M’s favorite craft projects ever!  His cute Summer Sunshine.  I’m excited because every kid that sees it in our home wants to make one too (must be the handprints!), and I’m so glad to be able to share it!

Imagination at Work

Every month we get an issue of High Five, a preschool version of Highlights magazine.  The subscription was a gift from Matthew’s grandma, and he LOVES it.  Every issue has a page with a picture of something to build using blocks or every day items at home. 

Here’s the picture from our current issue:

It’s an apartment building, built with blocks and empty cereal boxes.

And here’s what has been standing in our living room floor since Friday night:

I really should’ve taken a picture of M playing with it and setting it up, because he was really into it.  Seriously into it.

We got these little crate-style containers at Dollar Tree a year ago and we keep M’s little cars, musical instruments, and a train set in them.  Well, apparently we did keep those things in them, but now they are just lying in heaps on the floor.  Because he needed an apartment building.  :) 

Really he treats it more as a house; I’m not sure he really knows what an apartment building is.  There’s a garage to the side made from blocks, and the book in the front is the sidewalk (couldn’t you tell?).

And, yes, some of the people living in the apartments are figures from M’s nativity set that he has refused to let us put away since last Christmas.  He plays with them like they are action figures, lol.  If you look closely you’ll see Mary on the rooftop and baby Jesus in the middle square, hee hee. :)

I thought it was such a great idea, and works so well.  You can’t beat a play house/apartment building for $3.00!  And believe me, I’m not upset at all that I need to go back to the Dollar Tree to buy more containers for the toys that were evicted!! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art time – Yellow Prints

The theme for open-ended art this week was yellow and prints.  Check it out here.

I’ve been wanting to do some circle prints lately, with all the lids we’ve collected (since I’ve started doing creative stuff with M I can’t seem to throw anything away!), so I set it out yesterday morning.  M wanted blue paint too, and since it’s his art, I complied:

  I had some lids and some old spools too.  He was really interested in the spools.  He yelled, “look Mommy, steering wheels!”  Sure enough:

He worked on this for a while, and he did notice that blue and yellow mixed together make green.  I know we’ve gone over that before, but this time he noticed it and mentioned it on his own.

He started playing around with the paint right on the saucer, and I don’t remember his exact words, but I finally realized he wanted me to notice the designs he made on the saucers, and to hang them on the wall (we have one decorative plate on the wall, and I guess that gave him the idea).  We got some paper and pressed them onto the saucers, and made prints of his “designs”:

(I know the masking tape holding up all his artwork in our house is just sooo elegant, isn’t it?)

Here’s the final product:

Have a beautiful day! :)