Valentine's Day

I am slightly opposed to Valentines's Day. I don't mind the simple "take time to think on the one's you love" aspect, but the candy filled backpacks drives me crazy!! So, I try every year to do non-candy (and mostly non-edible) valentines for my children to hand out. This year we chose Kool-Aid Play Doh kits.

KK received a similar kit a few years ago at the end of the school year (with a tag that said something along the lines of "Have a Kool summer"). We had a blast making it and it lasted for about 6 months before it dried out (that's much longer than a little piece of candy lasts).

The girls had fun helping me measure the ingredients and tape off the top of the bag (just to be safe). And then they sat and chose which color would go to which person. KL went easy and gave all the boys in her class pink (strawberry Kool-Aid) and all the girls purple (grape Kool-Aid), KK on the other hand chose to get a variety of scents and took the time to specifically choose each color for each person, including rearranging a few to make sure it was just right.

The neat thing about this play doh, the Kool-Aid not only gives it color, but a scent too.

That's all for now,
Jo!

Bug Week, Days 1-2

This week is a science week (we got a late start but hopefully we'll make it up later this week) with a bug theme.

On Monday we made roly polys (polies? I'm not sure how you pluralize that)-- how about pill bugs, that works.

On each segment we wrote a fact that we learned about pill bugs.
It was really simple, just 7 triangles held together with a brad (and you can barely see but there are feet and antenna there too). We drew a face on the front one and left off a fact, but the other 6 are informative.
Here's a few action shots:

(Assembling their bugs)

(Learning and writing her facts)

On Tuesday we made play dough fossils.

We went into a little detail about fossils but they were too distracted by playing with the play dough and plastic bugs.
Here's our bugs (I ordered from Oriental Trading, but they were a little smaller than what I wanted but there were plenty to play with):

Then they pretty much just made an imprint, whether by folding the play dough over or using another piece to cover the top and then pull it off/open it up and see the imprint left by our bugs.

Here's a few action shots:

(KK tried to get one of each kind all in one big piece, but it tore as she was lifting it up)

That's all for now,
Jo!