Thursday, August 30, 2012

Kitten's First Full Moon

Theme: Kitten’s First Full Moon, by Kevin Henkes
Honey Pot is 2 years and 3 months old


We love participating in the Virtual Book Club! And we are so pleased to read that it will continue beyond the summer. This month’s featured author, Kevin Henkes, is my favorite so far. We took out three of his books from the library, and read them throughout the week. I had originally planned a few activities for My Garden, but after seeing Honey Pot choose Kitten's First Full Moon to read so much more than the others, I had to use this one. And I have fallen more in love with it too.


The story is about a little kitten that sees a bowl of milk in the sky, and tries to get to it. She leaps off of steps, climbs trees, etc. in attempt to get a sip…but in reality, the bowl of milk is just the moon. It is such a cute story, and has a happy ending. So here follows our activities for Kitten’s First Full Moon.

Crayon Resist Painting

I had been seeing this fun craft on Pinterest quite a bit. Because Kitten’s First Full Moon is entirely in grayscale, I knew we had to do some type of black and white craft. This fit the bill. First I drew a simple cat face in white crayon, and then I let Honey Pot paint a seemingly blank piece of paper with watered-down black paint. (Looking back, I would have rather traced an actual image from the story, as it would have been super easy and cute!) I told her an image would magically appear! As she painted, it emerged more and more.





We both thoroughly enjoyed this craft, and I intend on doing this one again and again. Love!



Magic Milk Paint

We found this idea at Modern Parents Messy Kids. Please take a look at their magic milk, because ours is soooo poorly photographed. You really can’t see how special this experiment is until you see theirs! Here is a glimpse:

via Modern Parents Messy Kids

As far as ours – first I poured some milk into a small dish, and then we added a few drops of food coloring. I let Honey Pot’s choose the colors. Unfortunately one of them was black. (LoL.) She dipped a toothpick into dish soap, and then into the milk dish. The colors swirled around, away from it.



And as she swirled, the colors mixed and very quickly became black.


A fun experiment, but we’ll have to try it again with brighter colors for sure!

Cat Mask

I printed a mask for Honey Pot from Craft Jr., a website with tons of cute printable animal faces. Originally I had tied a string around it for Honey Pot to wear, but after a short time of play it snapped off. So we improvised and taped it to a Popsicle stick. It was still fun. This was just for a bit of imaginative play. We meowed and pretended to sip milk from a bowl just like kittens do.


Problem Solving

Throughout the story, Kitten makes various attempts to get to the bowl of milk in the sky. I decided to make a fun problem-solving game out of a similar situation. First I took a bowl from her play kitchen set. Then I gave her a kitten from my childhood stuffed animal stash, and told her that she wanted the bowl of milk. I placed the bowl in various situations, where Honey Pot would have to think about how she could get the bowl down. "What could she do?" I would ask her.

First, I put it on top of the door…


So Honey Pot decided to close the door to knock it down.


Then I placed it atop the fan…


And so Honey Pot turned on the fan!


Next, the top of her open closet…


So she closed the closet.


Then the bowl of milk was “just waiting” on top of the bathroom sink faucet…


So she stepped up on her stool to reach it.


And each time the kitten got to her bowl of milk, she had to take a sip of course!


I wedged the bowl into Honey Pot’s blinds, with the cord hanging down in her reach…


And after thinking for a moment, she helped her kitten grab a hold of the cord, to open the blinds and knock it down.


And finally, I hid the bowl at the bottom of a bin of blocks. At first Honey Pot had her kitten try to dig for it. But that didn’t work.


Then after much deliberating, and a bit of help, she decided to dump the whole thing.



“Lucky Kitten!”


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Visit the Virtual Book Club's Facebook Page!

Virtual Book Club for Kids

We are linking our activities up to the Virtual Book Club!
Check out what some of our blogging friends did with this month's theme:


Thursday, August 16, 2012

Frogs

Honey Pot is 2 years and 3 months old
Little M&M is 5 months old


Books

We made our weekly trip to the little local library and picked up a few books about frogs. A childhood favorite of mine, Frog and Toad, is just a little too advanced for Honey Pot so I reluctantly left it behind. We did, however, discover new books that were such fun to read. My favorite of the three is Leap Back Home To Me, by Lauren Thompson. The story is so simple and so sweet as a mommy frog watches her baby leap out into the big world, and remains there for him when he returns home. Do check it out!

City Dog, Country Frog, by Mo Willems
Leap Back Home To Me, by Lauren Thompson
I Took My Frog To The Library, by Eric A. Kimmel


Snack

I first spotted this cute little snack from Pinterest, via a blog called Clean and Scentsible. So adorable! And yummy too – Honey Pot ate the entire thing. Instead of using cream cheese as “glue” though we used peanut butter. It’s an absolute favorite in this house, and sure tasted great with the apples!



Paper Bag Puppet

Our craft for the week was inspired by one I discovered from DLTK-Kids, a website I have often visited since beginning Tot School. First I offered Honey Pot the paper bag and green paint.

“I’m make a frog!” she exclaimed before getting started.




Then, after it had dried, we assembled the pieces. I let her take full control of the glue, only showing her where to put it.




Here is the final product:


Then it was time to PLAY!





She loved this little guy. We forgot to give him a name. But she had many laughs with him!




Frog Pond, Small World

This is our first “small world” sensory bin. The idea came from the blog so humorously entitled You’ll Thank Me One Day. Honey Pot enjoyed it greatly because she is a huge, huge fan of pretend play. The package of 8 frogs came from the Dollar Tree. I cut a few lily pads out of my craft foam, already in my supplies, and added some flowers from my scrapbooking stash. Oh, and a couple drops of food coloring to make the pond blue!


We talked about the lily pads and had a quick lesson on floating versus sinking. Honey Pot had a fun time trying to balance the frogs on the lily pads. And she played with them for quite a while.




We also put them all in a row and counted them up!


Here she is making her froggie leap into the water…over and over and over again. J


Dressing For The Occasion

Little M&M is still quite young for our tot school themes, but he did wear his very cute frog outfit, and play with his froggie toys. What a cutie…





Lily Pad Color Matching

I quickly created a template for Honey Pot to match the colors of the frogs to their lily pads. She had an easy time of it!





Each lily pad was numbered too; so then we tried some number recognition. “Leap to the number four!” etc.


Letter Matching

I just wanted to practice some letter recognition with Honey Pot, so I created this worksheet in Photoshop Elements. I printed it on cardstock and used a circle punch from my scrapbook supplies to cut out the letters. Honey Pot needed a bit of help matching the letters up, but we did it!



She even took the liberty of adding a green frog over the picture!


Button Art

Honey Pot received this cute toy from Santa last Christmas. We took out the image of the frog, and popped the buttons through according to color. It had been a while since she played with this, so it was nice. She has definitely improved since then!