Advent - What is it?

I have never celebrated "advent" and this year, I decided that Julian is old enough to understand and really communicate to him why we are going to start celebrating Advent.

The meaning of Advent is a season of waiting and prepartion for the celebration of the nativity fo Jesus. To look beyond the commercial Christmas and find the true meaning of Christmas.

This year, I have lots of activities planned for Advent including ice skating, Holiday Walkabout, making Christmas cards together, baking cookies, giving a toy to charity, going to see the Christmas play at church, making Christmas playdoh, having lunch with Santa, caroling at the nursing home, Christmas party with PALS, make Jesus a Happy Birthday Card, etc.

My Advent Calendar looks like this:

There is one card for every day until Christmas. Attached to the back is a message with what to expect for the day. I can't wait to start.

Today we are heading to the Holiday Walkabout...I will post pics tonight.

Enjoy the season, give thanks for what we have beyond Thanksgiving and seek to help others all year long.

UPDATE on Thankful Tree

This is the progress our Thankful Tree has made so far.

Just in case you can't see the leaves, these are some of the things we are thankful for so far:

• Family
• Mom (Aww)
• Chanel (the dog)
• Food
• Light
• Internet
• Books
• Balloons (I give you one guess who that was)
• Step Stools (lol)
• Etc.

Update on the Bible Verse:
We are on the same one. They got the verse memorized and they love singing the verse song in the car. I catch them humming the tune of the song all the time! I love it.

This is our beauitful Thankful Tree.

Original Post about our Thankful Tree.

I got the wonderful idea of doing a Thankful tree from Brandy at Adventures of a Flake.

I remember she did one last year and I thought it was a great idea, so this year, we made our own. We used cardboard paper and I went to the library to cut out the leaves (using an old Ellison die cut machine!! LOL).

Everyday, every memeber of our home (including Aislinn on the days she is with us) will write something they are thankful for on a leaf and then we stick it to the wall. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around we will have a beautiful fall tree full of leaves.

I am also starting to incorporate bible lessons into my weekly lesson plans. Since we made our tree today, this weeks verse is:

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. Psalm 118:1

I taught the kids a little jingle with the verse in it so they can learn it and memorize it.

Every week, I will choose a new verse.

Deal of the Day!

Leap Frog Alphabet Pal will be available this weekend at Toys-R-Us for $10.49 during a special two-day sale on Friday and Saturday 11/11- 11/13/09.
Target will price match it according to their policy here. According to corporate, you can use a Target and/or manufacturer's coupon on a price matched item.
Use the Afullcup.com Target Coupon Generator to print a $10 off coupon here and then you need the Toys R Us ad to take to Target
Final Price: $.49!

Thanks to Clair for this tip.

Even if your child is too big for this or you already have one, maybe think Toys for Tots or adopting a needy child from an Angel Tree at your church.

Its been a slow week

I just wanted to update our week. We have done NOTHING in the way of learning. LOL. I took the week off. I needed to work on some major projects around the house. I am in the process of preparing my back bedroom. Not sure why, but I feel in my heart that God is preparing me for something and I want to be ready when the time is right. :)

I am starting to volunteer for an organization call Child of the King based out of Polk County. They are having a free thanksgiving dinner for homeless and needy persons on Sat. Nov 21st. If you can help in any way, please let me know. Thanks!

Cookie Monster

Today we celebrated Cookie Monster's Birthday. I put up left over birthday decorations and balloons and invited our PALS over. We read "Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar", made a construction paper cookie and decorated it and then decorated a real cookie.

This was Aislinn's sprinkled cookie. A little overboard with the sprinkles. LOL

And of course, they taste-tested the cookies.

Picnic at the Park

Today was a beautiful "fall" day in Florida so we had a picnic at the park.

Perfect gorgeous weather for it and we all really enjoyed it.

Lots of pics :)

This slide is really cool and it is small tubes so you slide down it really easily.

This round thing, goes round and round like a modern day merry-go-round.


This death trap, I mean, shape caterpillar is fun for the little ones, but injury producing contraption for bigger bodies (like mine).



I loved how A's is holding onto Julian for dear life!

This cute little bucket seat swivels round and round.

These kids aren't scared of anything!! Thats a pretty high ropes course.

This is kinda like a teeter totter but cooler, i guess. :)

All in all, we had a great day~

Thankful Tree

I got the wonderful idea of doing a Thankful tree from Brandy at Adventures of a Flake.

I remember she did one last year and I thought it was a great idea, so this year, we made our own. We used cardboard paper and I went to the library to cut out the leaves (using an old Ellison die cut machine!! LOL).

Everyday, every memeber of our home (including Aislinn on the days she is with us) will write something they are thankful for on a leaf and then we stick it to the wall. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around we will have a beautiful fall tree full of leaves.

I am also starting to incorporate bible lessons into my weekly lesson plans. Since we made our tree today, this weeks verse is:

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. Psalm 118:1

I taught the kids a little jingle with the verse in it so they can learn it and memorize it.

Every week, I will choose a new verse.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Uncle Cozi and Julian working out together.

Ooey Gooey

We went to a PAL's house for a playdate and to make roasted pumpkin seeds. Only Aislinn would cooperate with retreiving the seeds out of the pumpkin. It was a slimey gooey job, but someone had to do it. I think she liked it though.

Trick or Treat

We went with our PALS to the Senior Home to Trick or Treat. It was so much fun. The seniors loved handing out candy and talking to the kids about what they use to dress up as when they were small.

B-I-N-G-O

Lately, we have been playing BINGO mainly with numbers and letters. J and A really like playing and they feel like they are playing a game. Its really helping them recognize their letters without by only hearing them, instead of seeing the letter.

Noodle Sorting - Math

This is an easy sorting exercise. This time we used noodles, but I plan on using rocks, marbles, large beans etc. I want to do this more often because they struggled with it. I simply used some appetizer trays that I happen to have around and wrote smaller #'s onto paper.

Letter Tt Week

This is our Letter Tt tub. This was an easy letter week for them, easy as in, they learned the sound, words associated and recognition of the letter within a word quickly.

They even pointed out this cute plate that Julian made a few weeks ago and tried to "test" Thanks for the T sounds (tuh, tuh, thanks) and it didn't work. So I had to semi explain that Thanks does start with a T but it has an H after which makes a th sound. I love that they were so proactive in learning though.

We read a story about Time, which worked out great because I have been meaning to start talking to them about time telling. We will get more into that soon.

As with every Letter, we made the letter Tt and they had the option to use toilet paper and/or toothpicks. Julian had attempted to use toilet paper with his open ended art last week and didn't like it being stuck to his finger because of the glue, so he stuck to just toothpicks this time.

Aislinn used TP and toothpicks.

This next turkey project was the best craft I have done all year!!! First of all, a great learning tool and helped reinforce the letters they are already very familiar with and helped to remind them of the others that we haven't gotten to. Also, this craft last like 45 min. They were both very detailed and they took their time in accomplishing it. I loved it!!! I kept looking at the time and thinking wow, its been 20 min, then 30 min, then 40. LOL. I will duplicate this over and over with a rainbow, a slide, etc. Be on the look out for it.

They had to glue the corresponding letter to the correct space and then color their turkey.

Here is the template for anyone interested!

This site is a great resource.

I showed them some numbers to see how they would do with recognizing the letter Tt and they were champs, so we moved onto harder things :)

I quickly typed up a story about a Turtle named Tommy that lost his Tooth. There were soooooo many T's in the story, they had a blast highlighting the T's and finding them. I kept telling them it was like a scavenger hunt.

Open Ended Art - Black and White

Open ended art gives children free creativity, allowing the child to create art, how he/she sees it. I didn't invent open ended art, I simple saw the idea from Adventures of a Flake and Mommies Wise Little Bookworms.

The open ended art theme was balck and white.

This was a project that only Julian did.

In his words, he created a scary ghost. :)