Letters I and J

Okay, so the letter "i" was really difficult for me to think of activities, partly because from letter "i" to now, we have been really busy and I didn't have much time to think!  That is why I am joining letters I and J!

Letter I activities:

•  Insects - look at insects with a magnifying glass.  Capture them and put them in a bug catcher (look online for instructions on how to make a bug catcher! - the easiest one that I used to do as a kid is a clear jar with holes punched in the lid).  Make an insect out of paper - I got this pattern from http://www.first-school.ws/theme/animals/insects.htm and used the "B is for Bee" link.
• Inside/outside - we have a turkey blind that is somewhat broken (or at least unable to use while hunting, according to my husband, who had to buy another one).  It's huge and like a really big and fun tent.  It just pops up!  So we popped it up in the kitchen and went inside the tent, then outside the tent!  Asher had a blast!
• Ice - do lots of ice experiments - put an ice cube in warm water and one in cold water.  Which melts faster?  Put an ice cube outside on a warm day and time how long it takes to melt.  Freeze some colored ice cubes with food coloring (use primary colors - red, blue and yellow).  Melt the red and yellow together and predict what color the water will be.  Do the same with red and blue, and blue and yellow.
• Make some ice cream - there are tons of homemade ice cream recipes.  Use an ice cream maker, an old crank ice cream maker, or just some easy ice cream in a ziplock bag.  Look online for lots of ideas!  Look at my other blog post for a snow ice cream recipe!
• Igloo - make an igloo with sugar cubes and frosting.  Just build with brick (sugar cubes) and mortar (frosting)!

Letter J activities:

• Make a jellyfish - I found this idea in Family Fun magazine.  Just take an old fruit cup (the clear plastic kind) and poke a hole in the top.  I used a small nail and gently hammered it in.  This was kind of hard for me, so my hole looked more like a broken top.  But it still worked.  I would probably suggest putting the cup right side up so the bottom is against a piece of wood before hammering a hole.  Then it might not break as much.  Anyway, then you take pieces of blue tissue paper and modpodge it around the inside of the cup.  Then take several shades of blue yarn and ribbon, all cut to relatively the same length, and tie a large knot at the top.  Put the knot in the cup and pull one string through the hole.  Hang up with that string!
• Jump in various places.  Discuss how it feels different to jump on the bed or couch versus the floor or grass.
• Jump in the leaves - if it's fall!
• Make Jello Jigglers
• Eat jelly on something
• Teach your child a knock-knock joke

Letter H

Activities for H week!

• Cut out hearts (you know, do the folded paper thing) - this is good for practicing scissor skills! A little more difficult than straight lines, but still good practice - and decorate them with heart stickers, markers, paint, whatever. We gave a decorated heart to a girl named Haley at church.
• Hats - pull out all the hats in your house (or if you're like us and have a bazillion, just get the kids' play hats) and sort them by size, color, etc. Wear them and have a parade of hats.  If you have one you can decorate, do it!  Asher actually hates wearing hats, so this activity wasn't very exciting to him, which saddened me, because I think it's so fun!
• Dig holes in the sandbox or dirt.
• Give lots of hugs!
• Play with a toy hippo.
• Draw a house, talk about your house/home, play with a dollhouse.
• Sing "If You're Happy and You Know It"
• Make a newspaper hat - we did this, decorated it, and gave it to Asher's friend Hayden at church.
• Make handprints with paint on a large piece of paper.

• Cut out some additional hearts from colored paper and a few from newspaper print.  Then glue them onto another piece of newspaper.  Have your child see if they can find all the hearts and discuss camouflage.  You can tailor this to your child's age - I only used 2 colored ones and 2 newspaper ones because Asher is so young. I numbered them after he found them.

Letter G

Activities for G week!

• Green - you can do tons with the color green!  Paint with green paint, go on a hunt to spy green things, sort M&Ms and eat the green ones first, etc.
• Make some green frosting and put it on graham crackers for a snack. Asher asked for this one nearly everyday for the next 2 weeks.
• Read "Green Eggs and Ham" and use green food coloring to make scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Asher was excited, yet skeptical about this.  But he eventually tried it and loved it!
• Pan for gold in a sandbox.  We painted some really small rocks with gold spray paint for an activity at church.  When that was over, we just put them in our sandbox and pretended to pan for gold!
• Color a picture of a giraffe.
• Watch a video of giraffes on YouTube.
• Go to the grocery store.
• Teach your child a new game or play an old favorite.  Like golf!
• Play in the grass.
• Look at things you've grown in the garden (during G week, our garden still had some produce).
• Eat some gum (if your kids are old enough.  Mine wasn't.)
• Most importantly, talk about God!!

Modern Slavery

My husband surprised me with tickets to a Tenth Avenue North concert last night.  It was awesome!!  I really like their authenticity and genuine spirit.  They truly make their concerts into a time of worship and put all the spotlight on God rather than themselves.  

Their tour is called "The Light Meets the Dark" and is used to highlight the heinous issue of modern slavery.  I have heard many times about this problem and it has always been a heavy weight in my heart.  But two things were said last night that really hit hard.  They have partnered up with Compassion International, which is a child sponsorship organization.  A Compassion video was shown where 3 adults from other countries spoke about their lives before Compassion intervened and they were sponsored by someone.  One man said that he remembers his mother holding his 10 month old sister as she died of starvation.  I have an almost 10 month old.  Wow.  I don't even want to imagine what it is like to hold your baby as they die of something so simple, yet something you can't provide.  Not only that, but the days and weeks prior to that when they cry out in hunger.  

Then the lead singer of Tenth Avenue North began to talk about slavery and he said he'd always wondered how it actually happens, how a child becomes a slave.  And he began to paint a picture of a common scenario.  A man is working in a field for many hours.  Perhaps a coffee bean field, plucking the beans by hand.  At the end of the day, he brings the pile of beans to his boss and receives $1 for his day of work.  He feels the stress of not being able to provide enough for his family to eat.  Then a stranger comes along and says something like "I have work for your child.  If you let her come with me, I'll pay her $300 a month."  And the man, out of desperation, gives his daughter to the stranger, maybe not having the slightest idea what she will be doing or what will be done to her.  Now, I know that thousands of other children are kidnapped or get into the sex slave industry by more forceful means, but as I sat there and thought about my two babies sleeping peacefully at home, I tried to put myself in that mother or father's shoes and felt heart-wrenching pain.


The singer went on to say that when you sponsor a child through Compassion International, you actually stop that cycle right where it starts.  You literally pluck a child out of a desperate situation in poverty and give them a new start in life.  Instead of a stranger coming to that family's house to offer "work" for a child, a Compassion worker comes and brings wonderful news in the form of food, education, clothing, and most importantly, the Gospel for the child.  What amazing news that must be to a family who wonders how their dollar will feed and clothe their children, let alone give them any education!


He went on to give the typical speech about how it's about the cost of 3 or so lattes a week, but not being a huge coffee drinker (thought I love it, opportunity and cost deter me), that kind of talk never resonates much with me.  What does is realizing that I have and most of the world has not.  It doesn't matter that most of our clothes are second-hand and our TV is old and I have to watch almost every penny I spend.  I have clothes and a TV and pennies to spend.  I spent this morning folding clothes and thanking God that I have clothes to put on, a washing machine to clean them in, a clean floor to fold them on, a warm bed to sleep in, food to eat for breakfast, and many other things.


But even more than God taking care of me on a daily basis with my physical needs, He has taken care of a deep spiritual need that all of us have.  He sent His son Jesus to die on that old rugged cross to take our place.  He literally plucked me out when I was drowning in sin and saved me.  And I thank Him all the time for what He did for me.  He can pluck you out, too, if you just trust Him.  Believe that He died for your sins.  Tell Him that you need Him.  And don't forget to thank Him :)


Our sponsored child is Joan and he lives in Peru.  He's 15 now, which is hard to believe.  He was only 8 or 9 when we began sponsoring him.  It's like watching your own child grow up too fast :)



http://www.compassion.com/

Letter F

We had lots of "F"un during F week!

• Flowers - we didn't do this particular activity, but I found a neat craft in Family Fun magazine (instructions posted below).  What we did do was take a flower sponge and used paint to stamp some flowers across a piece of paper.  Then I had Asher practice drawing lines by drawing the stems with a marker.  Then we completed the picture with some bug stamps and other flower stamps!

  

• Fingerprints and Footprints!  You can do so many things with this.  I had plans to do the following activity with our play group, but we ran out of time and didn't get to do it.  Read Dr. Seuss' "The Foot Book", then roll out a long sheet of easel paper on the ground and have the kids step on a paper plate with paint and walk down the sheet of paper to make lots of fun footprints!  Left foot, left foot, right foot, right!  For fingerprints, use a stamp pad, paint, or just color marker on the fingers and make them into bugs, caterpillars, letters, etc.
• Frogs - the day we did this was a rainy day, so it was perfect for an indoor activity.  Take several paper plates and color them green.  Then cut a wedge in each plate to make a lily pad.  I will insert here that it would be a wonderful and easy opportunity to help your child learn to use scissors with these wedges.  I didn't even think about it until Asher said "I do it!" I helped him get his fingers in the holes and held the plate.  Once he got started with each new cut, he actually did pretty well!  And your preschool teacher will thank you a million times over if you've worked with your child on this skill beforehand!!  Anyway, we pretended to be frogs and jumped on the lily pads.  We have a small toy frog that Asher liked to make jump around on the lily pads too.
• Make a small and simple family tree with photographs and help your child understand some easy concepts about family (like his grandma is actually your mommy).
• Four - do everything in fours!  And practice that counting!

Letter E

Our activities for the letter E week:

• Ears and eyes - listen to different sounds (you can get into high and low sounds, loud and soft sounds, play 2 sounds and ask your child if they were the same or different, etc.), look at things and talk about how we see with our eyes, use a blindfold to put on and see how hard it is to walk around in the dark, etc.  Just be creative with this one!
• Put googly eyes on a picture (one that has eyes, of course, or it might look silly :)
• Put silly glasses on your eyes!
• Eggs - go somewhere where you can get messy and bring a few eggs and a bowl.  Let your child play with the eggs and see how hard they have to push for them to crack.  Let them feel the inside of the egg and see the different parts.  Then cook some eggs (not the ones you played with!) and eat!
• Save the eggshells to make some crushed eggshell art.  Be sure to peel out that thin lining so that all you have is the hard shell part.  When the shell is dry, let your kid have fun crushing the eggshells on a piece of paper.  Put some glue on a piece of paper and sprinkle the pieces on.  When it's dry, you can paint them with watercolors.
• Watch a youtube video of some eggs hatching.
• Make this elephant craft: http://www.first-school.ws/activities/shapes/animals/elephantshapes.htm - you can discuss the shapes and have your child glue (we used tape) the pieces on a piece of paper to make an elephant.  But really, if you just search for elephant crafts on google, you find a ton more to do!  We just used this one because it was really easy. (picture above)
• Exercise!!

 

Letter D

It's been busy in the Regier household and we haven't had much time to do our letter activities lately, but we are getting back into the groove this week!  I also haven't had much time to update the blog, so although we are farther down the alphabet than the letter D, I'm just getting to writing about our fun activities.  We didn't do a whole lot for our D week, but here are the activities:

• Dance to music!
• Make drums out of butter tubs, canisters, pots, etc. and make some noise!
• Read a book about dinosaurs
• Hide a toy dinosaur around the house and have your child search for it
• Hide a toy that starts with D (dinosaur, duck, dog - we used the duck and dog) in the dirt and have them dig to find it!  This was Asher's favorite activity - he wanted to do it everyday for the next week!
• Make a day/dark picture (I know the opposites are day and night, but to make them both start with D I had to get a little creative).  We divided a large paper in half and I drew a sun on the day side and a moon and stars on the dark side.  Then I had Asher paint blue all over the dark side and color the rest of the picture with markers once the paint dried.
• Watch Dumbo - this movie has been played about a thousand times in our house, so it was a no-brainer to include it in our D week!
• Let the dogs out to run around
• Draw pictures!
• We gave a jar of "delicious" salsa to our friend Dana!