Another week flies by..

Beans and I have been up to a lot.  It's been a bit stressful to keep up with everything but I guess we're managing. We had a busy week and not so very busy weekend.  Our homeschool group began art in park on Tuesdays again which means that Beans will nap on Tuesdays at least!  So far our week normally looks like this: Mondays- themed homeschool mornings (this month weather) 'Spanish hour' with friends in the afternoon.
Tuesday - Art in the park mornings - biking in the afternoon.
Wednesday - Music morning with friends - Letter day in the afternoon
Thursday - playgroup morning - baking in the afternoon.
Friday - Homeschool morning - swimming in the afternoon
Saturday - Art class/ Library / children's museum..aka Downtown dance:)
Sunday - cleaning day! (lesson planning)
I really didn't know it was that busy until now.
Anywho it's almost two in the morning..so I will attempt to rapidly summarize my adventures with Beans.  We had attempted a few last minute science experiments with the weather kit we got from the library (which Beans accidently destroyed a piece of! A part of the anemometer:( I tried supergluing, failed and ended up using a piece of tape..I'm awaiting my judgement call from the library to see if I have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a plastic anemometer that still technically works btw)
One of my favorite experiments found in the kit was the water cycle in a jar.  I took a pic detailing instructions and materials needed.  Beans has become pretty familiar with the water cycle thanks to the Magic School Bus and the Glazer Children's museum. But this really helped to actually demonstrate it.

Here is our 'Greenhouse jar'.. Beans had a blast putting everything together, she loves loves dirt.  This is what it looked like on day 2.  On day one Beans kept checking on the jar to see a 'cloud' would form.  But she was still a bit excited when she saw that it had begun to rain inside the jar when we checked on it in the morning.

Other fun stuff included the very anticipated thermometer in the freezer experiment.  The experiment was very simple, but still very fun for Beans.  We put one thermometer in the freezer and one on the top shelf of the fridge and waited an hour or so before taking them out.

 It's kind of hard to see but of course the freezer was much colder, it was below zero! Which Beans found very interesting.."Below zero? What? That doesn't make sense!" It will in time beans.  I then helped Beanpie record in her little journalmajig.

More good fun was the tornado in a bottle! Everyone should make this with their child. It's pretty much just a flat bottomed bottle, water filled 3/4 way, drop of dish soap and coloring, and marble. Swoosh and shake.

Our last Monday morning consisted of all things clouds!  Beans is using flat marbles to fill in dots on her cloud magnet sheet.  These are great activities for developing fine motor skills and hand/eye coordination. I love this site for finding these printables..http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/WeatherMagnet%20Pages.htm

We then proceeded with a 'cloud' experiment.  We added drops of water, using a dropper, to a cotton ball and waited to see how many it took until it began to rain. It took a LOT of drops.

 Beans was very anxious to get to work on our cloud book and I think it came out great! It was way fun making it.  We used 3 sheets of construction paper folded in half. We then hole punched the edge and tied it with some hemp. Then we got to work with the contents. We used felt, stickers, construction paper,water colors, glue and markers. These are a few pages.

Soft cuddly cloud book.

I've been getting into the hang and really enjoying putting together Montessori inspired tray activities for Beans.
Some of her faves over the weekend were the juicing activity..

  And she loved making bracelets and necklaces out of heart beads, pipe cleaners an shoestring.

But I think the thing she enjoyed the most was lying in that little Ikea bed and pretending it was hers..wacky kid!  That reminds me, I should go to to bed:)

Holiday type of Monday

Today I didn't have drive anywhere. Nope. Not today. Pops had lunch at the workplace for once, so Beans and I actually spent the whole day at our complex, and time flew by.  We rose at our usual time but Beans wanted to get straight to 'work' (we didn't have brekkie til' snacktime).  So off to work we went.
I couldn't believe what we had scored at our super awesome downtown library last weekend.  They actually have unit workboxes you can checkout!  Yes, really. I almost thought it was too good to be true, put there to tease me, that I had to double (triple) check with the librarian. And lo and behold there was a whole unit on weather!

The pic is a bit dark, but the box includes an anemometer, a wind vane, thermometers, activity idea box, charts, a weather storybook, a rain gauge, just a whole lotta cool stuff.

   Beans pretty much wanted to find out what the anemometer and wind vane was for so we took it out in the hot hot florida heat to find out.  Those things didn't spin at all. Hmm.

We recorded our observation the super dry erase experiment chart that came with the kit.

So anyway, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to try out the thermometers.  The box included two old school thermometers. I put one outside for a bit, and left one inside. The outside one seemed pretty accurate, but the inside one..?  I was a bit unsure about that one, but none the less, we recorded the comparisons in Beans journal.  Beans then wanted to put one in the freezer, take a bath with one, sit on one, etc etc, but had to explain that since they didn't belong to us we couldn't do that with the ones from the kit.  She was slightly bummed. I know what to get her for christmas though:)

  There are so many cool ideas, for language arts and science projects with this kid that I was just giddy, but we chose just a couple of other ideas. I followed Beans lead mostly, but we had a kick doing the fill in the blank story card and Weather poem.  Beans filled in the story blanks, I did the poem..I'm just not much of a poet..

Beans had to make her own 'poem' too:)

We took a break after all that busy ness to go deliver a letter Beans wrote for her cousin, Beans rollerskated, fell ,rollerskated, fell,  gave up, then walked all the way to the mail box to deliver this oh so adorable letter she wrote for her cousin.

aww..her first letter. I just about teared:) And I just treasure that little punk rock type looking monster that's supposed to be her cousin.

After meal time the fun didn't stop. Nuh uh. We looked up some pics of rain sticks and conspired to make a Huge one! Time consuming but so very fun!

 I was kinda tough hammering the nails until they penetrated through the tube..especially for a three year old, so I hammered the nail until it just poked through the tube, then I let Beans finish. She thought this was a good idea so she gave me a sweet pat on the head and proceeded to hammer away.

Once all those nails were in (which we just followed the spiral around the tube), we spilled the beans! (ha) right into that giant tube.  Beans, rice and aquarium pebbles.

Ta da!  Very rainy sounding rainstick.

We hammered and hammered nails into that thing. We used up maybe 150 nails? Beans estimated 572:) Good estimate lil kid.

Our Tuesday Morn

  It's oh so rainy this Tuesday morn.  Which is perfect for our weather themed month.  Bean's  been getting familiar with the different (and in her opinion very funny) cloud names.  Actually when she heard a clash of thunder this morning she whispered in a very frightened voice *gasp* 'oh gosh there's a cumolodimbus cloud out there.." (eh..close enough), and proceeded to keep watch near the window for a lightening show, which to her are cooler than fireworks:)
At our visit to the library yesterday we found some pretty gnarly books on weather. Here's some of our good finds!

        This book is super! We read this last night and again for circle time this morning. I just love how all the info is written in a fun, rhyming way and just captivates kids. I need to own all of these books. I will make that one of my goals.

  We started doing a circle time in the mornings which consists of calendar time, the weather we see outside, some songs and a story...
At calendar time we'll put a star sticker on the day of the month and follow the column up to see the day of the week. Then Bean proceeds to tear off the paper days of the week attached to the wall and trys to find the right ones.  Then we'll look out to the weather and find out what suits our weather spinnermajig best.
Here is my improvised, very inexpensive, calendar area..The calendar was given to us by Bean's awesome great aunt and I got the weather spinnermajig and days of the week at Target for a dollar.

  Awhile back, maybe when Bean's was 2.5, I tried a scheduled morning..but no..that didn't work at all then.  So then I tried again about a month and a half back and now she really responds well to it. She seriously really likes looking at our schedule and figuring what'll be coming next. So I learned something  very important that most parents learn in their parenting journey..Even if your kid doesn't respond well or seem to like something at first it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to reintroduce it in the future, because kido will probably really like it then (the other night Bean's ate a bunch of broccoli and liked it!!! what!?!) try, try again. and again and again.
This is our morning schedule..(which isn't always followed to the t but mostly it is)

  After circle time Bean's can pick any activity from her closet shelves and she wanted to play math today.  I got these really cool table scatter fishies,shells, and animals on super clearance at Target (I<3 target) and they make great counters.  I found that cool felt math board at Michaels on clearance.

  
     I found this Leapfrog Letter Game at goodwill for 2 bucks! It's Bean's favorite game ever:) It helps reinforce counting colors,phonics, before and after concepts, taking turns, logic and all that good stuff. The only downside is that it's been missing the letter M since we bought it, which bums the kid out sometimes.

    Bean's then wanted to play with these cards.  These were given as a gift in her 2nd birthday and they're so awesome.  They're pretty much picture flahcards and we make up a story as we pick out pictures and we write the story down and then read the story all together after picking out maybe 8 - 12 pictures. (pardon the half naked 3 yr old, we're battling her issues with clothes lately)

  Bean's is starting to catch on to my blogging during her snack ...until next time:)

I forgot about thy blog...

  So much has happened since I last posted!  I'm finally a licensed Kindermusik educator and I'm so pumped to get this underway, but also still so nervous and bummed because I don't really have the startup money to get this going.  Training took about 3 1/2 months.  During training I hosted free practicum classes for my mom friends and their wee ones and it was so much fun!  Beans didn't seem to like to see me praising the other kids too much and she would either sit on me or asked to be picked up a lot of time. I wanted so much for Beans to love Kindermusik class with all the other kids, but she'll probably have to stay home while a I teach a class now and then. She does love the songs and instrument exploration, I think it's still hard for her to adjust to the idea of sharing me with the other kids.  I really do want to host music mornings again so so bad, I'll just have to do that whether Beans likes it or not:)  Aside from that, I don't think I've posted since summer started and and it is sooooo very hot here in Tampa.  I really don't like summer here too much.  Coming from someone who lived in Puerto Rico half their life, you'd think this is nothing, but I swear I could bake some chicken outside faster than in the oven.  That said, we've been indoors a lot! And with people guessing Beans age is 5 years, we really need to get her a Busch Gardens pass and we've been flat broke, so none of that for now. Boo.  So to keep cool, we've been going to playgroups at friends houses, swimming, library, mall, painting in the tub, swimming, eating popsicles, swimming, beach (swimming), and going to Target to try and score any clearance toys or board games we can play indoors in the sweet, cool, lovely A/C.  Our main highlights of the summer have been Free art class at the art museum on saturdays, Kindermusik!, Beans hanging with her cousins, a dance class,swimming, learning about clouds and rain, letter days and, well, so much more..but in all honesty I just want summer to end!!
some summer pics:)


                                                    Beans ready to play at the mall play area

                  
          
                                                   Looking pretty on a very hot walk outside:)
                                                

                                            'Exploding Rainbow' by Beans

                                           Kindermusik!

                                       Beans has become an avid photographer. She sneaks the camera from time to time and I find little gems like this one.  Poor peppy le pew.

                                         Our latest super cool art class art project!  In class they gave us a rectangular piece of wood, I'm guessing 6'' by 3 or 4'' and two smaller wood squares with mirrors on them and Beans painted the blocks all sorts of different colors of course until they were black, so the I thought, that's perfect for a space theme! So I then painted our solar system on the mirrors and it created this infinite, kind of 3D effect when you looked into one of the mirrors.  So very very cool and Beans had to show it off to every single person we passed which made walking around even slower than usual but so cool to see her so excited about the project.

                          
                                   Very cool and wet mist play area in downtown Tampa.

                                      Dress up time with friends!  I'm glad the girls got to come over because they moved away that very day:(

Until next time:)