Rainbow rice

This activity was inspired by Pink and Green Mama who's blog is full of fun rainbow things to do.
Be prepared for a mess. I laid a sheet down before putting the tray on, but we still had rice all over the floor. Great for summer outside.

I put equal amounts of rice into zip lock bags, added a few drops of food colouring into 2 tablespoons of vinegar and mixed in with the rice. Pour into bowls to dry. There are different ways of doing this.

great sensory activity

the kids added some little wooden toys, cars, etc to the tray.

A peek at our day

With Danny now settled into the new routine of school, its a wonderful new phase of life for me to have that precious mother and daughter time with Amy. She is now 2.8 yrs and able to engage in lots of activities. I'm trying to get into a routine of some structured activities in the first hour of the morning before we get carried away with other things like outings, chores. So far, she's responded very enthusiastlically to any learning experiences where she has mommy all to herself, and i simply can't keep up with how fast she learns. Here she's doing a simple aphabet matching activity and felt board













The girly stuff, which Danny never really got into even tho i exposed them both to all sorts of toys. They both LOVE my fabric box in the background. Lots of imaginative play comes out of that

They both love gardening, hmmm, wonder where they get that from (says mommy who's been dreaming of the country life, la de da, someday). And yeah, a little housekeeper in the making, just give me something REAL and USEFUL to do, i do it "my byself". Gotta love the enthusiasm of preschoolers hey....before 'I'm bored' enters their vocab.

Grocery math

Spontaneous math lesson: looking through junk mail, Danny starts picking out numbers, so i asked him to cut out three thinks he would buy. Glued them and wrote down price, added manipulatives (shells) and got him to count the shells for how much money we need to go shopping.
I try to incorporate basic math concepts in every day situations, to make it as 'real life' as possible at this stage. With preschool only 2 months away, I'm getting more formal with the abc and 123 stuff, and hoping that school will not steal the incredible curiosity and creativity in this little homegrown kiddo.

edible alphabet

Any excuse to get Danny interested in his ABC's, without appearing to 'teach' him. I used a simple dough for flat bread here, and helfway through rolling it out for some 'naan', brought out some alphabet cutters that had been stashed away for ages - maybe Danny would like to have a play with cutting out letters... He got right into it. No sugar either!