Cool Tracer Website

Lincoln keeps asking to draw letters, but he can't quite do them on his own yet, and since most of the sites only have one or two dotted letters to trace and then the rest of the line is blank (and therefore no good to me since he'll only trace the two dotted letters and come asking for more), I went on a hunt for alphabet tracer pages. I found this really cool site that lets you type in the letters so you can do their name or whatever you want. I had to copy/paste it into a word document and tweak it a little to get it exactly how I wanted it, but it wasn't hard. And Lincoln thought it was awesome to be "writing" his name. :) I think we'll be using this site a lot in the next year or two.

It's also been really fun to have Ivan involved in some of the educational things we're doing. And no, he's not even close to being able to trace dotted letters. But when Linc wants to trace letters, I give Ivan a blank page and just let him color and he's so happy to be included and doing "big kid" stuff.

New Resource

Tonight while I was blog hopping searching for fun ideas to do with the kids, I came across another blog I really like. It's called Delicious Ambiguity, and she does a lot of things with her blog, but the one I really like is called Tot Tuesdays, it's for "...sharing crafts, activities, tips, recipes and learning resources for TODDLERS." And anyone who wants can post their ideas. I love it, and will definitely be checking back often to find ideas. Here's the link if anyone else is interested:



I love stuff like this, and someday my goal is to be the author of a blog like this. I've got a very small start, but it will take time, and a lot of organizing to get to the big picture. I just think it's great to have places where people can go to share their ideas, and thoughts about what does and doesn't work, in their process of educating their children. I would love to create a resource like that for people. That's probably why I spend so much time documenting the things I test out on my own kids. Not only will it be fun for them to look back someday and see what they did in their childhood, but if at any point along the way it inspires another person to help a child to learn, experience, and create, then maybe that could be my one small contribution to making the world a better place. I don't just do this because "that's what stay-at-home-moms are supposed to do", I do this for me...this is my "life's mission", or at least part of it, or the start of it. I had more I was going to say, but I lost my train of thought...darn pregnancy brain! :)

Anyways, there's my spiel and rant for the evening, now off to bed.

Family History Tidbit

I think I've mentioned before that one of my callings is to teach the Family History class. I love it, mostly because it forces me to learn more things and keep going with my own family history. This week our lesson was on gathering information from public records. There are lots of things that can be included in the public records category, the Internet being one of them, but I won't go on to re-teach my whole lesson here. Mostly I just wanted to share a really cool resource that I found.

That resource is a little site called http://www.findagrave.com/, ya I know it sounds really weird and unofficial. And kind of it is, but I thought it was cool. Find a Grave is a website started by I have no idea who, but they had the idea to go to cemeteries all across the country and take pictures of gravestones and post them online for anyone to have access to. Sometimes they even have other information with the picture. For example...I decided to search for my dad's grave since it's in a small out of the way town known as Hooper, UT. This is what I found.

Birth: Nov. 20, 1959

         Salt Lake City
         Salt Lake County
         Utah, USA

Death: Nov. 13, 2002
           Salt Lake City
           Salt Lake County
           Utah, USA

Salt Lake Tribune, The (UT) - November 15, 2002
         Stewart Ross Lemmon passed away on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2002, at the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah of leukemia.
        He was born in Salt Lake City on November 20, 1959, the son of Earl Scott and Maxine Harrison Lemmon. He attended Weber High and served an LDS mission in Munich Germany.
        He was married to Tamilynn Hogan on September 24, 1982 in the Logan Temple. He was an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served in a bishopric, on a High Council, but his favorite calling was as a Sunday School teacher. He also enjoyed spending time with his family in the outdoors, hunting, fishing and camping.
       He is survived by his mother, Maxine Lemmon, his wife, Tamilynn Lemmon and four children: Krystal Lynn, Kyle Stewart, Jackson Earl and Tanner Ross. He is also survived by his three brothers and three sisters: Lee Nelson, Salt Lake City; Lani (George) Tolman, CO; Charlotte (James) Trainor, California; Valarie (Hagos) Egzibher, N.C.; Scott Lemmon and Steven Lemmon, both of Ogden. He was preceded in death by his fathers, Grover Thompson and Earl Scott Lemmon and his father-in-law, Jack D. Hogan.
      Funeral services will be held Saturday, Nov. 16, 2002 at 11:00 a.m. at the Hooper North Chapel, 5000 S. 5900 W. Friends may call at Myers Mortuary in Roy, 5865 S. 1900 W. on Friday, November 15, from 6 to 8 p.m. and on Saturday at the Church from 9:45-10:45 a.m. Interment, Hooper Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the family.

Burial:  Hooper Cemetery
             Hooper
            Weber County
             Utah, USA

The picture of the headstone itself is an awesome family history find, especially because my dad's has a ton of information on it if you know what to look for. Birth and death dates, full name, name of spouse, birth of spouse, marriage date (and if you notice the temple picture you could assume they were married in the temple), and names of children. Most headstones don't have that much info on them though.
 
Having the obituary included in the information was awesome! Obituaries are like family history gold mines. From them you can get every thing you need to complete a person's temple work, and get lots of ideas about family members to search out and where to start looking.
 
And yes, obviously, I already know this info about my dad, and have seen his headstone before (helped design it in fact), and have copies of his obituary, but I'm just using it as an example of the kinds of things you can find on this website. Other things you can do on the website are add your own pictures, leave flowers at the virtual grave (ya, that's kind of weird), leave messages, and put down your contact info in case other family members come on the site and want to get a hold of you.
 
Anyways, it's a lot faster than grave hunting yourself. Trust me, we spent about 4 hours once in the American Fork Cemetery looking for some of Aaron's ancestors. So give it a try and let me know what you think.

Book Review: Marshmallow Math: Early Math for Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Primary School Children

  by Trevor Schindeler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I originally picked this book up to get ideas for simple counting and math games for Lincoln. I was pleasantly surprised to find, not only the games I was looking for, but a philosophy about teaching math to young children that I agree with.

This book focuses on how to teach solid math principles instead of just memorizing equations and rules. It encourages using objects (i.e. marshmallows, pennies, jelly beans etc.) over written numbers in the early stages of math so that children can see and physically manipulate the numbers they are trying to work with, and gain a understanding of what they are actually doing with each equation. Most importantly, it does this in game format to make it fun.

Other things I liked about the book...it encourages short, focused, fun time periods for doing math, instead of long stretches with lots of "work". It is easy to read and simple to understand, as in, they don't spend pages and pages trying to convince you why their method works or is better. In fact, each chapter is only about a page long. The book itself is only 153 pages, which includes charts and game boards that you can print out to use. Also, the concepts start with simple things for toddlers, and gradually advance in difficulty to about a 1st or 2nd grade level. So the book and it's ideas will be useful for awhile.

I would recommend this book for anyone out there with younger children looking for fun ways to include math into your everyday playtime activities.

A New Resource

Today I stumbled across another ABC blog while I was looking for ideas for our upcoming K day. It's called The Alphabet Project. It's basically the same as the ABC Stuff blog I posted about a little while ago, except that the woman who posts on there has a daughter that's 2 (as opposed to the woman who does ABC Stuff who has a 4 year old son) so her projects are a little bit simpler. I also really like the method she uses. Here's how she explains it:

Each week we will focus on one letter. I've divided the Alphabet Project into daily and weekly activities. Daily activities will be shorter, while the weekly activities will be more involved.


Daily:
1. SEE the letter.
2. SAY the letter's sound.
3. READ a book based on the letter. (For example, for the letter A, we'll read a book about apples.)
4. WRITE the letter.


Weekly:
1. COOK something that begins with the letter.
2. MAKE something that begins with the letter. (Yes, "make" could be the same as cook, but for "make" I'm envisioning an art project or something.)
3. DO an activity that begins with the letter.


Lincoln and I aren't doing anything daily yet. We are still just going through the alphabet one letter at a time once a week. It's been more or less a play time with our friends so far, that just happens to have an educational twist. But I have been thinking that maybe in the fall after he turns three, we will boost it up to where he and I at least are doing something on a daily basis, and though I may not copy these exact goals, I like that she has them layed out and goes from there. It seems like it would give a little more structure but still give you lots of freedom to move within it.

Anyways, check out her blog, it has some cool ideas.

I Day: Ice, Indians, Instruments, and Insects

After a two week break for sickness, we are back on track with letter day. Today's letter was "I" and it was my turn.

To start off we made ice. I gave each boy an ice cube tray and had them fill it with water. I explained to them that when water gets really cold it freezes and turns into ice. We put their ice trays in the freezer while we did all the other activities.

Next, we talked about Indians. Yes, I realize it's politically incorrect to call them Indian, but Native American doesn't start with "I". The boys made Indian headbands out of construction paper. I let them color the bands first (which I had already pre-cut, about two inches thick and 22 inches long, 22 inches was the perefect size for a two-year-old's head, but if you were doing it for older kids you'd probably want to do it longer) then we sized them to fit their heads and taped it together to make a headband. I had already pre-cut some feathers out of construction paper too. Each boy got 4 feathers in different colors. The boys got to choose where on their headbands they wanted the feather to go and in what order. Then we moms helped tape them in place.


They thought it was hilarious to watch themselves dance around in the mirror and see their feathers flapping around.

Once they had their headbands on we sang an Indian song. The lyrics are below. We only did the first verse today.

One little, two little, three little Indians,

Four little, five little, six, little Indians,
Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians.
Ten little Indian boys.

They jumped in a boat and the boat tipped over x 3
Ten little Indian boys.
They swum and the swum till they reached the shore x 3
Ten little Indian boys.

They all fell asleep in a little tepee x 3
Ten little Indian boys.

After that, I asked the boys if they knew what an instrument was. I explained that an instrument was something you used to make music. I told them that some Indians had a special instument called a rain stick, and whenever they wanted it to rain they would make music with the rain stick and do a rain dance to try and get the rain to come. Then we went back into the kitchen and made our own rain sticks using instructions that I found online here.

This activity required a little bit more mommy help than what I usually like to do, but it was well worth it. The boys loved their rain sticks. We also talked a little bit about insects and how insect was a different word for bug. I gave each boy a sheet of insect stickers to decorate their rain sticks with.

It's always interesting to me which parts of our Letter Days stick the best with Lincoln. Today after they were done making their rain sticks they brought them out in the living room and shook them and danced for awhile, and afterwords Lincoln looked at me and said, "I make it rain." And he kept talking about how it was going to rain and how he wanted to shake his stick to make it rain. He must have done something right, because I'm looking out my window right now and it's pouring sleet out there. Maybe I should have had them make sunshine and warm weather sticks :)

Just before it was time for our friends to leave, we pulled out the ice trays. The ice had only frozen about half way, but I think the boys liked being able to see both the water and the ice at the same time. They played in their ice trays until they, and my kitchen counter were thoroughly soaked, then they seemed to be satisfied. :) I love to watch curious little boys at work. It's worth the effort of cleaning up when they're all done.

And let's not forget my favorite "I" word of all...

Ivan Boy!

E Day: Elephants and Eggs

The holidays are over, so it's time to get back on track with our letter days. It was my turn this week to do "E". I decided to do an egg and elephant theme.  Lincoln really loves to paint, and we haven't gotten it out in awhile, so I picked activities that would allow us to get out the paint.  When I was little, my Grandma Lemmon did this activity with us where you poke a hole in each end of an egg, and then blow out the yolk. You are left with a hollow egg. We used to glue little squares of tissue paper on it and then paint a clear coat over it. I thought tissue papaer might be a little advanced for two year olds, so the plan was to just let them paint their eggs.

The night before Aaron helped me do some prep work. We washed the eggs first and then poked holes in each end and blew out the center of the eggs. FYI, it helps a lot if you stick the pin inside the hole and swish it around to break up the egg yolk.

Then, since these are supposed to be decorative eggs, we made egg stands to put them on out of the egg carton. Then we covered the stands in tin foil so it would look fancy.

I know it's a long long way from Easter, so I modified a little bit and decided that these eggs could be Valentines eggs. Ya, ya, I know, Valentines Day is still a ways off too, but it's the closest holiday we've got. So I found some heart stickers that the kids could stick on their eggs after they were painted, so help spice things up a bit.

That was the egg part. For the elephant part, I got the awesome idea to make a paper sack elephant puppet off of a website a friend shared with me called ABC Stuff. It's an awesome website and has multiple activity ideas for each letter of the alphabet. She had a link on there to a sight that had a pattern to print out to make an elephant puppet. I didn't think cutting would go so well for the kids, so I printed out the patterns on cardstock and cut out the pieces for them and made them each their own little envelope (whatever it takes to stick in another E word right?) with all of their elephant peices in it.

That was all the 'before' work. And I think having it all ready made the day go a lot smoother. When Suzy, Nathan, and Kaitlyn got here, I sat the boys down in special "story chairs" (our banana chairs, I hoped having special chairs would help their attention spans, it only sort of worked) and read them Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Suess. Which just so happens to be about an elephant to tries to hatch an egg. Not only that, but it's got a good moral (patients and hard work pay off in the end) as well. Double winner.

After that we headed to the kitchen to paint! Oh, I should mention, the apples on the table are for "Eating", which starts with "E". Couldn't think of any egg snacks that sounded good, so I got creative. The boys painted the paper sack first. They painted it gray. The only color I got out to begin with, so that at least the body and the face would look elephantish. You'll see what I mean in a minute. When they were done with the sacks we put them aside to dry and got the elephant pieces out of the envelopes. Then I got out more colors so the boys could be as creative and artistic as they wanted to be. :) They didn't let me down either.

Here's Lincoln painting his elephant ear a nice mix of red and orange. We haven't used brushes very much with him, but let me tell you it's LOTS less messy than finger painting. And he still loved it. So I think from now on I'll have him use the brush for inside, and save finger painting for outside. It was also a nice addition to have the garbage sacks taped to the table. I usually just spread newspaper, and it's more of a hassel, and paint still always manages to get on the table.

When the boys were done with the elephant parts, we put those aside to dry. I took their painting plates away, and got them different ones with only Valentines Day colors on it. Then gave them their eggs. They seemed to have a little bit more trouble painting the eggs because the eggs kept rolling away from them. But I think they enjoyed that too. Once the eggs were nicely painted, we washed up and let the boys down to play while everything dried.

They had a good time playing together, which they always do. Unfortunately the paint did not dry fast enough, so we had to send everything home with Suzy in pieces to have Nathan put together after nap time. We put ours together after nap time too. Here's how they turned out:

Not quite as professional looking as the elephant puppets the lady on ABC Stuff made, or the eggs I used to make with my grandma, (and actually, the ABC Stuff page did some blown eggs as well, that are really well done), but hey, for two year olds, not too bad. :) And we had fun doing it, which is really all that matters.

Sharin' the Wealth

For Christmas, my mom subscribed Lincoln to the Highlights High Five magazine (which is similar to the regular Highlights magazine, but for the younger age range of 2-6). Our first issue came today. I remember loving the Highlights magazine as a kid, and was really excited to share it with Lincoln. We weren't disappointed either. They have fun little stories, games, and puzzles, that are entertaining as well as educational.

Probably my favorite story/activity in this month's issue was one about space men called Add Them Up! I took a picture of the page to give you an idea. If you click on it, I think it will get big enough that you can read the words on the side. What I liked about it is that it was clever, and pretty versatile. For the younger kids you can work on counting up the space men. Which is what Lincoln and I did. But for older kids, you can use the same paragraphs to do simple addition. And if you wanted to add some of your own ideas, you could turn everything around without too much trouble and do simple subtraction. But the best part is that it's fun, so you hardly realize you're "doing math". :)

Anyways, I'm thrilled with the magazine. Lincoln and I got half way through it today. And I think he enjoyed it enough that we could read it multiple times. Also, for anyone interested they have a website that has a lot of the same kinds of ideas and it's all free. Go to www.highlightskids.com and see if you can find anything to tickle your fancy. I think the age range is 2-12, so you can probably find something. Or, if you want to check out High Five (the one geared just to 2-6 year olds) go to www.highlights.com/highfive , on the bottom of the page in the center is a blue box called About High Five, and under that if you click on Preview a Sample issue, you'll be able to print out one issue for free. It's at least worth going and getting the free one.

Spread the Word

My sister-in-law, Lisa, is a person I look up to a lot. She just seems to have it all together, and accomplishes so much with her family. She homeschools her four kids, and writes articles for homeschooling websites. Recently she decided to start a blog that explores ideas about education. Not so much educational philosophy or different curriculum, but more in depth about wisdom and learning, and what they really are and how we achieve them.

She asked me if I would like to be an author on the sight with her. I took it as such a great compliment. I don't know that I have much to contribute, I hope I do, but, I really felt honored that she wanted me to team up with her on this. 

Anyways, my faithful blog readers, I'm asking for your support on this. The address is http://wisdomspath.blogspot.com just take a look and see what you think. If you like it, share the address with your friends. We're excited about the site and the things it's trying to explore and would really like to get the word out about it.

Theme Day: Airplanes

A little while ago, I stumbled upon this book called "The Absolute Best Play Days" by Pamela Waterman. In it, it has 52 different themes for activites you can do with kids. Each theme includes craft suggestions, indoor and outdoor activites, snacks, books, movies, music, and games; that all revolve around the specific theme. It gives you ideas for how to adapt theme activies to kids ages 2-7. And lots of the materials it calls for are things you have already in your home. Needless to say, I was super excited about this book and have been waiting and waiting to try it out.

Today was the day. Lincoln's friend Nathen and my friend Suzy (Nathan's mom) were coming over to play today, and I thought it was time to pull out the book. Suzy and I have been trying to do some very minimal teaching of letters to the kids (Lincoln already knows A-J but we decided to start back at the beginning) and we'd switch off every other week and come up with activities based on letters. So, for example, today was my day, the letter was A, so I pulled out this book and decided to do airplanes. We had so much fun!

First we colored an airplane puzzle. I made this puzzle myself. I went online and typed "free airplane coloring page" into a Google search. When I found one I liked, I copied and pasted it into a word document. Then using WordArt I made the word Airplane with the A's in red, and the big and little A at the bottom. Then printed. I drew in puzzle lines. Then let Lincoln color it before I cut it out. I think he might still be a little too young for paper puzzles though, because, he did like coloring the puzzle, but as soon as we cut it out, instead of wanting to put it together, he just wanted to rip the paper. But that's ok, we'll try again some other day.

The next thing we did was decorate paper airplanes with Halloween stickers. I had pre-made the airplanes (well, ok, Aaron pre-made the airplanes, and was utterly apalled that I did not have the knowledge of how to build one. What a horrible childhood I must have had!) because I didn't think two year olds would be too interested in the folding part. Also, on the top of the airplanes I taped a piece of a straw. Once the airplanes were decorated, we threaded a piece of crochet thread (but yarn, or any other kind of string would probably work just as well) through the straw piece and taped it up so that it went across the room, with one side as high as Lincoln could reach standing on a stool  and the other side pretty low to the ground.

Lincoln would stand on the stool, and I would hand him his plane. Then he'd throw it, just like you do a normal paper airplane. But instead of going all crazy, and not flying very well (that's what my airplanes always do at least) this one zips across the room along the string. Lincoln thought it was great, and played with it for a really long time. I think if I ever do it again though, I'll find something to tie the string to, instead of taping it. The tape held for a little while, but of course Linc had to pull the string and it kept coming untaped. Also, I think it would be more fun to find a bigger area to do it in. I used the short side of my living room, and taped the string from the hall door to the front door, and that worked, but I think it would work better with more space and a steeper slant to the string.

I say steeper angle, because sometimes our plane got stuck in the middle and Linc would have to push it more, which he didn't mind at all, but ya. Anyways it was still a really fun activity, and I think the kids enjoyed it. (My camera ran out of batteries during the actual activity. So these pictures are all a reinactment Lincoln did for me after Nathan had already gone home.)

And of course let's not forget the most important part: the snack! It was really easy to make. I took a cheese stick and shoved a pretzel through the middle of it to make wings. Then for the tail, I just broke another pretzel in half and poked it into the back. Wa-la! And Lincoln thought it was so cool.

So that was our airplane themed morning. You can see now why I am so excited about my cool book. There were more things in there too, that we could have done if we wanted to. (I actually did try to find an airplane book at the library, but as per usual the Provo library was pretty picked over, so it didn't happen.) That's one of the great things about the activities in the book, you can do them in any order and adjust them to fit your schedule really easily. We will most difinitely being doing theme day again soon!