Friday Fun and More

Just a quick update. Learn and Move has been a huge success! We have added one or two minutes each time and the kids are able to stay at their station “for the most part” until the kitchen timer goes “beep”. I am loving my individual learning time with each one of the kids.

Krogering….

I am currently taking a parenting class at my church. One of the key BIBLICAL points in the class is the importance of training our children to do what is right. I feel that I am often so busy that I don’t take enough time to simply train them and then parents get frustrated when the kids don’t obey. I dread taking the kids to the grocery store, but why? I saw an episode of Super Nanny recently where she gave each child a list of items to look for as they were shopping. These kids were school aged kids, but I wondered if that same technique would work for mine. Anyway, I prefer to go to the grocery store alone. I am a huge coupon clipper so it takes me hours at the grocery store sometimes. I recently thought I needed to conquer my fear of grocery shopping with all 3 kids and simply train them on the expectations of a shopping trip! So we went Krogering one day after preschool. We only had 2 things on our grocery list…bananas and “treats.” Treats are used as rewards for positive behavior and I was out of treats at home.

The Rules (given in advance)

1. You push your own cart.

2. You ask before you put something in your cart.

3. Your feet stay close to Mommy’s feet.

4. “Drive” Carefully and be respectful of the other people around you.

And I must say….they did amazingly! We had a fun time. I would not say this is my first choice for getting a lot of grocery shopping done, but at least I am not afraid to take all 3 of the kids grocery shopping anymore.

Dallas Children’s Museum

Today, we took a field trip to the Dallas Children’s Museum. We went with a bunch of “mom friends” from our church. Here are a few highlights of the day! (I did not want to put faces of other kids on my blog w.out their parents permission)

Milking a cow…..

Five In A Row

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, and just haven’t. Before Christmas another homeschooling mom friend shared with me about a reading resource called Five In A Row. www.fiveinarow.com

The author describes it as “a rich treasury of creative ideas designed to help you gently, consistently prepare your children for the life-long adventure of learning.” She adds “each unit provides creative ideas and enjoyable activities designed to cultivate intimacy with your child while building vital learning-readiness skills”

I have the “Before Five In A Row” which is geared for ages two thru four..since I have a 2,3 and 4 year old this is perfect for our family! The book has units based off of 24 literary wonders such as Jesse Bear, Corduroy, Caps for Sale…and our Nana went to work on Ebay and found every single one of the for us!

Each unit provides you with lessons in these areas

Bible, Language Arts, Relationships, Math, Drama, Art. I Love that it automatically gives me a way to tie in scripture to our book each week.

The concept is to read the book to your child every day for 5 days and do one of the activities with your each day. This is very easy and only takes about 15-20 minutes.

Our book this week is Yellow Ball by Molly Bang.

Today the Art lesson was to let the children recreate the cover of the book. I gave them each a piece of paper and a dab of blue paint first, after they finished their blue, I put a blob of yellow paint. I will add that I put my hand over Ava’s hand to help guide her to make a circle.

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Melissa Stuff

I have been posting a lot lately on face book some of the great deals I have gotten lately. I just got a case of Pamper Baby Dry Diapers for a little over $4 a pack. I got 9 boxes of cereal for about $1 each and just started earning money for searching the internet! So I wanted to tell you my source for these great deals. I met this most marvelous money saving diva in MOPS. Please visit her blog and sign up on her blog and she will send you the best of the deals to your inbox every day! She is amazing!

http://melissastuff.blogspot.com/

Learn and Move

Well Blog Friends and Real Life Friends, today I put into action the suggestion of my friend who is a wonderful home school mom to 7 fabulous children. I was looking for ways to have individual learning time with one child…while keeping the other 2 happy and occupied at the same time:) My friend suggested making centers. So “Learn and Move” is my twist on centers. I wanted to give it a fun name so the children would associate what we were doing to the expectations I set. Today, I set up 4 stations. I took the kids around and showed them what to do at each station. I then explained to them they had to stay until they heard the kitchen timer go off. Today…we started with 5 minutes.

I spent much of the time today setting expectations and sending them back to their assigned station until the timer went off. But I believe with consistency and effort this system will work! I did manage to work with both boys for 5 minutes each. I am planning to use these 4 stations all week this week.

Levi is putting magnetic clothes on a magnetic person

Pegboard Fun!

These are a set of “Go Fish” cards. I just had them on the tray and told the kids to match all the cards. It took right at 5 minutes for this task.

This was the favorite of the day!

A Fun Dinosaur adding set I found through a book order. I had the kids match the dinos to the cards and then count them out loud after their dinos matched the cards. Next time, I will only give them 2 or 3 cards instead of the whole stack.

A couple of notes…

TRAYS! Levi’s preschool teacher always has her activities set up on trays when the kids arrive. The tray itself helps give the kids a perimeter in which to work. I found these fun trays at the dollar spot at Target last week. I have also gotten some great tray ideas from this site http://1plus1plus1equals1.blogspot.com/2009/02/tot-school-back-to-trays.html

LEARNING ACTIVITIES! I am constantly on the look for fun things for my kids to do. I look at garage sales, thrift stores, consignment sales…other peoples trash (seriously) I almost NEVER buy anything new…has to be cheap! I keep all these things in baggies or plastic tubs in my laundry room. That way they don’t get mixed in with the play toys and so the kids are interested in them when I bring them out.

Also, if you are reading this, please let me know who you are on facebook! Join the triplesmiles fan page http://www.facebook.com/pages/triplesmilesblogspotcom/319260222533?ref=ts

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Loving em' One At A Time Pt 2

Yesterday, I ask for feedback about ways to find that special individual time with each child that I think every child needs. Thanks to everyone who gave me lots of great ideas for spending special time with each child. One of my dear friends who home schools her 7 children gave me some great advice for also teaching them individually. She has taught her children to rotate to various pre planned activities much like “Centers” in a classroom. I am excited to try that with my bunch soon. Another dear friend who has 4 children, secretly chooses in her mind who gets the “special” attention one day a week.

However, Mondays and Wednesday’s Miss Ava gets most of Mommy’s attention. Ava is so different than her time demanding brothers. She actually requires very little attention and will play happily for long periods of time without my intervention. It is often very easy for me to “let her be” and try to get things done around the house instead of spend quality time with her.

With this topic on my mind this week though, I dove right into a sorting activity with her soon after her brothers left for Preschool today!

As you can tell from this first picture, her first task today was free coloring. She choose to color her nose??!!

Then, I got out some colorful buttons and 3 bowls…yes I know there are 4 in the picture, but we started with 3.

Very soon after we started sorting by color, she said “Where is the pink?” So I had to get another bowl to have a pink pile.

After we worked through the pile of buttons I gave her to sort…I let her play with the buttons and she poured them back and forth from bowl to bowl for about 15 minutes.

Loving em’ One At A Time

Before I became a full time Mommy I was a full time teacher. Over 9 years I had the great joy of teaching 4th grade, 2nd grade, and then my last year of teaching I took my 2nd graders for another THRILL ride and we tackled 3rd grade together:)

The first 6 weeks of school, a teacher always has the daunting task of figuring out her students one by one. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What makes them tick? What is their learning style? Usually by the end of the 3rd week a school, a teacher has grouped her students by ability and learning style. Although I could write a book on this topic, I will keep it short and simple. The bottom line is I know and understand how very important it is to teach on a child’s individual learning level and individually as much as possible! Over 9 years of teaching, I saw many students soar when given just a few minutes of one on one instruction!

And today, I was given that JOY again. Any teacher will tell you, there is nothing more joyful than experiencing that “light bulb moment” in a child.

My children are almost 4, 3 and 2. I will admit most of my instruction to them is “group instruction” Most everything we do, we do together. I have had difficulty at times getting one or the other to cooperate and concentrate while I am trying to teach them something.

Well today, the 2 youngest children were napping. Zachariah had already taken a “cat nap” and was resting in his room when I decided this would be a great opportunity to work with him. He had a letter “V” project that we needed to finish. So I called him out of his room and we went downstairs, just the two of us to work on Letter V. He has never cooperated so well. First, we pretended that Letter V was a road for his cars, then he glued pasta noodles back to back on his V. Normally, he would have given me great resistance to this task. But without the siblings around, he loved the project!

Then came the light bulb moment! I had been working with him on sequencing for many weeks, it has never clicked, or at least I thought it had never clicked. After we finished the letter V, he ask if we could do “his letter” which is letter Z. So I thought I’d try to get him to sequence the colors and he did it! I would ask him after every noodle what color comes next and he got it right time after time! I was so proud of him!

So I must find a way to give each of my Triple Smiles individual learning time. If any of you moms out there have any tips on this topic, please please forward them to me!

And just for fun after supper, we pretended Zach was a Veterinarian and then he shopped at a Vegetable Market!

“Vegetable Stand OPEN”

Crazy Circumstance….

I don’t normally blog about me, but today something really crazy happened to me and I want to “Tell It All!”

A friend of mine recently gave me a $25 gift card to Starbucks. I had to go to Target today and thought I’d start my shopping trip off with a Latte. Well, the line at Starbucks was too long, so I slipped the card back into my wallet and thought I’d get my fix at the end of my shopping trip.

As my shopping trip was coming to a conclusion, I got back into the line at Starbucks. I heard the cashier say to the man in front of me, “Thank you for your honesty.” He then looked at his wife and said “Well, I found that $25 gift card,and its not mine, so I turned it in.”

I thought to myself..Oh no! What are the odds? Sure enough when I went to retrieve my $25 gift card it was not in my wallet. I told the cashier I had lost a gift card, but I can only imagine that she was thinking (yeah right lady, you just heard that man tell me he found a gift card! NO DICE!)

I then showed the cashier the original receipt for the gift card which my friend had included in the card which had the gift card number on the receipt. The cashier could have easily compared the numbers and handed over the gift card the man had just turned into her. But instead, she simply looked at me and said “Well, you need to call Starbucks.com”

I decided to take my crazy scenerio to the manager on duty. She listened to my account and confronted the Starbucks employee. The Starbucks employee then lied to the manager and told her the man had simply turned in some money he found on the ground. It was my word against hers, so I left Target, but as the afternoon wore on I kept thinking about this situation.

I called the manager back a little later and told her that I understood her position about it being my word again the employee’s word, but that I felt she had a dishonest employee on her hands. She took my name and number and told me she would have security review footage from the Starbucks counter.

She called me an hour later and ask for me to come back into Target where she proudly presented me my gift card! She also thanked me and told me I had done Target a favor that day.Not exactly sure what that meant,but if an employee would be that dishonest to a customer and also the manager when questioned about the issue, maybe Target realized she wasn’t a quality employee.

So…how did my gift card get from my wallet to the floor of Target? Well, I ran into some Oatmeal that I wasn’t planning on buying. I checked my wallet to see if I had a coupon for that particular brand of oatmeal. So my guess is that while I was shuffling through coupons, I almost exchanged a $25 gift card for $1 off oatmeal:()

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SNOW DAY!

Zachariah woke up this morning and said “Its Christmas!” We came downstairs to find a beautiful blanket of pure white snow covering our front and back yard.

I quickly looked on some of my favorite blogs for a day of winter fun ideas! I have now posted these favorite sites on the right hand side of my blog. I am so thankful to these ladies for sharing their creative mind with me:)

Daddy took the boys out for some quick snow play by about 7:45 AM. 

Not sure if this programming was on purpose or not for our area but the Imagination Movers were solving a problem today about their Snow Day!

 

Next, we took some Q-tips and white paint and painted a snow picture.

Before lunch, and Moms out there let me tell you…this occupied their little minds for about 45 minutes…they LOVED it. We brought the snow indoors…with SHAVING CREAM!

They were cracking me up, they heard the morning news on this morning and started adding their cars to their “inside snow” telling each other “He is stuck in traffic” I guess they decided they needed Tow Mater to help out this poor car!

And let me just say that Little Miss, wouldn’t have anything to do with this activity! This is a shot of her trying to get up from the table. Too funny!

I was able to get lunch made while they were playing with their inside snow. Then we all settled down for a long winters nap! (Well 2 hours anyway)

After nap, we went to the park to play and ran into lots of friends. I love living in a community where you run into people you know on fun days!

 

After our fun at the park we hurried home for SNOWMAN SOUP!

However, I was unable to convince the kids it was anything other than Hot Chocolate:(

This has been the most fun day I have had with the kids in a long time!

And lets all be grateful to our Heavenly Father today for cleansing our sins White As Snow!

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Where is Spencer?

Well this is the first post in a series that I am going to name “Tell it All.” My brother, sweet wonderful precious brother….thinks that I leave out; shall we say the “bloopers” of the Donaldson household on my blog!

He thinks that I could double “my readers” if I would simply “Tell It All Sister!”

So, I am going to try to start blogging more bloopers because I certainly want my brother to learn from me! LOL!

So…when we found out that we were going to have our 3rd baby in 2.5 years..we needed another room. My husband basically split our master bedroom into 2 rooms. So after “the new” room was finished we needed to move the light switch from one side of the room to the other. Zachariah is almost 4 and this project was just started. Well, while Daddy was up in the attic moving wires..Zachariah saw this intriguing new “
box” in his room.

Well, what is an almost 4 year old supposed to do with a new hole in his wall? YES! PUT TRAINS IN IT! Surely that must be what its for! So for now, poor Spencer (and friends? ) are living in the walls of our house! We have contacted the Imagination Movers for help, but in the mean time hoping to find a magnet with enough force to pull him up!

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