Oh Christmas Tree!!!

Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree, how you have kept Cameron busy!!!

We made these Christmas trees during Stay and Play at school on Tuesday but Cameron wanted to add more ornaments on today. He really likes the licky/sticky paper that they use in zoo class and we finally bought some. I just need to think of things to do with them besides Cameron just licking them and licking them and licking them!!

What I did was cut out 3 pieces: one triangle and two trapezoids. I could have just traced them and had the kids cut them out but I knew we wouldn't have time. I might have Cameron make another one of them and have him cut it out this time. The kids had to figure out how to put them from big to little to make a tree. They glued them on the red paper; this took a lot of glue!!! They had to color their star yellow and glue that on the top. After that, they got to glue ornaments and put stickers on their tree. I cut out circles and squares for the ornaments. I could also have let them cut out their own ornaments. Hmm, maybe the next one I do. This was a huge gluing project which some kids loved and others didn't like getting glue on their fingers.

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I LOVE how Cameron's turned out. It was totally made by him. I like letting the kids make their project how they want and never try to fix it. Sometimes, I really have to bite my tongue because I would like it to be perfect but then I remember it is perfect to him! (: Sorry the pictures are sideways! I haven't the time right now to figure out how to fix that! I'm sure it's something easy but I just need those couple minutes to figure it out!! Some day, some day!!

Christmas playdough

We made Christmas playdough today! We used Christmas green food coloring from Wilson's and it turned out a beautiful green! My green always turns out such a light green when I use regular food coloring. I LOVE IT! We are going to start using Wilson's when we make playdough from now on. This was one of our things we did for advent. I made 24 stockings and put a little tag in each with something fun to do each day! I will try to post tomorrow and show you what they look like.

Whole Wheat Banana Bread - YUMMMMOOO

WOW!! I haven't been on since April 09! SORRY!!! Here we go, we are gettting ready for Christmas and can't wait to share what we are doing!!

Today, Black Friday, we are making banana bread! Wait until you see this recipe!! It is awesome! There is 0 (yep, I said ZERO!!) sugar in it! You use honey!! Here's the recipe; ENJOY!!

Whole Wheat Banana Nut Bread

1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 cup mashed bananas
1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup hot water
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
2. In a large bowl, beat oil and honey together. Add eggs, and mix well. Stir in bananas and vanilla. Stir in flour and salt. Add baking soda to hot water, stir to mix, and then add to batter. Blend in chopped nuts. Spread batter into a greased 9x5 inch loaf pan.
3. Bake for 55 to 60 minutes. Cool on wire rack for 1/2 hour before slicing.
We added 1/2 c. of dark chocolate chips too!

If you make this, let me know what you think!

Organizing my life (just kidding!) just by cupboards (:

I really need to be more organized! OKAY, I really want to be more organized! Well here's one way that we are trying to get organized. I was at Bunko last month and I'm not sure if this is exactly how she did it but one of the ladies organized her dinners on one of the insides of her cupboards. This is such a great idea and here's my interpretation of it. This is the second week and its working out great! I've been adding more choices as I think of them! Recipes that I haven't used in a while, I'll get rid of. I wrote where I can find the recipe on the post-it too!

Here's my other organization tool for the kitchen. It's a list of what I have in the kitchen cupboard. This is great because then I just have to look to see if I have it or if I need to buy it when I go grocery shopping. I'm hoping this will stop useless buying!!

YUMMY!!! Whole Grain Banana Bread

Yum!! We made the BEST Whole Grain Banana Bread! It was so good!! We had some bananas that were past their prime and I couldn't just throw them away so we decided to make banana bread with them. I've never found a recipe that I really liked because most recipes use 2 cups of sugar and NO ONE needs that much sugar!

Cameron had a great time cutting up the bananas to put in.

He even helped mix it.
Doesn't it look yummy!!??!!
Next time, I might add nuts! I'm not really crazy about using splenda but I did.

Here's the recipe:

Whole Grain Healthy Banana Bread

3/4 cup SPLENDA® Sugar Blend
3/4 cup flax seed meal
5 ripe bananas, mashed
1/4 cup skim milk
1/4 cup low-fat sour cream
2 teaspoons egg whites
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and a 9x5 inch loaf pan.
In a medium bowl, mix together the sugar blend, flax meal, bananas, milk, sour cream and egg whites until well blended. Combine the flour, baking soda and salt; stir into the banana mixture until moistened. Spoon into prepared loaf pan.
Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted into the crown of the loaf comes out clean.

Planting

We started our plants indoors this week. We've already got some seeds growing. We put the container in the front window! Now I have to make sure the plants stay watered. I need to get one more container because I bought so many different things to grow. I LOVE gardening but sometimes I get tired of it mid-summer and forget to water and tend to them! I'm gonna try harder this summer because I think Cameron will be able to help more.

Here's the plants we have growing right now.

squash

little cherry tomatoes

green peppers

rosemary

cherry tomatoes

sweet banana peppers

ice plant (flower)

dahlia (flower)

lavender

different color peppers

Easter fun

Here's a couple of projects I made for school! These were really fun to do and the kids really enjoyed them!

Cameron has a container that has rice in it that he uses to play in during the winter when its too cold to play in the sandbox. Instead of using scoops and funnels, I put little bunny and carrot erasers in it and added chopsticks for the kids to practice their fine motor skills. It was interesting to watch because some kids got it and could easily pick them up and some had a hard time figuring out how to pinch the sticks together. We told them they couldn't use their fingers to pick them up or find them or put them back. When they were finished they would even try to hid them under the rice for the next person. At our letter and shape table, we put out an egg shape. We had an egg shape traced on a piece of construction paper and the kids had to cut out the egg shape. Then they had to snip pieces of paper and put them on their egg. You can't see it in this picture but we also had the letter W at the table where the kids could draw W's on it and glue W pictures on it.The kids had a good time with our nest and egg counting. I couldn't find any bird's nests so I bought baskets from Hobby Lobby and cut the handle off to look like birds nests. Hobby Lobby had sparkly eggs so we used those as our bird's eggs. The kids had to set out the bird's nests and put a number card in each of the nests. Then they used a tweezers to pick up one of the eggs from the big nest and put the right number of eggs in the number nest.

Bunnies and Chicks

We made these cute little bags for Cameron and Bella today. We decorated one like a chick and one like a bunny. We found these at Hobby Lobby and the only thing we had to do to them was glue the pieces. It was so easy and such a no brainer. Right now I am totally into no brainers. I think the kids will have a good time with these on Easter!
I feel like I'm working on so much stuff lately that I don't have time to get anything done! Oh brother!!

Spring is coming!! (I think?!?)

We filled up the birdfeeder today and found some flowers starting to grow! Yay!!!!

Tulips:
Daffodils:
Hyacinths:
Cameron was getting dressed this morning and looked out the window to see if he saw Rich outside but instead of Rich he found DUCKS in our front yard!! It was fun to watch them.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

I've been wanting to make magnetic board (aka cookie sheet) more appealing for a while and didn't know what I wanted to do. We have magnetic letters and numbers and wanted to find something fun to do with them. I found this idea somewhere on the internet. I can't remember where (sorry) but thought what a fun way to talk about letters and numbers.

We made a tree from our magnetic board to go along with the books, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Chicka Chicka 1 2 3 by Bill Martin Jr.

First we painted! Of course, Cameron loved that part!!

We painted one big piece of paper brown and one green. I wanted Cameron to paint the whole paper one color but he wanted to use his hands instead so I let him do that and I painted two papers. I cut a trunk out of brown and four leaves out of green. After it was assembled and glued, this is how it looked on the magnetic board (aka cookie sheet). Here's the finished project! I had the magnetic letters and numbers so here it is finished. What we did was: I lined up the alphabet in order because Cameron doesn't know all of his letters yet. If you had a child that knew his letters than you could just mix them all up. I would read a page of the book and he would put the letters or 123 on the board. Here's from the first pages. It goes like this, "A told B and B told C, I'll meet you at the top of the coconut tree." It is really cute and Cameron had fun trying to get all the letters on the top. Sorry, I can't figure out how to turn my picture. Here's the Chicka Chicka 1 2 3. We only used 1-10 though. Maybe the older he gets, we'll try higher.

Playdough

We made Bella and Sunshine Mountain playdough today! For one of my niece's Christmas presents we are making her a "Playdough of the Month" and for April we made her purple playdough and for Sunshine Mountain we made pink. The pink doesn't look so hot in the picture because Cameron was ripping it apart right before I took the picture. The picture doesn't show but we also gave Bella a egg shaped "playdough" (cookie) cutter too!

Here's the recipe we used. It works AWESOME!
1 c. flour
1/2 cup salt
1 T. cooking oil
1 T. cream of tartar (if you use a little more it turns out even smoother 1 1/4-1 1/2 T)
1 c. water
Food coloring of your choice
Add-ins of your choice (i.e. spices, extracts, glitter, etc.)
Stir ingredients together well. Just measure them into the saucepan you will be using to cook the dough, but mix them well before heating up the pan. Over medium heat cook the dough, stirring constantly until it forms a ball. When it starts to get dry looking, take it off the stove. Knead, knead, knead! It will be hot to the touch but keep trying to knead it.

It was great when Cameron wanted to make purple because we could practice mixing colors! This was a really fun lesson for him to see! We used red and blue food coloring. It was hard for Cameron to squirt an exact number of squirts in! He wanted to squirt it ALL in! It turned out great and he was so impressed how the red and blue turned purple! This was fun!