Rainy Day Projects

The rain has seemed endless here the past two to three weeks. It's such a struggle coming up with new activities and projects for the kids...cause really, how many times can you circle the three museums we have in the area? And with no naps anymore...the days are looooong!

I hit up the dollar store a few weeks ago for lots of craft ideas. I filled an entire craft box for under $10! And thanks to this book our friend Yang gave us for Christmas, we were ready for days upon days of learning through arts and crafts! This book is really great ideas for home schooling...most of the activities are geared toward slightly older kids...4-6 age range. But I found a few gold nuggets inside and put them to good use.

The first art projects were puppet bags and sheep. The bags were easy and fun to play with afterwards. The sheep idea I got off the Michael's website...trace their hand/cut out, then the fingers are the legs and the thumb is the head, cut out a cloud shape body and have fun with glue and cotton balls. It's a good craft to keep just to see how small their hands once were...


One day we did a bunch of sorting and color games. I put a bunch of different objects in a bowl and had them use tongs to separate them out into cups. The book recommends tongs and a way to help with motor skills.


Then sorting color pom poms into cups...I found this was more about following directions then learning colors. They already know their colors but they wanted to pick out their favorite colors and put them all in one cup. It took a lot to get them to follow directions correctly and not go their own way. And once they did it all right, they were so proud of themselves!
More motor skills...sticking clothes pins around the top of a cup...this fun lasted forever!
I didn't get pictures of this one day but we numbered cups 1-10 and had to put the correct number of pasta pieces in each cup. It was a great way for them to see 9 pieces was much more than 2 pieces...therefore 9 is larger than 2. That game really suck with them and they still count pieces of food on their plates to see who has more.

We have also learned lots of letters and slowly working on numbers...it's funny, Cameron seems to grasp the letters and alphabet faster and Timo gets numbers and can count pretty high. Wonder if that's a girl/boy thing?? Oh well, the sun is coming out this week and we'll be tackling the playgrounds, back yard and beaches again...we have LOTS of energy to burn off, that's for sure!