Fall Centerpieces

Fall is my favorite season! All the beautiful colors and fabulous smells! I got the kids busy yesterday making some centerpieces to go on my shelf. I love the way they turned out!

Materials needed:

• Mason jar (We used the big ones)
• Colored rice (We used red, orange and yellow)
• Bird seed
• Fall colored beads and buttons (Can also use wood beads.)
• Fall colored pipe cleaners
• Pumpkin pie spice (Makes them smell great!)

There are no real instructions. I presented my children with the materials, and let them create. I showed them how to curl the pipe cleaners on their fingers, and it was my idea to put the beads around the top. Echo made hers completely by herself, and I helped Charlie with his. He kept taking everything out of the jar, so at the very end, I dumped it all in and called it good. :) I sprinkled them with pumpkin pie spice to make them smell good. I love the way they look on my shelf. I placed them on on a clear glass plate with some other decorations and some acorns the kids found with my mom. I added two Fall scented candles and it looks perfect!

Here are some action shots of the kids putting them together. 

 Although there was still quite the mess on the the and floor, the trays really did help contain most of it. 

 Curling it on her little finger. 

 She also wanted to make a bracelet for herself. 

 

I hope you all enjoy making some too. Please leave a link below if you make one (or something else seasonal to help decorate), so I can go and check it out!

Tot School Blog Roll

Echo is 51 months
Charlie is 30 months

The Day it All Starts

We had a pretty slow start to our school year this week. We're waiting for my neighbor to have her baby, and I have been keeping her toddler for them a lot during the week. It made schooling difficult, with a toddler that just wanted to run around and rip everything off of my shelves, while I was trying to teach. We wound up closing shop for that day. We schooled for one other day, and then were out of the house for a whole day. So this one will be short. I am hoping to get into a better routine in a couple of weeks. Even though it was a rough start, I'll share some pictures that I took.

 Echo: Age 4

 Charlie: Age 2.5

 Playing with moon sand. 

Our book of the week is 5 Little Ducks. So we had duck shaped cheese for snack. 

 Our growth project for the year. At the end of the year, I will make a print of their other hand. 

(Names covered)

 Hunting for red. He can now name the colors, red, orange and blue. :)

Making Grandparent's Day cards. :)

A Glimpse Into Our Schoolroom

We were very fortunate to move into a home with a basement. I immediately started thinking about school and how I could use all of this space. It has been a long work in progress, but I finally have it done! My last step is spray paint the chairs for the kids to sit in. So here it is! I hope you enjoy. I will go into different things in future blog posts, today I will just give a quick overview.

 View coming down the stairs.

View from the other side of the room. 

 This shelf holds our seasonal bins, and sensory items. 

 Basket holds their lap books. White bins are for weekly toys. 

Book shelf will hold Charlie's tot trays. 

 Kids' desk and lap tables. 

 Shelf in the corner. 

 Puzzles, games, and misc. craft items. 

 Blue bins hold five weeks of lessons. (Post to come.) Clear bins hold other misc. items. 

 My desk. Holds my laminator, Cricut cutter and printer.

 Closer view of my desk. 

 Little art station. Their easel. Aprons hang on the stairs, and there is chalk, board markers and paper on the tote. 

 Calendar wall. 

 Calendar board. From 1+1+1+1=1

 We got this one from Oriental Trading. Yes, I know, July is over. :)

 All the cards for calendar board. 

 Wooden puzzles and books, books and more books. 

 Misc. craft items. 

And our small foam ABC mats.

 Big ABC mats. I bought them at two different places and thought they would link together, but they don't. 

 Just for fun, the other side of the room! Storage, laundry and work out area. :)

The chairs I'm going to clean and spray paint for the kids to use. 

I hope you enjoyed the little walk through. If you have any questions, or want to see a post about a specific thing, just let me know in the comments. :)

I'm joining The Not Back to School blog roll. Come and see other creative ideas. :)

Blog Hop 

Thrift Store Finds!

 I love a good bargain! Who doesn't right? I spent part of the afternoon looking around a local thrift store. I found some amazing items for our upcoming school year. Here is what I found and how much I paid for it.

Car Ramp
I paid $3.00 for this.
Easel
I paid $7.00
Hullabaloo
I paid $2.50
Play tent
I paid $5.00 and it cam with balls.
Balls


My grand total was $22.00! Not one of these items is less that $20.00 brand new! My kids love all their new toys, and I love that I got them for so cheap!

*The tent and balls are not exactly what I have, but are the closest I could find.

Comment below with some of your great thrifty finds!

Check out my guest post

Head on over and check out my guest post on Ultimate Guide to Mommy Survival! I talk about preparing meals for when Charlie was born.

Summer is comig to an end

Summer is slowly coming to a close! Summers in the Northwest are a lot different than summers in the Southwest. They are very short up here. We're getting busy, gearing up to start our new year of homeschool. I hope many people will join us on our journey. Stay tuned for posts on our new school room, set up, and routines.

Starting our first year of Preschool next week!

I don't even know who reads this anymore. I'm going to start blogging again, now that we are getting ready to kick off our school year. I will start by blogging for my benefit, and pray that as people stumble across it, that they will benefit from it to. I have been doing a lot of reading lately on some other blogs, about getting the year started off. I was a little discouraged when I didn't find a single blogger that was starting preschool with no older children in the house. I wanted to read how everything went with them, and try to implement into my system.

With no bigger children at home, my day looks VERY different. We still have a lot of playtime, and both my children still nap in the afternoon (which is how I have the time to sit here and type all of this out.) We still have diapers, and sippy cups, blankies, and pacifiers. they dont help with house cleaning, well other than making the constant mess for me to clean up. There are no long books being read, or extensive projects that are going on all the time. No legos to be swallowed, no free for all paper to be ripped up. There are meltdowns, and screams, and "I declare a park day" kind of days. So where do I begin?

We are going to take our first year very slowly. Sparkle was gifted a preschool workbook from her grandma. I plan on going through that with her throughout the year. She is also starting AWANA (Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed) at our church this week. There is a book that she has to work though with lots of scripture memorization. Along with those two things we are going to focus on number and letter recognition. Of course there will be art projects (we LOVE to do art in t his house.), and LOTS of PLAY. I beleive that children learn best through play. For example, yesterday we threw a big green ball back and forth, and every time she threw the ball I would have her say b-b-b-BALL, b-b-b-BOOK and so on. She now knows the sound that the letter "B" makes. :)

Since my kids are so small (3yr and 17m) we are only going to do school 3 days a week. I'm not sure which days we are going to do, we might change it up each week and do different days each time. I'm just not sure yet.

So, here we go! Official start day is next Tuesday! I hope you all enjoy the ride as we go through our first year of school. I will share here, the things that I find online that help me, and also share the things that didn't work quite the way I thought they would. I hope you all have as much fun as we will!