ABC Fun - Letter E

Sweet Girl had a lot of fun with our alphabet review last week (click here to see more), but now it's back to the letters.  This week is all about letter E and it's sound.

Alphabet Sensory Bin

I always like to start with the sensory bin so we can talk about the letter and it's sound.  In our bin this week we have lots of capital and lowercase E/e's, some elephants, an Eskimo, an eel and the number 8.

Hide and Seek Puzzles

I pulled out our stash of Easter eggs and used an old egg carton to make this hide and seek puzzle game.  I printed off six pictures that begin with the "e" sound (egg, elephant, Elmo, envelope, elf, eight), cut them in half and placed one half in an egg. I put the like pieces in the same colored egg (the two halves of the elephant are in the blue eggs).  I think Sweet Girl will enjoy this one!!

E is for...Elmo

E is for...Elephant

Letter E patterning

I found this neat "letter E" patterning sheet at Making Learning Fun and thought Sweet Girl would enjoy it since we have been working on patterning a lot lately.  I pulled out the correct patterning pieces to make it a little easier for her.

Be sure to check back at the end of the week to see our fun letter E crafts!!!

Momma made....I Spy Book

I saw this awesome idea for an I Spy Book over at No Time For Flashcards and I knew I had to make one for Sweet Girl!!!  I had so much fun gathering her toys, making the different page layouts and then photographing the pages.  Sweet Girl really loves looking through the book and was really surprised to see HER TOYS in there.  It's been fun helping her try to find the different toys!

Here are some pages from our I Spy Book....

This is the cover of our book.  It's just a plain photo book.  I used our ABC stickers to spell "Can You Find"

This is probably Sweet Girl's favorite page because it has her dolphin, duckie and turtle!

Gosh...do we have enough farm animals???

I spy with my little eye.....Little People!

I love this page!!  It reminds me of the movie ET!!!

Here are some other great I Spy things to make for your little one!!

I spy bottles from Counting Coconuts

I spy mat from I Can Teach My Child

DIY Eye Spy Book Tutorial at No Time For Flashcards

Do you have any more I Spy ideas????



Tot Trays - Foods

Our theme this week is foods, so I tried to make all of our trays food related!!

Tonging "tomatoes"

Sweet Girl loves tomatoes so I thought this would be a fun little activity for her.  I kept an empty tomato container from the store and am using red pom poms as our "tomatoes". 

Cutting fruits and veggies

This is a great set of fruit and veggies from Oriental Trading.  The fruit is held together with Velcro which makes this activity a little challenging.  If cutting with the knife is too hard, I will encourage her to just pull them apart with her hands (still a great task!).

Fruit patterning

I made the patterning strips by photographing our fruit counters.  Sweet Girl will probably need some help with this one as patterning is still a little tricky for her.

Counting bananas

Sweet Girl can count things with no problem but still has some difficulty with recognizing numbers.  Here, we will work on recognizing numbers 1, 2, 3, as well as adding the correct number of bananas to each cup.

Pouring mini bow tie pasta

Pouring is always a favorite at our house!

Making fruit cheerio bracelets

I've had this on my list of things to do with Sweet Girl for a while, but I was originally going to use either string or pipe cleaners.  The crafty mom over at Chasing Cheerios used Twizzlers so I thought we would give that a try.  The twizzlers are a little flimsy so I may end up switching them out for the pipe cleaners (er...that's if she doesn't eat all the cheerios first!!!).

 

Sorting cookies

Be sure to check back at the end of the week to see our fun crafts!!

And the winner is....

A great big THANK YOU to everyone who left me a comment or became a new follower of my blog.  Your comments made my week and I loved reading each and every one of them.  I hope to have another giveaway really soon!!

And without further ado....

CONGRATULATIONS to Lorie Smith from The Smith Family!!  You are the lucky winner of the Momma Made Makeup!!  Hope your daughters enjoy it!!!



Toddler crafts - Week in Review

Happy Friday!  Our week was all about colors!  Hope you enjoy!

Pom pom rainbow

It's not your traditional ROYGBIV rainbow, but Sweet Girl picked out the colors.  After I drew the rainbow I used a marker to color in the different areas of the rainbow so Sweet Girl could match up the pom poms with the colors.

Marble painting

This was such a fun craft!  First, I taped a piece of paper inside of an old pizza box.  Then Sweet Girl rolled a large marble in a small cup of paint and put it in the pizza box.  Next we shook the box all around, dumped out the marble and started again with another color.  We said we were "shaking our wiggles out"!!

Fish aquarium

When I asked Sweet Girl what she wanted to make she said fish, so fish it was!!  She used a kitchen sponge to paint the fish the different colors.  Then we add some "sprinkles" to our fish and "put" them in our aquarium.

And here are our alphabet crafts for this week:

Alphabet cookie cutter painting

We used our A, B, C, D cookie cutters to stamp our paper.

Alphabet magic pictures

I made up this craft to go along with our alphabet review this week.  First I wrote the alphabet letters on a piece of paper using a white crayon (if you do this one, make sure you bare down pretty hard so the wax from the crayon will be visible once you paint).  Then Sweet Girl painted the "blank paper" and watched the letters appear.  She was pretty quick with naming the letters once she saw them.  I was surprised since I didn't tell her the paper had letters on them.

FYI...For letters A and B we used watered down washable Crayola paint.  For letters C and D, we used the Do-a-Dot markers.  The markers seemed to work better.

ABC Fun - ABCD Letter Review

Instead of starting a new letter this week, I decided to do a "review" of A, B, C and D.  Sweet Girl is pretty good at recognizing the letters and usually knows their sound, but I wanted to put together some activities for us to do just to reinforce what she has already learned.

Alphabet Soup

This muffin mold is perfect for our letter review since it has four different columns.  Sweet Girl used the spoon to "ladle" the letters from the bowl to the muffin mold.  I left the top row completed so she could see where the additional letters were supposed to go.

Sweet Girl had fun doing this and loved spooning the letters into the muffin mold.

Letter matching with colored alphabet stickers

What a great letter recognition and matching activity!  These alphabet stickers are from the Creatology section of Michaels and have been a great purchase so far!

For the next activity, I decided to have Sweet Girl match up the different objects with the correct letter and sound.  I only had her do two letters at a time (A,B and C,D). 

A and B object sorting

C and D object sorting

I had to give her lots of sound clues ("Here is a "c-c-c-cupcake") initially, but each time we practiced it got easier and easier for her.

Sweet Girl also played with this great ABC puzzle I picked up at Target for a $1.  It's a little tricky because you really have to look at the letter to figure out where it goes. 

Check back on Friday to see our alphabet review crafts!!

Momma Made...Makeup Tutorial & Giveaway

Well....you asked for it!!  Here's a quick tutorial for the "Momma Made...Makeup".

Step 1: Gather your supplies

You'll need some makeup cases.  All of these are from the Dollar Tree, but definitely use any "extras" you have at home.  It doesn't matter what is or was in them, as along as it's powder-based. 

And grab some craft foam sheets in your choice of colors.  I mainly used sticky backed foam just to make the project super simple.  Some of the colors I liked weren't available in sticky back, so I used craft glue as my adhesive.  I also recommend a good pair of craft scissors, but regular kitchen shears would work fine too.

Step 2: Remove the pressed powder from the makeup cases. 

The easiest way I found to do this was to make an "x" with the point of a paring knife in each little box.  The powder pretty much just falls right out after you score it.  I highly recommend doing this part over the sink or trash can as it can get pretty messy.  Use the tip of the knife to get all the powder out of the corners.

Step 3: Wash out your cases and let them dry.

Okay...promise not to laugh at my method for measuring?????

Step 4: Press your foam onto the empty makeup container. 

As you can see above, it leaves an imprint on your foam of the exact size square you will need (the foam will expand after a few minutes so you will want to cut soon after making your imprint).  With my first batch I tried to measure it, eye-ball it, guess, etc. and almost went crazy. The method above is by far the easiest.  I pressed my foam onto the entire case just to show you, but you can do just one square.

 

Step 5: Cut out your foam squares.

Step 6: Remove paper from the back of your foam and insert in the case. 

If you are using craft glue, you only need to use a small amount.

(FYI...I inserted all of my squares with the backs still attached first just to make sure they fit well and looked right.  Just use the tip of your knife around the edge of the foam to remove it when you are satisfied with the look and ready to adhere it to the case). 

And voila!  You made makeup!!

Watch out....making it is a little addictive!!!

And as a little thanks for your interest I have one set of Momma Made makeup I'd love to share with someone!!  You get everything you see below in this super cute hot pink makeup bag.  It's perfect for that girly-girl in your life!!

If you'd like to enter to win the makeup set all you have to do is:

1. Leave me a comment in this post

For extra entries:

2. Follow Playing House and leave me a comment letting me know that you have or already are

3. After today, come back and leave me one comment per day until the end of the giveaway

This giveaway is only open to people with a US or Canadian mailing address and will end on Sunday, March 6th at 8:00pm EST.

Good luck!!!

UPDATE:  Starting 4/10/11 until 4/12/11 at 12pm I am hosting another giveaway of Momma Made makeup for my 100 followers celebration!!  Click here for the post and to enter the giveaway!!

I'm linking up to....

Handmade Tuesday, Too Cute Tuesday, Tip Me Tuesday, Get Your Craft On, Anti-Procrastination Tuesday, Tutorial Tuesday with Hope Studios, Show and Tell, Creative Share Wednesday, Sugar and Spice, Hoo's Got Talent, Hookin up with HoH, Transformation Thursday and It's a Hodgepodge Friday

And are you following Playing House on Facebook?  Click here to "like" us and follow along!