Field Trip #15 Friday Blog Hop

Field Trip Friday!

A Blog Hop designed to share 'FIELD TRIP' related Blog Posts

(does not have to be a 'home school field trip', can be any trip to any place with your children!)

This week there wasn’t much going on, but we did manage to go to the local town center for their weekly clown show.

My kids take almost the whole session to warm up her, C finally started to participate the last 5minutes, and Z wouldn’t even go up to her for the sticker at the end.  O well.  At least we got out of the house.

Z on the sidelines

Later during the week we walked to a nearby park to meet up with a local homeschool group for the first time H2O.  But, guess what…I forgot my camera!

**NOTE:  Before linking up please review guidelines HERE

Getting Ready for General Conference

This is the first conference where I actually have a game plan for the kids.  Probably a year ago now, I printed off some of those color pages for C (who was then only 4) in hopes it would occupy him, knowing full well he doesn’t like to color…and well, of course it didn’t.  This year I was on the hunt for ideas that did not involve coloring, and that would also grasp the attention of my 2yo as well. 

Here in Hawaii we are lucky (or unlucky) that conference starts at 6am…though my children are usually up bright and early, it still buys us some time for the morning sessions before everyone is up and at ‘em. 

So of course I hit up pinterest for some great ideas!

My goal this year is to have some sort of breakfast prepared the night before and baking in the oven to be eaten at the conclusion of the morning sessions (8am).  I’m thinking this blueberry french toast bake, I pinned it here.  Now that takes care of ONE morning. 

In regards to keeping the little ones busy, I have combined a variety of ideas that I have found on pinterest and other blogs. 

First off I have hung a row of church related pictures on the wall by our TV. 

This will be used for this activity – Conference Wall, which I pinned here.

I am combing this activity that I pinned here, Each bag will be labeled with a picture of an apostle, the bag will contain and activity and an extra picture.  They must match the extra picture to the picture on the wall that matches the topic the speaker is talking about. 

We are moving the little kids table into our living room so they can sit and do their activities in the room while watching conference. 

So…what’s in the bags?
I’m still working on them, but this is what I have planned so far (listed in no particular order):
1.  mini M&Ms
2.  mini containers of playdough
3.  Juice boxes
4.  M&M cookies
5.  Little panda cookies
6.  Popcorn kernels (to pop) with a popcorn bowel
7.  Cookie dough (to make fresh baked cookies)
8.  Jesus Puzzles (pinned)
9.  Book of Mormon Match up cards (pinned)
10.  Temple Matching cards (pinned)
11.  Apostle matching cards (pinned)
12.  Conference Jenga (pinned)
13.  Build a Temple, activity taken from The Friend magazine…I would like to mount it to some duplos or wooden blocks, but we don’t have any.

And I may throw a few extra in there, since they  usually have some other speakers, like The General Primary President, or someone else. 

I also went through the friend magazines and cut out the search puzzles, and the last page with the picture and scripture on it…for quiet books for sacrament!  I’ll put them in coversheets in a binder, so they can be reused again and again.

For Family Home Evening this week we talked about Prophets, we sang Follow the Prophet, talked about who the prophet was today and talked about General Conference and why it’s important for us to watch it.  I introduced the basics of their activities, so they have something to look forward to this weekend!

I’ll post how it goes after this weekend!  Happy Conference everyone!

For those of you that are not LDS – twice a year we have large meetings which include all of the church membership worldwide, it is held in Salt Lake City and is broadcast throughout the world in many different languages.  This is when we hear from our church leaders.  We believe that there is a living prophet on earth today, and our church is set up like Christ’s church was in the bible.  There is a prophet (or president of the church) and 12 apostles.  Conference is when we are able to hear from them, and receive instruction.  Feel free to tune in, many places broadcast it on their local cable channels, you can also watch it or listen to it at www.lds.org.

Workbox Wednesday - On The Farm

I’m co hosting workbox Wednesday this week with Adventures in Home Education, please follow her (and me) and link up below!

Tot School – 29mos

I got a lot of my ideas from Counting Coconuts!  Love her blog!

Pouring ‘milk’ from milk jugs, the mouth on the jar was pretty narrow, so I gave him a funnel, but he put the funnel aside and did fairly well without it. 

Farm Sensory Bin – popcorn kernels and wheat, tractor and little farm animals.  In the education cube are farm animal nomenclature cards, roll the cube and find the matching animal.

Farm foam stamps and large ink pads

 Melissa & Doug Cutting Food Box

 Melissa & Doug Jumbo Knob Wooden Farm Puzzle


Farm Stencil Rubbings

Baby Animal Book and Baby Animal Matching Cards

Noisy Animals Book and Farm Animal Puppets

Tractor Painting

Linky goes live at noon EST

Washington & North Dakota State Studies

For a list of state study resources, including printable cards go HERE

Color in the state on the map

Sort the state cards and post cards

Apples are the largest agricultural product in Washington, so we made Easy Apple Delight

And for North Dakota we made North Dakota Dinner (though we ate it for supper).  I made it in the crock pot.  I try to use the crock pot as much as possible to keep the house cool. 

Read some books

  This book was great, it talked about a lot of different landmarks in Seattle, we then took to the web and looked up the real life pictures of them. Lots of really neat buildings and statues in Seattle. I finally found these books! They are at a different branch of the library here, so know I pre order them a week ahead. They have small bits for each letter of the alphabet that goes with the state, there are pretty in depth paragraphs that go along with each letter too, but this can be skipped over for the littler guys, I felt like it was too much information for my 5yo.

And of course we added the post cards to our wall map.

Education Cubes

We used our Education cubes for some Geography!  Using the state words inserts from www.education.com.  I picked 7 states that we have talked about so far, and Maryland and Virginia (b/c he is already familiar with them).  And put them into 2 cubes.  We used the LeapFrog Adventures Across America 41 pc Wood Puzzle.  I removed the pieces that corresponded with the cubes, and they would roll the cube, then find the state and put it back on the puzzle.  You could easily play the other way around as well. 

C pulled out our Melissa & Doug USA Map 51 pcs Floor Puzzle and so after putting it together we grabbed the cubes again.  We rolled the cubes and then placed a little people person/animal onto that state.

Some other uses we found for the cubes this week:

Kumon and Scholastic are doing a book giveaway, and one of the worksheets for the 5yo was a counting bingo, so we used the cube as a dice, using the dot inserts.

And we used it with our farm themed sensory bin, with animal nomenclature cards and the blank inserts (though the cards were too big, and covered the blank ones up), roll and find the animal.

Sink or Float

Prepped area, with a towel and the titles FLOAT and SINK (Laminated)

The boys took turns taking an object (I had collected several in a bin before hand, that coincided with the Montessori cards linked below). They would guess sink or float, and then put the object in the water table.

Afterwards they would place the object on the towel under the correct title. 

Then we went inside and used the Montessori Print Shop SINK OR FLOAT Cards to review what we had just done.

Also linking up with:

Dyeing Rice–Pin Do It!

When  I taught preschool we would dye rice and pasta all the time with liquid watercolors, I LOVED that stuff.  But it never occurred to me that you could dye them with food coloring as well!  My kids have been deprived and playing with plain old boring pasta and rice…until NOW!

and this is JUST the beginning! 

I had this activity pinned HERE, from this website

I will say though that I found it did not need as much coloring or alcohol as what the recipe on the site calls for.  As I was starting I realized I did not have 2T of food coloring, so I decided to half the recipe and only use 2 c of rice.  But after adding a little less than 1T of color and about 2T of alcohol, I added 1c more of rice, and than another.  And it was plenty colored!  The second batch, I didn’t measure the food coloring, I just added it  until it was the color I wanted.  We used the neon food coloring!

So My recipe is:

4c rice
food coloring (eyeball it)
2T Rubbing Alcohol

It dried really quick, in about an hour – I just spread it out on wax paper on the countertop!

WARNING:  This does stain your skin before it dries…even though I washed my hands numerous times, it finally came off when I washed my hair in the shower. 

I have plans to do some more rice and some pasta too! 

Also linking up with

Field Trip #14 Friday Blog Hop

Field Trip Friday!

A Blog Hop designed to share 'FIELD TRIP' related Blog Posts

(does not have to be a 'home school field trip', can be any trip to any place with your children!)

 

This week we did some more geocaching, but this time in Laie.  We only found 1 of 3 we set out for, but we still had fun, and saw some beautiful sights!

Rainbows are an everyday thing around here!  Z calls them ‘bows’

The LDS Temple in Laie, we didn’t find the cache hidden here, but still enjoyed walking the temple grounds.

Learning how to navigate the GPS

Looking for a cache by Temple Beach

Found it!

Last sight, didn’t find the cache…but the view was beautiful!  We are going to go back next month and try to find this one again….

 

**NOTE:  Before linking up please review guidelines HERE