A Little Sparkle...

Jack and Eve had a great time making this stretchy dough on Friday.  It was easy to make and it provided them (and me!) with lots of fun and laughs.  Jack and Eve made this stretchy dough by combining 1 1/2 cups of liquid starch with 2 five ounce bottles of Elmer's clear glue...and that's it (for now).  After Jack and Eve mixed the ingredients together with their hands it formed into a gel-like dough, which was very slippery and quite stretchy.  A great texture for some fun sensory play!

 Eve pouring the glue.

 Jack squeezing glue.

Eve pouring the liquid starch as Jack watches.

Jack pouring in the liquid starch.

Here are some pictures of all the fun...

In order to decorate our dough we decided to add some gold glitter....some SERIOUS GOLD GLITTER (who doesn't love a little extra sparkle in their life?!).  We ended up adding about a full cup to our dough to make what looked like liquid gold.  It was so beautiful!  

We saved our gold glitter dough by putting it in a plastic bag and have played with it several times since.  This has quickly become our new favorite sensory activity.  So much fun and so easy too!

Thank You Veterans

Thank you to all veterans, past and present, for your service.  Thank you for your tremendous courage and dedication.  If there is one thing we should never forget it is the many sacrifices that our veterans have made for our freedom.  A very special thank you to my father who served in Vietnam, to my grandfathers and to Uncle Steve for his continued service.

We also wish Memere a very Happy Birthday today.  We love you!!!

Our Scarborough Boys' Soccer Team are State Champions!!!

To be honest, I'm not really a sports kind of girl.  I would rather attend a play or a music concert over a sports event.  The only sports I truly love watching are ones that involve my children.  However, I discovered over the past week that watching sports is a lot of fun too!  

We have been attending all of our Scarborough High School boys soccer team games recently.  What initially struck me was the incredibly high level of talent the players had.  At all of their games I felt as though I was watching professional soccer players.  Scarborough easily won their way through the semi-final games and the state finals game was this afternoon.  We drove up to Bath to watch the final game today.  It was well worth the long drive because it really was such an exciting game to watch!  Both teams played really well and at the end of the game the score was tied 1-1.  Two minutes into overtime Scarborough scored the wining goal giving them the state champion title.  Grace, Jack and Eve did a great job cheering on their team throughout the game!  

Jack intently watching the game from the top of the bleachers

 Grace & Eve

For everyone who knows Grace, this picture says a lot!  Grace loved reading through the program.  I think by the end of the game she had all the players' names (including how to spell them), ages, soccer positions and numbers memorized!  :)

Brrr!  We all bundled up for the game today because it was definitely a cold one!

State champions!!!!!

My Little Engineer at Work

These past few weeks have been quite busy so I was very excited to have a quiet morning at home with Jack and Eve today.  After we dropped Grace off at school we came home and did several fun projects together -- and we all decided it would be best to stay in our pajamas until it was time to pick up Grace!  :)  I love these type of days, where our schedule is completely free with no time constraints.

Just before lunchtime today I presented Jack with a big bag of plastic cups.  I had got them for Jack the day before, knowing how much he would enjoy building with them.  Jack is such a deep and detailed thinker and instead of diving in to immediately begin building with the cups, he sat with me to come up with a plan for his construction.  Jack talked for the longest time about how important it was to build a solid base to support a high structure that he was planning on making and the best way to do that.

After watching Jack this morning I smiled because he reminded me so much of a little engineer!  I just love how Jack is always exploring how and why things work, how he takes just about every item apart and how much he enjoys a challenge.  He also is very creative and practical and is great at applying objective and subjective reasoning.  I saw all of these skills at work this morning as Jack was building with his plastic cups.  This was such a simple activity but it was filled with so much thinking and learning from beginning to end!

I'll post more pictures over the weekend of our fun Friday.

Jack's Montessori Work

Jack's teacher at his Montessori preschool frequently sends me pictures of Jack engaged in specific activities at school.  Here are two that she sent to me last week.  In the picture above, Jack was given small phonetic objects and he is shown working on building words with moveable alphabet letters.  In the picture below, Jack is working with the teen board and number beads.

Jack attends preschool school three mornings per week and he loves it!  Every morning when I pick Jack up from school I ask him what he enjoyed the most that day and his reply is always the same, "Everything, Mama!"  I love how his school is so academically based and filled with so many learning activities yet Jack never views it as work.  Jack always tell me that he "plays" all day at school.

Wordless Wednesday

Little Red Riding Hood, The Wolf & The Granny!