Great Five In A Row resource!

I am playing around with various ways to organize our next school year. There are a lot of things I would like to incorporate and I want to involve Monkey more as well.

One of my ideas is to take all three volumes of FIAR and design our lesson plans geographically, filling in with fun related activities. 

I was searching for resources and found this great break down of the FIAR volumes with related information. The FIAR books are classified by geographical location, time frame, subject, and KONOS units if you happen to be using them.

This will make my plans SO much easier since I don't even know what some of the books are about yet.

I will share our plans as I get things put together.

Finished Clipboard Wall

I was still debating about adding some type of header to my clipboard wall when I found these at Micheals!

Aren't they awesome? Love them!

They are on metal and are ready to hang. They're only $2.00 each.

It gives just a touch of sophistication to Mickey Mouse.

Linking up to:
Kojo Designs
It's A Hodge Podge Life
Home Is Where My Story Begins
Embellishing Life
Fireflies and Jellybeans
New Nostalgia

Sugar cookies in a waffle maker

I saw this fantastic idea first at Remodelholic. Our first try was a little rough.

I didn't put in all of the flour and we ended up with this amazing fried sugar butter concoction that I had to scrape out of the waffle maker. It made terrible cookies but would make incredible ice cream topping!

 

I had to throw it away before we ended up eating it all.

 I used the recipe on Remodelholic and our standard cookie scoop. One to each section of the waffle maker.

  

I didn't time it, I just peeked every once in a while, but they did cook fast. After they cooked for about thirty seconds I opened it and sprinkled on some Valentine's sprinkles Bubby had picked out.

 

 Once I figured out the whole flour issue and tossed in some extra we finally got something that resembled cookies. These are good! Really good! and I don't particularly like sugar cookies. I love the little waffles too, so cute.

February Simplify: Clipboard art display

Somewhere I have more pictures that I took while dismantling and painting the clipboards but....I can't find them.

I mentioned before that we took the grommets out of the clipboards in order to paint them. This was relatively easy, we just used the appropriate sized drill bit, once you drill all the way through, the grommets fall right out.

I spray painted all of the clipboards black and then promptly got stuck on the project because the grommets we had planned on using to put the boards back together weren't long enough.

I finally bought some tiny nuts and bolts which fit the holes perfectly but were too long. I used this handy tool (wire cutters?) to cut the bolts down. You can see the bolt sticking out right in the middle of the picture. You thread it into the hole as far as you need and then squeeze the handles and it trims the bolt. It worked perfectly!

Once I had all of the clipboards reassembled I hung them up using small nails.

I want to add some kind of lettering on the wall above the boards (I think). I'm going to live with it for a while and see what happens.

The weird gap on the right side of this photo is supposed to be one of the display cases that we added when we sheet rocked the hallway. It's on my mission list to finish these this summer. They are getting wrapped in wood and there will be shelves installed.

February Create: Fingerprint Art

We had a great time creating finger print art. I want to get some of Ed Emberley's books and try this again. Since the boys needed something to do NOW I just went online to look for some ideas.

I copy and pasted some images in Microsoft Word and printed out a few sheets with pictures. I will try to post my sources soon! Otherwise just Google "thumbprint art" images and you'll find tons.

Monkey finger painted with the ink. He had a great time!

Bubby tried the bird (two long legged creatures in the middle), the frog (see the large eyes?) and the hearts (upper left corner).

 Tip: I keep a travel sized box of wipes with our stamp pads for easy cleanup. They tend to dry out between uses but you can just pour some water in to moisten them. We use them to wipe the stamps and our fingers.

I didn't get a picture of my own art. The bottom right is mine, you can see a tree with a cat. I also did the butterfly, bee and flowers.

It was really fun. We did discover that we need a better selection of stamp pads. For instance, we don't own black. How boring would that be!?


Local Fun For Kids

Free wall art

There is nothing better than cool art. Unless it's free art! These are flooring samples from work. I LOVE the colors and textures so when the company discontinued the line I snatched them up.

They are already mounted on MDF backer boards so I just nailed picture hangers into the back (the kind that look like alligator teeth) and hung them up.

 I think they added some much needed warmth to this room. Plus they're free so when I get tired of them, I don't have to feel guilty about changing them out.

The Mister thinks they need a little something extra, like vinyl. He thinks it's weird to have flooring samples hanging on the wall. What do you think!?

February Create: Winter Playdough

One of the activities on my list this month was to make winter playdough. We made a double batch of white with glitter and a double batch of blue. It appears that you should make playdough in single batches or it doesn't mix right and tends to burn on the bottom. Lesson learned.

After the playdough was ready to go I set the boys up with pipe cleaner pieces and black beans to make miniature snowmen. It was a lot of fun. This is Monkey's snowman. I kept making balls for him and he kept squishing them into a pile. Whatever. That is the blue hat squished on top.

This is Bubby's melted snowman.

Building building...

I do believe he was giving his snowman a kiss. or eating it. it's hard to tell.

My snowman.

I used the same recipe that I found for Apple Pie Playdough but obviously changed the colors and took out the spices. The glitter was an experiment so we just threw it in as the playdough was cooking and it came out great. I bought a twelve pack of glitter colors for about $6.00 so we'll be making more in the future.



Bathtub Painting

I have a huge list of bathtub paint recipes saved up, but the other day I needed something to entice Monkey into the tub so I went the easy route. Dollar store shaving cream and food coloring.

 I always keep a stash of cheap shaving cream because it's useful for lots of messy projects. It makes great stocking stuffers!

 I just filled up some plastic bowls with shaving cream and added some food coloring. At the time all we had was blue and yellow. It has been a fun way to teach the boys about mixing colors too.

 He had a blast painting the bathtub and when he was done I just sprayed everything down with water. Easy cleanup.

Snow storm

 Here are the pics I took after the major snow hit. We received this snow in ONE night. Our poor dog was in snow up to the chest. We had tramped down the spot where he is standing but you can see the edge of the snow just under his tags.

 

I didn't get any actual measurements but we had a good 18" by the time it was over. I was sinking up to my knees when I was walking where the sidewalk is.

 This is our neighbors roof line.

 We keep throwing treats our for the birds. They loved us that week!

 Photos around the yard. The snow piled up on that bird house cracks me up. There was a good 12" of snow on it.

February Simplify: Closet

Please ignore the awesome night time photos!

We started with a mishmash of storage and a lot of empty space where we hadn't gotten around to adding shelves yet. We have this weird shaped closet that we thought would be a good idea when we were remodeling the master bedroom.

There isn't much room in the bedroom so there weren't many choices for a closet. However, I would not pick this one again. It's a weird sort of walkin but not layout. These are before I started in. The larger drawers below are part of the new closet. I had already removed the smaller ones to make sure my measurements were accurate.

 We still have some sorting/cleaning out to do, but for now everything has a place. No more piled up shoes.

 There is nothing on the floor which was a must in my plan. When you have pets, hair seems to creep into every nook and cranny. Now I can get the vacuum in the closet without any problems.

I still want to cover the inside of the drawers with pretty paper. For now though, I can find everything I want and that was the important part. Yes we have a lot of shoes and yes most of them are my husbands. We have role reversal issues at our house :).

SVG - Valentine's

Just sharing some fun SVG files for Valentine's Day. Just click on the image for the original location.



"Love is a never ending circle."