planes and trains follow up

So here is the last of our plain and train projects.

I mentioned earlier our train that we colored and cut out and were going to put on the wall. this is my new favorite thing.  When the kids are quiet at night time and go right to sleep, they get to pick out a train car to add to the train in the morning. Obviously we start with the locomotive and end with the caboose. But the 10th and last thing we end with is a star, and that means they get a special treat - such as gelatto at Costco. I don't know, Joshua picked that one. He has good taste in ice cream apparently.  Anyway, Abby a little less, but Joshua is TOTALLY motivated to get his cars and his star. (and I have taken advantage of this by warning that I'll take a car down from the train for certain misbehavings - I will have to work hard on not overusing this.) Anyway, it's working. YEA!!! * oh yes, and I decided this is a great time to learn our numbers.

Our shape trains. I got this idea from a book in the train kit at the library. I let the kids pick out the colors for their shapes, i cut the shapes out, and I glued on Abigail's, but Joshua glued his on himself. I did not even tell him where to glue the shapes, he said he could figure it out from looking at mine. I'd say he did pretty well. And if you look really close, you can see he drew some steam coming out of our smoke stacks/steam stacks (whatever those are called).

and we colored pictures of trains. Abigail is exploring a wider variety of colors while Joshua's new artistic technique is shading with the side of his crayon. beautiful.

We had a couple of windy days so we decided to fly home made kites - yes, i promise they really DO work, just not on this day. Once I got one of these dinky kites flying about 10 feet in the air for a few seconds out in Spanish Fork. Since we weren't having much luck, we moved on to paper airplanes.

The next day was the first day of Spring, so to celebrate we took down our snowflakes and starting working on our Spring flowers... which I just put up today because I'm a little behind schedule. and I don't really care. I've been having too much fun.

The following are just some photos of my kids playing dress up.

*sleeping issues -  Ever since my parents had been out for the baby my older kids have stopped going to bed at night. They would talk, scream, laugh, and pull all their bedding off of their beds, but not sleep - until like 10:00 pm and then we were all too exhausted the next day - but not enough to sleep apparently. So I prayed. And this is what we did. Instead of putting both the kids down at the same time, Abigail goes to bed now at 6:30. After she has supposedly fallen asleep, then Joshua goes in at 7:30 and he is supposed to be quiet and not wake her up. the next step, since Abigail wasn't actually falling asleep by 7:30 was to take away their afternoon naps all together. This was horrible and wonderful all at the same time. mostly it was just awful for 3 days but the end result, I knew, would be awesome. Then, step three, I bought some light blocking fabric and made curtains - they're still in the works, and since Derek hasn't put up the curtain rod, I have no photo to show you. I just tack up my two curtains every night and at nap time (which I reinstated for Abigail and she is very thankful) and presto! the room is totally dark and my kids are totally sleeping and I totally love it!!!! And we have the train system to keep Joshua from waking Abigail up when he creeps in at 7:30. Hallelujah revelation!! God helps us out even on the little things.

Happy St. Patricks Day

Here is what we did. (Disclaimer: when I say "we" I am referring to either one, all, or some of my children, either with or without myself, and/or my husband or just myself.)

We made cookies a day in advance.

 We ate green oatmeal and drank green milk.

We made sure not to forget to wear something green.

We did a bunch of nothing - can you find the three children in this photo?

We colored some St. Patrick's Day coloring pages.

We delivered cookies to a friend in Joshua's sunbeam class and a friend in Abigail's nursury class and ended up spending an hour or so at Abigail's (my) friend's house.

We ate cookies before dinner therefore spoiling our appetites (scroll down to the "March" post for an explanation of the cookie on a stick)

We ate and drank only those things appropriately colored for St. Patrick's Day - Green and Orange. Sorry, no cabbage, potato soup, or corned beef here. Maybe next year... that does sound good.

We almost gagged drinking the ultimate green drink, but reminded ourselves it is for our health. Who knew collard greens packed such a punch. gulp.

We had a great dessert of Irish Soda Bread and Apple Butter. And we pretended the Irish ate lots of Apple Butter.

Hope you had a fun St. Patrick's Day too

ps. I just posted a total of three posts. scroll down to see if there is something you've missed.

 

Just a lot of cute photos

 Grandpa Bob with Lukas

 Another Grandpa Bob and Lukas

 Lukas

 My cute mom and my cute baby

 Lukas

 the "little mother" tending the baby

 bath time - we need a bigger sink

 my cute family

 this is the face Abigail makes if you tell her to "smile"

 Lukas... oh wait, no, that's "baby" Notice how Abigail made sure baby had all the necessary provisions... blanket, binky, baby bottle, snorkeling duck...

Joshua helped put on Lukas' socks. unfortunately, he told me, the socks are too big so he just "did my best."

March weeks 1 and 2

I know that I had a good excuse to NOT do preschool, but I've made a commitment to myself to stick with this and I really want to see it through. (I have a list of major failings in my personal character and lack of consistency is one, thus the drive to keep going this time.)  So, lest the blogging community is led to believe I have taken a break from preschool, I offer the following examples of our "work."

We've been learning the letter "D" by making for each child a "dies und das" Kiste. (a this and that box).  As you can see, hot glued to the box are examples of this and that, and should one open the door of the box by pushing in the right spot (drucken) one would find more examples of dies und das.   This was as major hit. I'm glad I thought of this idea. 

We've been also learning the letter "E" by making an E mobile.  If I were to do this again, which I'm sure I will, I would do it differently. In German the letter E makes three sounds, E and is elephant, E as in the a in ankle, and E as in "eye". I thought for some crazy reason we should at least mention all three E sounds. Therefore, our mobile has three strings, one for each phoneme with three selected words and corresponding pictures. Too much information. Next time I will just stick with E as in Elephant.

We've started our transportation unit, and are actually half way done. First we got the transportation story kit from the library. It was ok, and we had a few coloring pages to go with it. Then we moved onto airplanes. We learned the parts of an airplane, colored an airplane, and the most fun of all, we built a small cheap-o wood model airplane and helicopter with Dad and painted them with Grammy. Painting was probably the most fun because it was so warm outside. ah spring... almost.  We flew around and pretended we were airplanes too.

Then we moved onto Trains. The train story kit at the library was much better than the transportation kit, at least in my opinion. The favorite story was "The Little Engine That Could" which I didn't even both to translate into German... some things (many things) are just better in their original language. you know, like "i think i can, i think i can, i think i can." My amateur translation would have been something like "ich schaff' es schon, ich schaff es schon, ich schaff' es schon" (roughly translated "i can do it" or "i'll get it yet" sort of). This prompted the idea that we would make our own paper train and use it to mark our progress on a specific goal - such as not talking when it is time to go to sleep. For each day/night that the children reach their goal or whatever, they get to pick another car to put on the train. We have a locomotive, 7 cars, and a caboose. Finally the tenth time they succeed, we put up a star and then they get to do something fun that they pick. so far the first fun thing on the list is go to Grammy's and watch 101 Dalmations. Joshua said I could come too, which I thought was very kind of him.  No pictures of the train yet, seeing as the kids have yet to actually go to sleep. that is a subject for another post. (angry face).

Just FYI, another really good train book - for English speakers - is Jingle the Brass by someone I forgot. And another book called something like "what's in a freight train" was very enlightening. I'm sure you can guess what is in a cattle car, or a stock car, or even a boxcar and tanker, but do you know which car is the gondola or the hopper? Thanks to "What's in a freight train" I do. (all the sudden I'm starting to hear music... butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high) ok, enough with the book reviews. In another book they mentioned semaphores and how the engineer can look at a semaphore and know whether to keep going, slow down, or stop. Joshua caught quickly on to that, and now whenever he is holding anything resembling a stick he holds it straight up and says, "now the train can go" or holds hit horizontally and informs me the train has to stop now.

 reading the train books

No, I am not ashamed of the hot glue gun in the back - in my opinion, that is the only way to make these little models. I threw the little nails away.

What else, we build trains but we haven't painted them yet. We have a train coloring page but we haven't colored it yet. Oh yes, and while we were making our St. Patrick's Day cookies, we also made railroad crossing cookies. I have no idea what the signs look like in Germany, but I figured my kids don't actually live in Germany so it would be more practical to learn what the RR crossing sign looks like here. The cookies were a cute idea, even if the cookies themselves didn't turn out so cute.

There were a lot of songs and poems and other cute ideas I got from the story kits at the library, but in the end I didn't feel like translating a bunch of songs, etc. That's not to say I'm not going to try next month, but this month it just seemed a little too much. I did just have a baby 5 weeks ago and I don't feel guilty taking things a little slower... just as long as I keep going :)

I have a couple more train activities to do, and then we will move on to boats. I'm really excited for boats, just because we are going to make boats and see if we can sail them somewhere - last year we did this down at Salem Pond, but I really really don't want to drive all the way down there - it would probably take about 45 minutes one way. so... any suggestions?