How to make Wooden Spoon Dolls

**Pictures now uploaded**

As I was looking through a book at Hobby Lobby, in search for some crafts I can do with Laney, I came across this project: making wooden spoon dolls.  I wanted a craft that Laney could really participate in, a craft that wouldn't cost a ton, one that would hold her attention (quick start to finish) and lastly, one that she would play with after it was all said and done.

Here's what you need:

• Wooden Spoons (set of 4 at the Dollar Tree)
• Felt Markers
• Scrap Fabric
• Yarn
• Embroidery Thread
• Embroidery Needle
• Hot Glue Gun/Glue Sticks
• Scissors
• Optional: buttons, ribbon, pinking shears, etc..

I had Laney rummage through my scrap fabric and pick out which clothes her wooden spoon family wear. She really enjoyed this, and I enjoyed putting to use some of those scraps!
1.) Cut a small rectangle of your fabric. I used around 12" x 5". All four of my spoons were different sizes, perfect for creating a family of four, so your fabric might be larger for the bigger spoon and smaller for the smaller spoon.

2.) Thread your embroidery thread and hand sew a running stitch around the longer side of your fabric rectangle. I used this time teach Laney what a running stitch was and wanted to use the correct sewing lingo so I could slowly teach her the basics of sewing. Pull the needle through in the end, gather the fabric together tightly, wrap around "neck" of your doll and tie it closed. Laney enjoyed pulling the needle through, and learned from Mommy's outcries that the needle tip is sharp. Feel free to put a dab of your hot glue to keep it in place. I tied my and it seems fine. If you want to make several outfits for your wooden spoon doll/puppet, I would recommend not hot gluing it.




3.) Draw a face on your doll. When Laney drew her face on her doll, it really didn't look like a happy doll, but that was her little creation, and I wanted her to know I was pleased with her drawing. I helped her draw lips and showed her how to put eye lashes on the eyes.


4.) Hot Glue the hair on with either yarn or embroidery floss. Yarn is better, but I didn't have any on hand, so I used embroidery floss since I had a wide selection of colors.

5.) Laney picked out three of her favorite buttons to put on her doll, and I sewed them on for her. I think she was her favorite part!

6.) Then she ran and showed Daddy and Mattie her Wooden Spoon Laney doll!!

She wanted to make a Mattie doll next and kept saying "Mattie" was cold and needed some clothes. Unfortunately, it was late and time to get ready for bed, but we will make the rest of the wooden spoon family this week. Let me know if you try this with your kids!

Extra Curricular Activities for our Kids!

This week's topic is addressing extra curricular activities for our kids. We're going to share what activities our kids participate in and how we try to balance it all! For our pre-school aged children, we'll define "extra-curricular" as out of the home activities, not related to "preschool." (Whether preschool takes place at home or in a school.)

First of all, we did not join any extra-curricular activities that cost money until Will was three. Prior to age three, activities consisted of free story times at the library, playdates, sunday school and trips to local kid friendly spots such as museums, pools, parks, etc.

My reasoning for this was two fold. First, I'm cheap! I was not willing to spend money prior to this age. It just did not seem worth it to me! Second, most activities for the under three crowd require a parent to participate (swim lessons, gymnastics, dance, etc.). Since I had two so close together, this would mean having someone else to watch Adeline. This is not easily arranged, so we opted to wait until they could each participate without a parent! They already interacted me all day, every day! Why would I pay for additional interaction that I could provide for free? :)

Our first extra curricular was swim lessons for Will. He took them the week after he turned three. Aside from Sunday school, this was his first chance to be in a class taught by someone other than myself! (And actually, I was his Sunday School teacher the year before as well!)

We took lessons at a city pool. They lasted for a week. Every day for one week during summer. Will was and is a FISH. Loves the water and was way ahead of the skills taught in this class. However, he struggled a TON with me "leaving" him in a class and having to follow the directions of someone else. He cried (no, screamed) for most class that week. But we stuck it out and with the help of his super patient teacher, he did make progress by the end of the week.

His teacher said that the young 3's typically struggle, especially if it is their first "class" of any kind. We did the next level lessons this summer (as a four year old) and Will did GREAT! He listened, didn't cry and obediently did the skills required. I could still tell he was the youngest in the class - but overall it was a much better experience. I don't regret our first swim lessons at age three at all. I think we would have had a similar experience had gymnastics been our first "class" for Will.

Will's next activity was gymnastics! I had wanted to start him in gymnastics for a long time - if you know Will, you understand why. :) But, at our local gym, he had to be 3.5 before he could take class without me. So we waited and started around January of this year. To say he loves gymnastics would be an understatement! We moved a few weeks before the gymnastics "year" ended, but we continued to drive about 20 minutes back to our old gym.

A few weeks after we moved to our new area, Will spotted a gym that is about 3 minutes from our house. He recognized the gymnasts on their sign and has begged me for more gymnastics! I finally got around to signing him up again just last week. He loved this gym even more! I did too, as their format for class was a full hour and very intense! I loved that his teacher required him to redo skills he rushed through - though she remained very patient as Will rushes through tasks often. :) Will was sweating when he was done! Woohoo!

In addition to the two weeks of swim lessons and gymnastics, Will has participated in AWANA Cubbies. I wrote about this last week, so I won't repeat it.

In our current fall schedule, this really means an hour of gymastics on a weekday morning and an hour and a half of AWANA on a weeknight. I think that is plenty for a four year old - even one who does not attend preschool out of the home. We still have plenty of time to do some homeschooling 4 days per week.

And of course, Adeline is just now 2.5, so we'll wait a little while longer. She will likely also do swim lessons next summer, Cubbies in the fall and possibly dance as well.

Here is a list of what I'm looking for in an extra curricular activity for my kids:

-a chance to practice obeying another adult.

-opportunities to practice appropriate social skills (big for Will who struggles with this!)

-good exercise! (also big for Will who has an abundance of energy)

-biggest bang for my buck!

As far as balancing our time in extra curricular activities - I don't have much advice. Mostly because my kids are still so young. Also, because we are very limited by finances! I am starting to see how much of a struggle it could be to say "no" to all the great opportunities that exist for our kids. At this point, I desire for the majority of our time to be at home.

Does anyone have any great advice for balancing extra curricular activities? Especially if you have school-aged children?

Please also share what activities your preschooler does and what you love about them!

Preschool Websites

I've had a lot of people ask lately which websites I'm getting a lot of my ideas from, so I thought I'd quickly do a separate post with a lot of links. Here they are:

Little Hands, Big Work

ABC Jesus Loves Me

TLSBooks

Children's Learning Activities - great list of preschool resources

Homeschool Creations

DLTK's Printables

PreKinders

List of Preschool Activity Bags

Walking By the Way - More Activity Bags

Squidoo article on toddler workbox ideas

Starfall - preschool letter, pre-reading computer games

These are the blogs on my reader right now:

Confessions of a Homeschooler

ABC and 123

1 + 1 + 1 = 1

No Time for Flashcards

Make and Takes - kids crafts

Our Days/Weeks

I hope you like pictures because this post has a few! I thought I'd do a post similar to Hollie's that includes a random sampling of activities and things we like to do on a typical day. All of these pictures were taken within the last week, so they are relevant to what we're doing now! There will also be some overlap from last week's post on Toddler Activities. I had a few questions I thought I'd answer here.

Before I jump in to our days...the first picture above shows what I mentioned before about how I do stickers with my toddlers. I really thought a picture helped explain this. You can see how there is no background around each sticker and Ava is able to easily pick the sticker off! I thought this was the best trick ever when I learned it while teaching 2 year olds at church!

When thinking about our day, I generally separate it into morning, lunch, nap, afternoon, dinner, bed. Our mornings are the most "organized" with specific things I like to accomplish. Lunch and nap are standard and afternoon and dinner depend on what we have planned for the evening. Mornings might consist of free play inside, table time activities, trips to the library or museum, quiet play time in their beds, outside play time or a video.

Adeline loves to play in the beans. LOVES them! She could scoop and pour for hours.

This is one idea of a preschool activity I have for Will. I found the idea here and he liked it a lot! You can see that he has to count all of the dots on the domino and "park" in the right location. It subtly teaches addition because as he is counting up to 4, he sees that there is a 3 and a 1 - even if he doesn't realize that yet!
This is what outside play time often looks like when Adeline finds the potting soil.

We also love going to the museums and library. This was taken last week when we went to the NC Museum of Natural Science. I haven't taken the kids in a long time and they really loved it. It's free and even though we have a membership to the Life and Science Museum in Durham - I love both, really. Will particularly liked the green snakes and meeting the animals during a program we went to.
Here is another activity Will did recently which was a little difficult for him. I used pony beads to make color patterns on these pipe cleaners and asked him to copy the pattern. He struggled, but worked through it. We'll definitely be doing some more pattern activities...

And this girl could string pony beads onto pipe cleaners forever!

(Forgive the quality of these pics - my sweet hubby took them for me when I was sick on Monday!) This is another activity Will did - spelling words! I used small letter beads (bought at Walmart) and cards with a picture and the word spelled out. He used the letter beads to spell the word onto the pipe cleaner! He liked it.

And because I got some questions about it - I took pictures of the system I'm trying out for Will. It's taking up a lot of my time right now, so its very relevant to my post on "our week." Basically, its patterned off a popular homeschool method of using "workboxes." Except we use drawers. It really encourages and motivates Will to move through the activities because I space out "fun" ones with more challenging ones. He has to finish the drawers in order before moving on to the next.
Each drawer has a numbered card that he puts on the top when he is done. It really just keeps me accountable for planning out activities for him (5 new activities, 3 times a week). Once he's done the drawers, he's free to repeat ones he really liked. I do drawers for Monday, Wednesday and Friday - but leave the activities there in between. Does that make sense?

Here is what is in our drawers this week. I love these markers that I got at Michaels with a 50% coupon (otherwise these suckers are about $14!! I'd love to find a cheaper version so I can get some for the girls as well). He used these to count bears in the bear book you can see.

I got these puppet kits (thanks, Martha Stewart!) at Big Lots. He needs help with this one.

This one uses the cookie sheet to match letters. Uppercase matching with the fridge magnets and lower case with some cards I made.

A jigsaw puzzle. This is a "fun" drawer - so I left him switch the puzzle for the Mickey puzzle that he wanted to do.
Matching colors and shapes with those foam lacing beads. I'm a big fan of multipurpose items since we are limited on space - so these beads are great for us! We use them for ALL kinds of activities!

And believe it or not, other things fill my week that are not centered around my kids! Like Hollie, I love to craft and sew. I thought I'd post what that looks like for me after a reader asked this question last week,

Hollie, I would like to know how you store your sewing/craft stuff. Right now my kids share a room so I use our guest room for sewing, but in thinking about long-term, I really don't know where I will sew or craft. Any ideas?

I know she asked Hollie, but I was in the same situation so I thought I'd share. Before my daughter took our extra bedroom/office/craft storage room, I mainly stored all craft supplies in her closet. I would drag them downstairs to the kitchen table everytime I wanted to sew or craft. Not practical. Now I've added this bookshelf to our dining room. Not my favorite, but necessary at this time. My sewing machine is on top and the bookshelf's contents are hidden by two panels I sewed to match my dining room.

They velcro in place and are easily removed to reveal all the craft supplies. Aside from this, I do store kiddie craft supplies in two other locations and my fabric is in the top of my coat closet. :)

Ok, so I guess this is somewhat centered around my kids as I love to sew clothing for them. This was the first skirt I made for Adeline when she was 16 months old.

Another big part of my week is coupon clipping and coupon shopping! While the newness has worn off and I no longer take pictures of all my deals (or document them) I still clip coupons most weeks and keep up with the deals. I shop at one grocery store and after a short hiatus I've returned to the drug stores - CVS and Rite Aid - as well. Although, Walgreens is calling my name after the FREE pull-ups I scored last week... Here are some POH posts on coupons.

And lastly, I want to address a question that often comes up. SO MANY times when talking about any one of these things that fill my time - I get asked, "How do you have time to _______?" Whether its coupons, crafts, cloth diapers, blogging, tutoring, preschool, cooking from scratch etc. My answer is that you simply make time for things that are important to you! Those things will not be the same for everyone and that is OK! Mine have certainly evolved over time.

For example - when I first started coupon clipping, it took up ENORMOUS amounts of my time. As I've learned and gotten into a routine, its second nature and doesn't seem to take up much time at all. The same things goes for all of those things listed above!

And often times, I find that one thing (right now its reading about homeschooling and planning our efforts in that area) is taking up TOO MUCH of time when the rest of my house starts to look like this:

So I usually step back and refocus my efforts a little more. :) Make sure the family is fed, house is cleaned, husband is happy...and then I return to reading the book about homeschooling or looking at a blog about preschool.

For the sake of being transparent, I'd also like to confess that the cleaning schedule I blogged about here NEVER worked for me. I think it might be because our house is on the market, but I much prefer to just kind of wing it when it comes to cleaning. Sometimes I get a burst of energy and want to clean the whole house. Sometimes we have a showing and I HAVE to clean what I can quickly. Sometimes I can't take another second without vaccuming my floors. I still have a "lesson plan book" or family notebook, but it just doesn't include a cleaning schedule. :)

And that concludes the longest, most hodge-podged post EVER.

What do you feel like are your biggest struggles with managing your time on a daily and weekly basis?

Toddler Activities

This week we're going to be sharing ideas for activities to do with your toddler! We realized (today!) that toddler no longer means most of our oldest children (Samuel, Will, Laney, Meredith and Lydia) but our younger ones. I know that I immediately thought of activities I do with Will when I first read this week's topic. But instead, we'll save those for a later week on preschool activities!

That being said, I have been spending a lot of time on preschool activities for Will. Right now, it consists of about an hour at the kitchen table at least three times per week. The problem is that I still have two toddlers running around the house! (Adeline is two on Wednesday and Ava - the girl I keep - turned 2 in January.) Most of my activities are things to keep them busy at the table. These also work to have everyone seated while I fix lunch!

I have been AMAZED at some of the activities I created for Will that the girls are able to do. Especially Ava! Here are some foam lacing beads that also double for sorting by color and/or shape. Will loves to do this with some salad tongs for extra motor skill practice. I gave them to Ava one day and got her started....

Went back to help Will and the next thing I knew she was DONE sorting by color! You can see in these pictures the trays I use for our table activities. These were 3.99 at Michaels (in the kiddie paint aisle, near the Crayola products) and are a lifesaver! None of our small objects - beads, crayons, craft supplies, puzzle pieces - roll off the table!

Adeline didn't do so great at sorting, but she sure had a blast filling the cups and dumping them again.

This was an activity I made for all three kids and again was shocked when Ava completed it the first time I gave it to her! I bought the cheapest cookie sheets I could find at Walmart (3 pack for 3.97 I think). I made a chart with all the uppercase letters (only first half shown above). Laid the chart on a cookie sheet and gave them magnetic fridge letters to match to the paper! I was careful to pick a font that closely resembled the font of the fridge letters. You can see how well Ava did - only some of the letters are backwards!

Another favorite toddler activity is dress-up. This is kind of a DUH one though. But I had the picture so I thought I'd share!

Even my toddlers like simple crafts. Their absolute FAVORITE activity right now is to put stickers on a piece of paper. I've found that if you remove the extra sticker parts from around the stickers - they can more easily get the stickers off the paper. Does that make any sense? Do you want a picture of this?? I cut up sticker sheets and the girls will stay busy for 10-15 minutes putting stickers on a piece of paper! They also enjoyed gluing the cotton balls on the snowmen you see above.
We even painted ornaments at Christmas! I just hovered over them with a wet rag ready to wipe up messes. (It was acrylic paint!)

This is our aquadoodle and the girls love it! Will does too - but this day he wasn't here so they got their own time with it. It's like painting with water. You can make a cheap aquadoodle by using water and paintbrushes on a chalkboard. (Saw this at our favorite museum!)

Other activities we do (but I have no pictures of):

-playdoh!

-going to storytime at the library (ours has a "rhyme time" for 2 and unders!)

-stamps (just use washable ink - they love these!)

-bean bag games

-looking at pictures of babies in my parenting magazines

-cutting out and making collage of those babies (I cut - they glue.)

-playing in a tub of dried beans (don't use kidney beans)

-sidewalk chalk outside

-sidewalk chalk on dark colored construction paper if rainy outside!

-pony beads on pipe cleaners - can make a bracelet (probably older toddlers - I didn't try this with the girls until they were about 20 months or so)

-stringing pasta

-pudding fingerpaint

NOTE: Almost every activity listed is a "table time" activity where my kids are supervised the entire time. Lots of choking hazards, but I lay down the ground rules about not putting items in their mouth. But I wouldn't recommend pony beads for a toddler without supervision, of course.

A couple of other resources for toddler activities:

Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready

No Time for Flash Cards

Preschool Rainbow Toddler Activities

ABC and 123

Craft Box Starter Kit

I called my friend Jen on the phone and asked her what she thought would be a good list of craft supplies to keep on hand for your kids to play with. She gave me a great list and I headed to Walmart to see how far $20 would get me. I was pleased with all I was able to get. Here's what you're looking at:
*Flexible straws
*Feathers
*Pipe Cleaners
*Pom-poms
*Cotton Balls
*Glue Sticks
*Wooden Sticks
*5 paints & a paint pallete
*Scissors
*Googly Eyes
*Paper Plates
*Plastic Spoons
*Scotch Tape

Additional items Jen mentioned were: air dry clay, Q-tips, construction paper, clothespins, paper doilies, foam shapes, and a hole punch. She also keeps a basket for "scraps" that can be used again. (And she said she tears all of the googlie eyes off of projects before they go in the trash so they can be reused!).
I asked how old her kids were when they started making crafts. She said she started doing crafts with her kids when they were 3 and 4 (her two oldest). She said her oldest really got into it once he turned 5. At first she would sit down and work on projects with them. Now she does some projects with them and also allows them to have free time with the craft closet and make whatever they want.
Isn't this adorable? Her oldest son made it. "A is for Alien":

One of my Favorite Moms

Seriously, Jen P. is one of my favorite moms. I knew her before she was a mom and have since seen her bring forth four amazing children into this world. She and her husband are a real example to us and I love them all!!

One of the areas that Jen really inspires me in is all the fun stuff she does with her kids. And a lot of times these things are both fun and a great teaching tool. Here are a few of my favorite things from her blog. These are all stored away on my computer and in my mind to do with my boys as they grow.

1. Bunk Bed Tent. Simply adorable! I know this probably doesn't fit under the "activity" umbrella, but I just think it's so cute and would be so fun to play with my kids in this.

2. Turkey Time. This is a great Thanksgiving activity, but could definitely be adapted to other times. I'm thinking you could write down things they are thankful for on rain drops on rainy days, flowers in the spring/summer, apples for an apple tree in the summer/fall, etc.

3. The Prayer Jar. This is my all time favorite of 2009 from Jen. It is such a great idea on so many levels. It's making prayer a priority, it's teaching her children to pray for others, it's fostering family time at the dinner table, it's prayer, it's easy to make, I could go on and on! And the best part about it is that they actually do this! :) Jen let me know what the kids prayed when they pulled my boys' names out of the jar - so sweet!

4. Weird Looking Grass Haired Thing. Sorry, I didn't know how else to describe it! This is a cute idea for a project to do when you're stuck inside all day.

5. Spoon Bugs. These are cute little things that Jen made with her kids. She got the idea from Mr. Maker (I am including the link, but I have no idea what Mr. Maker is!). I'll ask Jen more info and then add it to the list of link-ups at the end of the week.

Seriously, there are a ton of other cute projects that Jen has done and I had such a hard time just picking a few. If you want to see more from Jen, reply in the comments. I could be easily persuaded to copy more from her blog to here (with her permission, of course!!). :)

And finally, with all my heart Jen - I love you!! You are a great friend and a great role model. You are definitely a Titus 2 Older Woman to me that I look up to (even though we're practically the same age!).