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The first book is, Dotty, by Erica S. Perl.  It is about a gal who brings “Dotty” her invisible horned friend with her to school.  My daughter has imaginary friends (and actually an imaginary house where she claims to live part-time) so she can really relate with Ida, the girl in the story.  I love how this book talks about reality and imagination, encourages children to apologize for wrong actions, and celebrates creativity and active imaginations.  This book is great for those pre-school jitters, I love how warm Ida’s teacher, Ms. Raymond, is in this story!

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My son loves the second book we got to review today!  He loves facts and vivid pictures (and could do without story plot most of the time).   The book, The Exceptionally, Extraordinarily Ordinary First Day of School, by Albert Lorenz, is hilarious – it definitely speaks to little boys.  It features wild creatures that welcome, John (the main character), to the school bus where they drive to the “castle” (aka school), he carries a lizard and steps on frogs in science class, gets to meet several historical characters, eats insects for lunch in the cafeteria, and more.  Quirky Kiddo Z loved all the detail (and trying to find the kid hiding on each page picking his nose).  I loved the facts in the sidebar.  This book was one of the more educational and yet incredibly silly stories we have read in some time!

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The final book we got to review was about Sam, a mouse who lives in a library.  The book, Library Mouse: A World to Explore, by Daniel Kirk, is really cute.  My hubby used to be a librarian (sexy, I know!) and we love our local library and the trove of information you can find browsing books.  Sam and his friend Sarah share their love of books with the readers, and explain how they research with books to learn new things, like how to fly airplanes or to pretend they were Egyptian pharaohs.  They get to “see the world” through the books they are reading.

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Want one of these books?  Leave a comment telling me what items are on your school shopping list and become a follower of QM!  Winner will be chosen randomly next Monday.

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We made borax snowflakes, it was really easy and fun. We made 4 of them and gave them to grandparents when they visited. Our biggest challenge was finding a jar with a wide enough mouth. I copied the directions from about.com

How to make Borax Snow Crystals:

1.Cut a pipe cleaner into three equal sections and twist the sections together at their centers to form a six-sided snowflake shape. Don’t worry if an end isn’t even, just trim to get the desired shape. The snowflake should fit inside the jar.
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2.Tie the string to the end of one of the snowflake arms. Tie the other end of the string to the pencil. You want the length to be such that the pencil hangs the snowflake into the jar.

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3.Fill the widemouth pint jar with boiling water and add borax one tablespoon at a time to the boiling water, stirring to dissolve after each addition. The amount used is 3 tablespoons borax per cup of water. It is okay if some undissolved borax settles to the bottom of the jar.  If you want tint, now is the time to add it.  We used food coloring

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4.Hang the pipe cleaner snowflake into the jar so that the pencil rests on top of the jar and the snowflake is completely covered with liquid and hangs freely (not touching the bottom of the jar).  Allow the jar to sit in an undisturbed location overnight.
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5.  Wake up to the sight of the pretty crystals!!! You can hang your snowflake as a decoration or in a window to catch the sunlight

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Thanks again Pam and Troop Petrie kiddos for sharing your science experiment with us!

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Items needed for the preschool germ experiment:

• Bread
• Kids tongues
• Pocket Purifier
• Ziplock baggies

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Preschool Germ Experiment:

We cut a homemade pita into four pieces and then each of the kids and I licked a piece.  We talked about how there are germs in out mouths, in our saliva, and how they can make us sick and how we need to be careful not to drink/eat after each other and wash our hands before we eat, after we go to the bathroom, etc.  We also talked about the consequences of sharing germs (rotavirus is rampant at the time in our house, so we talked about who was sick and how they need to be careful not to spread the virus).    After licking the bread we sprayed each piece with some water then, two pieces were ziplocked and bagged (to be our control group) and the other two pieces got “light treatment”.  The Pocket Purifier UV light from Purely Products is really handy to use.  My four year old was responsible for making sure the bread pieces were lit for 15 seconds each (roughly, her counting is not exact).  Then we bagged those pieces too and set them on the counter to watch the germs grow!

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Gross!  Gross!

All of the pieces were moldy a week later, but you can see the obvious differences between the pieces that received the light treatment and those that hadn’t!  It worked!  And, after using the light on our stuffed animals, legos, and other porous toys that were hard to adequately wipe off with antibacterial wipes, the virus did not spread further in our house.  We had two people with Rotavirus before this light came in!  And no one else got it!!!  Our baby got to be born into a healthy home!  Thank you Purely Products!

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Do you want your very own germ-killing nifty light?  Tell me how gross your kids can be in our Mom Loop Community!

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This activity was included in the Blog Hop at Abc123, they have a great show and tell school time.  Check it out!

This week we read Good Morning, Pond, by Alyssa Satin Capucilli. This book starts off with a frog leaping into the pond and waking up all the animals that live in and around the pond and ends with three children coming to see all the animals in the pond. Emily loved acting out the different sounds and motions of the various animals in this story, of course the frog was her very favorite. I liked that it was written in a semi cumulative story form. It made if a lot of fun to read and easy for Emily to follow along.

I picked this book out because Emily loves frogs at the moment and I thought that she would enjoy reading a book with a frog in it and then making a frog project to go with it. I love projects made out of paper plates so I thought it would be fun to make a frog out of one. To go along with this book.

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How to make your own paper plate frog

First, Emily painted the front and back of a paper plate green.  While the paper plate was drying Emily colored in black circles on the top of two green bottle tops. (We had these in our huge bottle top collection.)  I drew and cut out frog arms and legs on green construction paper. Emily received Do-a-Dot markers for Easter (She was so excited!!) so she wanted to color in the frogs arms and legs a little more with them.

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After all the pieces were dry, Emily folded the paper plate in half and I made a small slit in the middle of the fold to slide the tongue which I cut out of craft foam through. Then Emily glued on the arms, legs….

… and bottle cap eyes.  Isn’t the finished product so much fun!  Thanks again to Mommy’s Adventures for sharing their story+art or “stART” project with us! Do you have a project you’d love to share with the QM readers? Feel free to email it to me! admin@quirkymomma.com

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Grab 4 bottles of bubbles and food coloring. I was fortunate enough to satisfy my obsessive nature by matching my dye to the bottles. You don’t have to be so picky!

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Open the bubbles and squirt half a bottle of coloring into each bubble container. I didn’t take this task outside. It’s messy, so you should go outside before you squirt food coloring all over your dining room table!

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Speaking of messy: do you have an art easel taking up too much room inside? If you want to make your deck the coolest place on the block, move it outside for the Summer! It’s so much easier to clean up paints and chalk dust, and we end up doing tons more artwork if I know we aren’t going to make the house a disaster. We have these: No-Spill Paint Cups With Lids and I use half of them for paint, and the other half hold our chalk. The lid keeps out any moisture, and I don’t have to bring our supplies back and forth.

Back to the bubble paint: take out the wands and change the kiddies into old clothes. The goal is to blow bubbles aimed at the paper, and when the bubble pops it leaves a great design. My kids thought it would be better to take the Jackson Pollock route.

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Looks like they had a blast!  Thanks again, Lawrence Girls and Daddy Too for a fun craft idea!

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We learned that not all toilet paper tubes (even if you consistently buy the same brand) are the same height.  Before we began we sorted the tubes – short ones in one pile, taller ones in another.  My son loved picking all the scraps of leftover paper off the tubes.

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Then we had great fun experimenting.  Is it easier to build the tubes one on top of another, or one on top of a group?  I loved watching them figure out weight distribution.  It was easier to balance a tube on the intersection of three other tubes.  We also learned that it is difficult to stack tubes on top of each other if they are laying on their side… but not impossible.  My son is a quick problem solver and figured out that he could bend the tubes to make them better building surfaces.

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Have you played with your trash lately?

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This activity took several weeks.  After we got our list of addresses to mail cards to the Quirky kids printed labels of themselves and glued their “signature” of sorts to the back of the cards.  They love glue sticks so I hope, if you were a recipient, that the cards weren’t too sticky!  I addressed them and then we tried to wait patiently for the mail to arrive.
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As we got a card we talked about the state it came from and the children who sent it to us.  We then put the cards in a box.  I wanted to wait till we had a bunch so we could review the states and our country as a whole.  After going on a cross-country road trip (and cheering when we went under those State Banners) we came home ready to talk about the fun we had in North Carolina, the states we drove through to get there and back  and then we went through our post cards and put stickers on our map of all the different states we’ve received cards from.  I think the kids understand the concept of states, that people live in different places away from where they are, and that different areas have different geographic markers or identifiers.  We have bluebonnets and longhorn cows, other areas have igloos and big tanks (thanks to whoever sent us the army base picture!  My son loved the tanks!).
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To help reinforce our lesson we referred to a book we got from IKEA, A Great Atlas for Children.  I like how it shows the readers the resources in each geographical area.  We compared the resources of the area to the cards we received and then looked for other areas which had similar resources or landmarks.  We printed the outline map of the United States from this site and put stickers on the states that we received cards from, and we’d love to get more – let us know if you’d like to swap post cards with us!

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I was thrilled to have received a number of cards from different countries.  Unfortunately, we haven’t quite begun countries yet.   We discussed the post cards as they came in, but I’m saving the global lesson for another week/month.

For my daughter’s 4th birthday, we got her a kid’s digital camera.  She loved it from the second we opened the package, and started taking pictures of anything and everything she saw.  Holidays, a trip to the zoo, playdates with her friends… you name it, she photographed it!

I came across a 3 ring binder that had a window on the cover for you to slide in a photo.  I figured I would put a picture of her there to personalize it a little.  Next, I printed out her pictures on regular printer paper, using our color printer.  Then I grabbed a pair of our kiddie zigzag scissors, a few magazines and catalogs I had lying around, and some glue.  I thought the zigzag scissors cuts would add an element of fun to the pictures while also helping to disguise the less-than-perfect cuts she’d make.

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A few weeks back I spied some pine offcuts in exactly the same shapes.  I scooped them up and spirited them away to preschool.

Unfortunately the wood pieces ran out before their desire to paint did.  So they began to paint the wooden pallet.  And then the logs.

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I love this tutorial!  It is so simple.   Jess over at Mad in Crafts is working on learning the letters of the alphabet with her little tyke.  To help him, she created custom alphabet cards using the free program Picnik.  I love free!  We have cardstock and as soon as I have an hour or two to accumulate the photos we are definitely going to replicate these!  My youngest is just beginning to learn her letters.  She printed her cards on photo paper, but I’m going to try it on cardstock.  For her terrific alphabet cards tutorial (and other crafts/tips) check out her blog!

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At the Hubbards Cupboard they have a collection of coloring sheets that you can use to create your own mini-books.  What I love about their collection is that they have them broken down into vowel sounds (ex: short a) and word families (ex: -ig).  We are were using Bobs Books and Progressive Phonics.  The weather has been too nice for “school stuff” and we’ve been outside playing or at the park most days.  We are taking a Spring-summer break (and going to have a baby!!!).  Once life calms down in the Quirky home, these books will be added to our collection of reading resources!

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We are also looking forward to moving into writing our letters this fall as well.  I found a site that has free printable handwriting worksheets.  I love the internet, we can create our entire preschool/kindergarten learning curriculum customized from the comfort of our own home!  I even have a few projector sheets lying about leftover from my teaching days.  Using the clear transparency over the printout means that my kids can wipe and re-write over and over again to their hearts content!  Maybe we’ll make mini-whiteboards with the handwriting pages!  The possibilities are endless.