Art Schedule April 2010

I have worked out an art schedule for Little Mouse, we are also turning this time into a standing art playdate.  We already have other little homeschoolers that's going to join us!  I am super excited about this.

Here is our schedule for April:

 14 April 2010
      Textured Painting Sponges
      Easter Egg Craft
      Collage Box Yellow

21 April 2010
     Textured Painting Feathers
     Waffle Craft
     Collage Box Green

28 April 2010
     Textured Painting Lentils
     Fish Tank Craft
     Collage Box Red

5 May 2010
   Textured Painting Potatoes
   Mother's Day Craft (Grannies)
   Collage Box Blue

We will start at around 9h00 and will finish up at 10h30 - 11h00.  If anyone in the Cape Town area is interested in joining us please email me or leave a comment.  There is a small fee involved of R80 per playdate, this covers the art supplies and snacks for both the kiddies and mommies! 

Sensory Box - Bran and Feathers

Last week I made this sensory box for Little Mouse, she had so much fun with this!  I had loads of digestive bran that I never use, this made a great base for the sensory box.  I added some feathers, a plastic cup and bowl and we took everything outside.

This is the reason why it is a great idea to do this outside!  I placed a plastic sheet on the grass and after we were done playing I just shook it out onto the plants.  No mess!  Yeah!

It is also important for me to add a base that is actually edible - Little Mouse still eats everything.  Here she is trying out the bran!

We had so much fun with this one!  I will take it out in a week or two again for her to enjoy, before the rain starts in Cape Town and we can still go outside for this one!

Art - Floor Drawings

We took a quick break from our Textured Painting series and made these fun floor drawings!  She had so much fun, as you can see from the photo!

I used some painters tape / masking tape and taped sheets of an old desk calender to the floor, I gave her some crayons and sharpies and she had a blast!

We will continue with our Textured Painting project in the second week in April.  We have loads of easter crafts and art planned for the next week or two!  I got her these Crayola Jumbo crayons and we LOVE them!

Easter Craft - Easter Basket

We made this super easy easter basket for Little Mouse today.  We are going to use it over the weekend to go for an easter egg hunt!  yeah!


I drew the template free hand on the back of the paper and then I drew some pictures of eggs and flowers for her on the front.  I helped her to colour the pictures and we had loads of fun.  After she was done I cut it out and glued it togheter.  I will try and make the template later today and upload it to my printables tab at the top of my nav bar.

Here Little Mouse is colouring the page.

She love sticking her face in the camera these days!  Silly girl!

Hope you have a great week!

Felty Goodness...

For those of you who love felt, be sure to visit Gulf Coast Cottage - she has the most stunning patterns in her Etsy shop for felt foods and playsets! Amazing!

I love the felt food Easter Basket, great for easter fun!

Book of the week - Babalela

Happy Friday all!  I have decided to dedicate a post to a book a week that we absolutely love. These books are full of life lessons and teaches little ones important aspects in life.  Enjoy the first post in this series!

We just love the Babalela books by Martie Preller -  we read the  series of books already, but Little Mouse especially loves this one - the first in the series Babalela.

The story is about a cute little forest animal called a Babalela, he is so happy in his home deep in the forest and then man comes and takes him to the city.  Babalela is so unhappy and finally escapes back to his beloved forest.

I love the way that Martie describes important life lessons for the little ones in plain language that they can understand.  The illustrations are beautifully done and makes the story come to life. I love the cute and totally unique characters in these books - aren't we all unique little characters?  We love this book and I find that we keep going back to it to enjoy the story again and again. 

I couldn't find an english version on Amazon, but here is the link to the Afrikaans one.

A must have on your bookshelf!  Little Mouse will drop EVERYTHING when I show her this book, that is how much she loves it!

Isn't this the cutest little thing!

If you would like to see more of Martie's work visit her website 

Hope you have an awesome weekend!

Our Homeschooling in 2010

I have decided to sit down, collect all my thoughts and work out a proper schedule (that mommy WILL stick to) for our homeschool for the rest of the year. I had everything planned, but life threw us a curveball in the beginning of the year with my dad being sick, etc. This has been a difficult year and I have to admit that at times it was easier to just let her run around and play with whatever she wanted to then doing homeschooling with her at least 3 days a week.

This post is for you to please give me your input or any ideas that you might have and it is also for me to refer back to and stay on track!

I want to establish a good morning routine with her, at this stage we have one, sort of, but it only entails getting bathed, eating breakfast and then we let the day guide us. I want to change that, I want us to have a certain routine that we stick to, even if we do need to go out during the morning. I also want to slowely start with a more set schedule for Little Mouse schooling wise - I am planning to start with the Hands on Homeschooling curriculum just after her second birthday and I want us to be in a solid routine by that time.

Here is what I thought might work for us:

Morning routine

Get ready for the day (includes bathing, getting dressed, brushing teeth and drinking some milk)
Bible Study
Circle time - I will use this time to spend reading with her, or working on something like a sensory box.
Breakfast for Little Mouse (she prefers eating her cereal a bit later in the mornings)
Art (once a week we will be doing art just after Bible Study from about 9h00 - 11h00)
Break (we can use this to free play or if we need to go out - she usually still naps between 12h00 and 14h00)

Afternoon routine

Lunch
Craft (if I have anything planned, I will try and do at least one craft per week)
Work out of her curriculum or any structured activity.

That's what I have in mind - I will start implementing it from next week on. I will update you on our progress in our Tot School post next week Sunday. I want to also make a detailed program for us to follow, will upload that tomorrow. I already started on the Art one and I am excited about all we are going to do!

If you have any ideas or suggestions please feel free to email me or comment!

God bless!

Homeschooling site

I found the most awesome site for ebooks and other homeschool goodies, Froggie went a Teachin! She has the most beautiful ebooks and games that covers every topic that you can think of, plus she has an awesome freebie section. I also LOVE the fact that it is instant downloads - I am way to impatient to wait for something! Little Mouse is already enjoying the goodies that I got from Sheilia's site.Be sure to visit Froggie went a Teachin. for loads of fun goodies and great finds! I have also added her button to my sidebar - easy for you to come back and simply click on!

I did not get any payment for this review - I just honestly LOVE Sheilia's goodies! These are my honest opinions and ideas.

If you want to punish a blogger...

How do you punish me? Easy, take away my laptop! Last week Saturday when I finally had time to sit down and do some well deserved blogging as well as read some of my favourite blogs something terrible happend. My computer did not want to boot up. Something was wrong... this was not good! I restarted, prayed, and still nothing happend. Then I called in the big guns. My hubby tried and nothing happend. I was devasted! All my info, every single photo of Little Mouse, all my documents, homeschooling goodies AND my accounting system WAS GONE!!!!!!

On Tuesday hubby finally found a way to download all my info, we were blessed to be able to retrieve all the info! Yeah! I did not loose anything! He finally got my computer to work again yesterday, so I will be joining the blogging community again on Monday! Hopefully everything will be back to normal next week.

stART - The Lion's Mane

As an afterthought I grabbed this little book as we were heading to the counter in our Library, and I am so glad I did! The Lion's Mane by Paula Knight was a really fun read!

The story is about the Lion King looking for a new hairstyle for his unruly mane, at one stage one of the animals even suggested ribbons! At the end the Lion realized that he is being vain and that he is perfect just as he is!

For our stART project I cut a lion out of coloured vinyl and assembled it for Mouse on a piece of construction paper. I also cut some ribbons in blue and red for the Lion's mane! She then stuck the ribbons on her Lion.

I think it turned out rather cute!

Visit A Mommy's Adventure's for more stART fun!

Open Ended Art - Textured Painting Project #2

For this weeks Textured Painting project I thought it would be fun to do some Bubblewrap stamping.

We used some bubblewrap, construction paper, a brush, blue and yellow paint and two recycled containers.

I decanted some paint for Little Mouse, I find that it is just so much easier for her to use if she does not need to struggle with the little paint containers. I showed her how to either dip your brush in the paint and then paint the bubble wrap before you stamp or how you can dip the bubble wrap directly into the paint. She enjoyed doing this activity, she loved touching the painted bubblewrap!

Here she is working on her project.

Here is the finished project! Her's is on the right, the one on the left I made.
She also painted with the brush on both her one and on mine (above the heart)!

New Blog Look over at Jolly Mommy Online Shop!

I entered a giveaway on Amy Bayliss for a new blog design, not thinking twice about the fact that I might actually win it! I was sooo suprised when Holly from Crown Laid Down Designs contacted me to tell me I was the winner! Yeah!!! Holly, you did a fantastic job! Thank you so much!

Holly send me a few questions and started designing, I loved everything she did from the start! She is a true professional and I can recommend her awesome services to anyone! Please visit her blog to see some more info on her design packages.

Thank you Holly! It looks awesome! To see what Holly did visit my business blog: Jolly Mommy Online Shop

Disclosure: I was not paid to do this review - this is my honest opinion. I did win a new blog look from Crown Laid Down Designs, but I was not asked to give a positve review.

Homeschool Bloghop - Theme 5 What's your style?

We have basically just started homeschooling and Mouse is still young, so I have to be honest in saying that I do not really have a certain style at this stage. What I would love to have in place one day is a practical hands on approach that makes learning fun for both of us. What I see now from doing schooling is that she loves it when I am involved with the activities as well. Sharing is important to her and to me. I am in the process of looking at curriculums and I love the Montessori principles.

Head on over to Our World Wide Classroom for more on homeschool styles!

Muffin Tin Monday - Yellow

We had a Muffin Tin Tuesday today! I finally found muffin cups! Yeah! I love the cups, now I can use just what I need, I found that with the tin there was always one that I just did not know what to fill it with.

For our Yellow food MTM we had:

Cheese, Otees, Toast with Golden Syrup, Noodles.

Funny that most of Mouse's favourite foods are yellow!

Join in the MTM fun over at Muffin Tin Mom.

Tot School - Week 3 | 20 Months

It has been a crazy hot week in Cape Town, we hardly had energy to do anything this week. I also decided, after praying and thinking hard and long about it, that even though I do educational activities with Little Mouse at this stage, I also want to include loads of free play for her. I will start with a more structured curriculum with her after her second birthday. For now, I want to play with her and slip in educational activities throughout the day. Keeping it fun for both of us! She loves sensory boxes and we will be having loads more of those in the future. Kylie from Our World Wide Classroom has a linky for sensory boxes and it is worth a visit!

Last year we started with an ABC file and we mostly used animal pictures. My mother in law gave me a whole bunch of magazines and Little Mouse and myself went through them and tore out new pictures for her ABC file! We had loads of fun.

Here she is busy organizing the pictures...



As you can see - the Winnie the Pooh one was a firm favourite!

We started with some Easter Projects. This one was a spur of the moment kind of thing. I cut shapes of a ducky, egg and beak out of vinyl and gave them to Little Mouse to stick on construction paper. I had to help her with this. After we created a picture of the ducky popping out of the egg she took a black sharpie and coloured it in!

For Open Ended Art Little Mouse started with a textured painting project. We did project #1 and loved it!

Mostly we spend our days like this, to escape the heat!



I just love this photo of her!

If you want to join in on Tot School fun or see other great ideas visit 1+1+1=1.

Open Ended Art - Textured Painting Project #1

I saw this really great idea on Delightful Learning, where Michelle gave her little girl diffrent textured items to paint with. Be sure to visit and see what they did! I decided that this was a great idea to incorporate some different ideas in our Open Ended Art projects and we will be doing a Textured Painting Project.

We started this week by using a sponge tipped brush, some green paint and red construction paper. Little Mouse dipped the brush in the paint and then blobbed it on the paper.

Always a good idea to smell your brush before you start painting!
You also need to touch the paint inbetween blobbing sessions... :)Here's the finished art work!

Want to see more Open Ended Art fun? Visit Zonnah's Addictions.

Tibe Talk Bloghop

The creative lady behind It's a Hodgepodge Life came up with this stunning idea to meet new bloggy friends!

My friend Ruby tribed me *LOL* and I am now hooked!

Here's how it works:


*It begins here every Saturday...(the McLinky will be up for 5 days, so you can link up anytime during the week but it begins Saturdays.- this is good for us that don't blog on weekends just link up during the week)


*Grab the Tribe Talk Button to your right and Share on your Blog ~ Share with everyone that this is a FREE way to increase traffic to their blogs and find some interesting blogs to follow.


*List 5 bloggers that you want to spotlight. Try and choose those that comment on your blog on a regular basis, but it's not a requirement.

*Make a list of them on your blog or write a post featuring them. It can be an old or new post.

*Then link-up your post and let everyone share your picks and "meet" your tribe as well as others.


Think of it as a "meet and greet" for bloggers, increase your Tribe and let others do the same.

Here are the five bloggers I've chosen!

1) Momma's Playground
2) Three A's and a C
3) Growing Up our Style
4) Momma to 3 Blessings
5) Our World Wide Classroom
6) Growing Up Blackxican

Have fun hopping around and meeting new friends!

Homeschool Bloghop - Theme 3 Why and Theme 4

Having had a crazy week last week I am doing both theme 3 and 4 today, I don't want to miss out! Theme 3 is Why do I homeshcool? (Theme 4 is just a Blog Hopping experience!)

I put a lot of thought into this and here are my reasons:

1) I would love to give my precious little girl the best start in life.
2) I want to teach my little girl morals and principles that I feel is sorely lacking in public playgroups and preschools.
3) Our teaching methods focusses on the bible and God - we will do a module for example on animals, but I will always include that God made those animals, etc.
4) I love spending every single minute of the day with her!
5) I love being creative and learning WITH her, this is a two way street! She is not the only one getting an education!
6) I know exactely where she is, what she is doing, what she is learning and who she is socializing with. Might sound like a control freak, but being christian parents we feel that this is so important. I have heard horror stories of what older children teach the younger ones in playgroups.
7) I will cry my eyes out if I have to leave her at a school or daycare mom, plus I feel that is totally uneccessary! I am a SAHM, I know my childs needs and learning skills best, I know what she needs when. No daycare mom can know that.

These are just some of the reasons we homeschool!

Now for some fun Blog hopping for Theme 4! If you want to join in visit Our Worldwide Classroom!

Tot School - Week 2 | 20 Months

Last week was one crazy week. My dad went in for another operation and between the hospital visits and everything else we didn't do much in line of Tot School. We did go to the library during the week and Mouse had two playdates which she loved.

She still loves playing with her Noah's Ark magnets that I made for her the previous week. She also developed a sudden love for reading the bible. She will stand on her tippy toes to remove her bible from her table and then climb onto her bed and "read" it! Such a sweetie! I also found her at least 3 times this Tot School week where she was busy "reading" my bible!

My dad was discharged on Friday and so far everything in our household is back to normal, we will have more exciting post next week on our Tot School!

My friend, Georgia, gave me a stack of coloured vinyl stickers! I am so excited to post more on what Mouse and I are doing with these stickers! Thanks G!!! Felt like Christmas when you gave them to me!

We also went to the Zoo on Saturday, all 3 of us enjoyed it so much. I don't have any photos as my camera's batteries went dead :( , but Mouse loved it! I will definately take her again, to see all the gorgeous animals.

Visit Carissa on 1+1+1=1 for some more Tot School posts and info!