stART - Little Fish

I found this little gem of a book in our Library, both of us loved this cute little book. It is about a little rainbow fish looking for his mommy, on his way he encounters all different coloured fishies, but not one of them looks like him - untill he finds his rainbow coloured mommy!






We made a fish tank - I helped loads with this craft, she tried to do most of it on her own, but skill wise it was still a bit mature for her.

What do you need:
2 x paper plates
Glitter glue in various colours
construction paper

I first drew some fish on construcion paper, keeping that seperate I gave Mouse a paper plate to first decorate with blue glitter glue for the water - she found it difficult to get the glue to flow out, I helped her by squeesing the tube a bit while she moved it around on the page. (Team effort!) This plate was decorated on the right side of the plate.

While we waited for that to dry a bit she started decorating the other paper plate. This plate we turned over and decorated the underside of the plate (as this will form the top part of the fish tank) She used different colours glitter glue to get the rainbow look! She applied it really thick ( I was still helping her with the tubes), because it was so thick we took the construction paper with the fish on and pressed it against the glitter glue on the plate and in a instant we had rainbow fish!

After everything was dry I assembled it for her, cutting and pasting the fish, as well as cutting the center out of the top plate and pasting it on top of the base plate.

It now has a place of pride in our new school room!

I found this great idea on My Family My Forever.

Hop on over to A Mommy's Adventures for more stART fun!

Wednesday Art | Week 3

Our Wednesday art session is a firm favourite in our house by now.  So much fun and the kiddos learn something as well!

We made 3 projects again - one of the projects doubled up as our stART project as well.

We made our Red Collage Box this week.  Little Mouse wasn't that into it, she loved the rice from last week, I will need to do that with her more often.

In her Collage Box where: Red construction paper, Red pipecleaners (cut smaller) and Red feathers (cut smaller)

She always looks so serious while she is busy with her crafts!

Here is her finished project...

For our Textured Painting series Little Mouse painted with Lentils!  I saw this great idea on Delightful Learning.  Simply place some Lentils or Beans in a old stocking, tie and you have a wonderful stamp!

Turned out very pretty!

Mouse also made a fishtank craft, this idea I saw on My Family, My Forever.   This craft doubled up as our stART project as well.  Here's a photo of the finished project, visit my stART post to read a bit more!

Hope you had an artfilled week as well!

Tot School - Week 1 | 22 Months

Some exciting news first.  I never  had a proper school room, we always used the living room.  Little Mouse's Tot Table was always there and we use to do all our activities in our living room.  Not having the biggest house around made this difficult space wise - the living room was beginning to look a bit cramped and full.  Now I really didn't have an excuse for using the living room.  I have a perfectly good spare room in the house.  The only problem was this was my "storage" space.  This room looked horrid, think clean house.  I couldn't even bring myself to take a photo of how it looked because I was so ashamed of the state that it was in.  This week I decided enough was enough and I tackled the room.  Every day I worked for a hour or so, cleaning, sorting, throwing away, donating etc.  On Friday we finally moved out of the living room ino our brand new school room!  I have a desk in there for me as well, some shelves for all our Tot School goodies as well as for my stock.  My heart sings when I walk into that room now!

Mouse working in our new school room!

 The built in cupboards are ideal to hang our posters and projects.  I love my new room!

This week between the cleaning we did some Tot School as well.  Our themes were still the Colour Red and Noah.

We finished up our Colour Red book from Me and Marie, and we also finished up our Noah projects - all from Christian Preschool Printables.

Little Mouse baked some cookies with me, this was the first time she helped me to bake cookies.  She loved it, she ecspecially loved eating the batter!

As you can see, she made a huge mess on the counter as well as on herself, this inspired me to make her a little apron.

Mouse loved the arts and crafts we did this week. 

She made a Green Collage Box....

Textured Painting with feathers....

and she painted on some waffles! (found this great idea on No Time for Flashcards)

In celebration of earth day she made a necklace from a TP roll  - also another great idea from No Time for Flashcards (did I mention that I LOVE her blog?)

I took out her baby swimming pool and filled it with balls - she hasn't played with this in ages, and she loved it!

We also did our first Letter craft for our stART project - we made a letter P for padda (afrikaans for frog)

A fun week!

Visit 1+1+1=1 for more Tot School fun!

God bless.

Sewing Project | 1

I love sewing, but I'm not very good at it.  The problem is I don't do it enough, and as they say practice makes perfect!  I finally got my ducks in a row and started thinking of doing some sewing projects again.  My sweet MIL gave me some leftover material and I made a apron for Little Mouse. 

This was the first real sewing project I did since I was in high school, I only dust my machine off for the odd table cloth or something straight forward as that.  So if you are a professional please don't look at all the mistakes I made!

 I made the cupcake from some felt and I handstitched that onto the apron...

Hopefully this was the first of many projects!

stART - Fidget and Quilly Find a Frog

For our stART project this week we chose the Fidget and Quilly Find a Frog book. We love the Fidget and Quilly books - great for little ones. Beautiful illustrations and a short, but cute story line. Ideal for little ones.

Fidget and Quilly finds a muddy frog and ends up all muddy as well! They then need to take a nice bath to get clean again.







For our stART project we did something a bit different. We made a letter of the alphabet project. We chose the letter P - for padda (afrikaans for frog!)

Mouse did all the glueing by herself, I only helped her with the eyes, I was actually amazed at how well she did it!

If you want to see some more awesome stART projects visit A Mommy's Adventures.

Wednesday Art | Week 2

We had so much fun during our Wednesday art session this week!  Mouse really enjoyed all the activities.  I am so glad that I started planning our art and craft sessions better, every Tuesday evening I get everything ready.  Wednesday morning we just wait for our friends and then we can do arts and craft and have loads of fun as well!

We always start off with the least messy craft (saves on cleaning in between activities!) For our Collage Box this week we did the colour Green. I cut up some green pipe cleaners, paper and I coloured some rice green (just mixed some yellow and blue food colouring and mixed it in with the rice the night before, next morning it was dry and ready to use!)

If I say that Mouse LOVED this, it is an understatement. She was so excited to pour the rice onto the contact paper, spread it, feel it, pick it up between her fingers. Great fine motor skills activity as well as art! She ended up making two collage boxes, that's how much she loved this!

 Here is one of her finished Collage Boxes.  I am linking this up to Shannon's blog - Welcome to our Wonderland.  Visit her to see some more inspiring Collage Box ideas!

For our second project we did some painting with feathers. Mouse liked this, but she wasn't that keen on it. She did humour me and painted a bit with the feather.

Here's her finished artwork...

Our third project for the day she absolutely loved once again, easy to understand as it involved waffles!!
I made a fresh batch of waffles on Wednesday morning and gave Mouse some waffles, food colouring diluted with a bit of milk and some brushes = loads of edible fun!!

I saw this idea on No Time For Flashcards and just new that it will be a hit in our house and I was right, she really enjoyed this, best of all, when she was finished she had a quick snack!

Yummy and fun!

Hope you had a great art and craft week as well!!

Muffin Tin Monday - Leftovers Rock!

A few years ago there was this story on TV called The Ropers, my granddad used to love it, he lived in this small town about 7 hours drive from Cape Town and he used to tape all the episodes. When we went to visit him during the holidays he would always play the tapes, watch it with us and laugh at all the silly jokes. Really slapstick comedy, but he loved it! In one eposide Mrs Roper gave Mr Roper some leftovers to eat - he took one look at it and said, "These aren't leftovers, they are remains!" Thinking of leftovers always makes me think of that, and then always makes me think of my granddad that has passed on a few years ago already. I miss him so much, and I wish Mouse had a chance to meet him.

But, anyhoo - here's our "remains!"

Leftover Cinnamon pancakes, Otees and a marshmellow mouse!

Head on over to Muffin Tin Mom for more Leftover inspiration!

Tot School - Week 3 | 21 Months

We had such a fun week! Our themes for this week was Noah's Ark and the colour Red.

We worked out of our Me and Marie Colour Red learning pack this week, we worked slowely as Mouse is still young and we will finish it up during our next Tot School week. We had so much fun with this learning pack.

Here she is with her fairy wings and all busy doing some serious learning!

I also had our first Art Playdate, Mouse really enjoyed this, she was super tired afterwards, but it was worth it!





We did a blue Collage Box...

painted some eggs....

and did another Textured Painting product with some sponge rollers and sponge stamps.

For out Noah's Ark theme we used some printables from Christian Preschool Printables, I just love this site, we printed out some colouring pages and had fun colouring them in.  I also read the story of Noah to her a couple of times and she is even starting to say words like "ark" !

We also made our stART project from one of the printables on this site.  I printed out some storyboard pictures as well that we will use during our new tot school week.  I also finally got hold of some felt!!! Yeah!  You will definately see what we did with that next week.

Hope you have a blessed tot school week, visit 1+1+1=1 for more Tot School fun!

SpellQuizzer Review and Giveaway

I was super excited when SpellQuizzer contacted me to not only review their fabulous product, but they are also sponsoring my very first giveaway!  Yeah!

What is SpellQuizzer?

SpellQuizzer is spelling software for children that need help learning their spelling and vocabulary words, not only can you upload specific words but the SpellQuizzer website has pre-made downloadable spelling lists that is easy to download and use with your SpellQuizzer program.

What did we love?

I asked my 10 year old cousin to help me with the review and we tested the SpellQuizzer extensively. He even prepared for a spelling test with the SpellQuizzer, by the end of the day he could spell all his words 100% correctly!  Best of all he had a blast learning them!
 
The program is super easy to use and the help files really help!  I also like the fact that SpellQuizzer was not designed with any one spelling curriculum in mind, it should compliment any spelling curriculum that you currently use.  You create your own custom spelling lists, making the lists goal specific.
The built in spellchecker recognizes US and UK English spellings.  A great feature of the spellchecker is that it warns the user when creating a spelling list if they enter a word that appears to be spelled incorrectly.  This is great because it can give kids the freedom to create their own lists.

The program works with sound recordings of the actual word.  You type in the words and link them to the sound recording.  When you decide to work on a list, the computer will play back the sound recording and the student then needs to type in the correct spelling of this word.  We had loads of fun recording our words, making them funny and amusing.  I found that this also helped him to remember the spelling of the words better and he had so much fun doing it he didn't mind learning his spelling words.

There is a special page dedicated to homeschoolers - adding more value to your homeschooling program.

I love the free downloadable spelling lists that's available on the site - ideal for those days when you are just to busy.  They also have a community area on the website with discussion forums and an area where users can share spelling list, making life even easier!

My laptop does not have a built in microphone like most of the newer models now have, I used a very inexpensive headset and it worked perfectly.  If you still encounter problems with the sound there is a help file on the website for just such a situation:  http://www.spellquizzer.com/MicrophoneBoost.htm - this will give you instructions on how to turn on your PC Microphone Boost.

My cousin had the following feedback:  " I had so much fun!  Thank you Trudie!"  - now how can you argue with that!  That a child actually thanks you for spelling lessons!

What we don't like as much

The first word is played rather quickly, so you need to press the repeat word button if you didn't concentrate when you openend the spelling list.  Other than that we LOVED the SpellQuizzer program!

Costs and Packages

Single PC Licence $29.99
Family License (5 PC's)  $49.95

You can also try the SpellQuizzer for free for 30 days.

As previously mentioned one lucky reader can win a SpellQuizzer program!

First and Mandatory Entry:
Subscribe to Fun with Little Mouse via email. (widget in my sidebar)

Extra Entries:
Follow Fun with Little Mouse in Google Friends connect.
Leave a comment saying why SpellQuizzer is needed in your home / homeschool.
Blog about this giveaway (please send me the URL)
Add my button to your blog (please send me the URL)

Easy as that!  Leave a separate comment for each entry.  Please add your email address to each entry, the competition is open WORLDWIDE and will close 30 April 2010.  The winner will be notified via email by the 1st of May 2010.  The winner will have 3 days to respond otherwise a new winner will be drawn. The winner will be drawn randomly.

I was not paid to do this review, I did however receive a free program from SpellQuizzer to review.  I blog with integrity and the opinions in this review is my honest and own opinions.  I was not asked to do a positive review at any stage.

stART - Noah's Ark

For our stART project this week we made a Noah's ark craft. We are busy with Noah's ark during Tot School and I thought that this would be a wonderful addition to our Noah theme.

I downloaded the template for this craft from Christian Preschool Printables. (which I LOVE btw!)

I gave the first page to Mouse to colour in, I think she did a wonderful job colouring in the animals.  As you can see on the photo she actually tried to only colour in the animals and not the surrounding areas as well.  I coloured in the second page that forms the top part of the ark.

I then cut each template out and glued the two halfs together, easy as that!   Afterwards we talked about the story of Noah again.

She loves stART!

If you want to join in visit A Mommy's Adventures!