What Was I Scared Of?

 WHAT WAS I SCARED OF?

"Then I was deep within the woods

When, suddenly, I spied them.

I saw a pair of pale green pants

with nobody inside them!"

This book by Dr. Seuss is a very silly tale.  Kayla loves the nonsense of green pants with nobody wearing them doing things like riding a bike and rowing a boat.  To bring the book even more to life, we stuffed a pair of Elise's green pants with tissue paper and our "green pants with nobody inside them" did fun things around our house.  Take a look.

hanging out on the couch

riding bikes with the girls

making dinner

climbing on the lamps

keeping the fish company

reading about some spooky green pants

hungry?

taking a nap

in the bathtub

wearing Daddy's shoes

jumping on the trampoline

The girls had fun thinking of places to put the green pants and it brought the book a little more to life.

"And, now, we meet quite often ,

Those empty pants and I, 

and we never shake or tremble.

We both smile

and we say

'Hi!'"

Aha!  These pale green pants DO have somebody inside 'em!  

And it's a super de duper cute someone!

The Foot Book

Another Dr. Seuss classic. 

 I saw several ideas for painting feet online, but none of them really popped out at me.  Last year we made a family foot book (one page was Daddy's footprint, one page was Mommy's, one was Kayla's and one was Elise's--little Ava wasn't out of the womb yet).

This year, a different idea came to me.  One that I plan to frame and put up in the girls' room.  Foot print letters!  You'll see, it's super fun and ridiculously cute.

All you need is:

Paint
Construction paper
Paint brushes
towels to clean off those painted feet!

We did a few different footprints which is why the paint in this picture is pink but the paint on the project is black...

Anyway, take the cute little feet and paint them with the paintbrush (it tickles so you'll get some glorious little child giggles in the process).  Carefully stamp the footprint on the paper.  Notice that we slanted some of the footprints depending on the letter we were going for.

Then it's Mom (or Dad's) turn to add the rest.  Use a smaller paintbrush to make the footprint into the first letter of each child's name and add the other letters alongside.

Read Dr. Seuss' The Foot Book together, add a frame to the picture, and voila!  Learning, book connections, room decorations, and memories!

Green Eggs and Ham

I saw a picture online with green plastic Easter eggs with rhyming words written on them.  I didn't find any real explanation for the activity other than that the eggs end up with the Green Eggs and Ham rhyming words written on them.

Kayla and I read the book and I had her listen carefully to see if she could pick out the rhyming words.  At 3 1/2 she needs some extra help and prodding especially since she is really into the letter sounds right now so listening for rhymes is a little confusing to her.  But by the end of the book she was really getting it and picked them out pretty quickly.

We took the activity a little further and tried to come up with some other words that rhymed to write on the opposite sides of the eggs.  So on the 'Sam, am, ham' egg, we added jam and lamb. She needed more assistance with this part since it wasn't just listening and  picking words out; it was thinking them up yourself. She loves looking at her eggs and trying to say all the rhyming words.  We'll fill them with jelly bellies soon to keep the rhyming going and add a fun dimension.

We always read this book a lot in March because Dr. Seuss' birthday is in March, but also because St. Patrick's Day is in March and it's all about the GREEN!  When I was a child my mom made us green scrambled eggs and green muffins for breakfast every St. Patrick's Day.  We carry on the tradition around here.  The more GREEN the better because we do so like green eggs and ham.  We do so like them, Sam I Am!