Meet Jo-Jo

The week after Christmas is always filled with happy stories of the wonderful toys and gifts that everyone received for Christmas from Santa and all of those other less important gift givers :) This year we meet Jo-Jo. Sammy got Jo-Jo for Christmas and he has been the star of the show this week. If you haven't heard of Jo-Jo he is a hide and seeking, talking, dancing bunny. The kids hide with Jo-Jo's carrot and Jo-Jo finds them and does a happy dance! The kids love it! Given Jo-Jo seeks about as well as 3 year olds hide, but it has been great around here. Lots of laughing and fun! We love that...

New Years Fun!

Well, 2010 is almost over. Time to get ready to welcome in 2011! We want to make sure that everyone can hear us as we stay up late New Years Eve and welcome in the new year so we made some noise makers :) We decorated some homemade shakers, filled them with rice and beans and sealed them tight so that we can shake and move with the best of them and make some serious noise! So much fun :)

Smells like Christmas....

Today we made Christmas ornaments. This is one of my favorite crafts for this time of year! We put applesauce and cinnamon in a zip lock bag and squeeze it to mix the ingredients together. Then we roll it flat and use Christmas cookie cutters to make different shaped ornaments for our trees. They are so cute, they look like gingerbread and smell wonderful! It's great a great way to capture the season and completely child made. They had so much fun squishing and mixing :) We ended up with Christmas trees, gingerbread men and Frosty the Snowman and they all smell like cinnamon and apples. And the best part is that these ornaments hold their smell for years to come.

Team work

This week we are working on our social skills. The kids are learning to work in teams to solve problems or create projects. To get them started I hung some large paper on the wall and put them in pairs to paint on the walls. They had so much fun! They worked together sharing paper and paints, they practiced taking turns and saying please and thank you. Seems the season to focus on that for a while :)

Science is everywhere...

The other day the kids were all super excited to see a spider in the window of the toy car in the backyard. We went to take a closer look and realized that he was spinning a small insect in his web for lunch. We sat there and watched for a long time. It was fascinating! Then we had a long talk about how spiders catch their food in their webs and that is what makes spiders special.

Halloween Time!

Every year for Halloween we let the kids bring their costumes and dress up for a "Halloween Parade". It's so cute! After weeks of everyone talking about trick or treating and what kind of great costume they have we get to have a peek at the creations. We all put on our costumes and put on a parade around the bike track in the backyard. Every time they passed the starting point they got to trick or treat for goodies. We had great variety this year with a giraffe, superheros, Princesses and even Elmo. So cute and so much fun!

Candy time!

It just isn't fall to me without candy and carmel apples!

It has been a long time tradition in my family to vi sit apple hill every year, come home, and mak these tasty treats! I like to share that with the kids, and the older ones get a laugh out of my stories about my little sisters. So this week we made both kinds of apples! The kids helped me measure out all the ingrediants for the candy "sauce" and got to watch me gook it on the stove. We then melted our carmel and I let the kids pick which kind they wanted! Suprise surprise, the girls piked the "pink" sauce, and the boys picked the carmel. After lunch time that day I sliced one of each and let them try both! They had no trouble eating apples that day =)


I also let these crazy kids paint with pumpkin yogurt!

We added pumpkin puree to organic vanilla yogurt and stirred it..... and kept stirring it! I made sure everyone could eat it, because I knew once they figured out it tasted good the painting would stop. And it did! They had a great time being allowed to play with thier food and get messy. A moto I picked up from Christy- let them get messy! And so we did. We covered ourselves in yogurt, ate yogurt, made pictures withyogurt. We drew letters and numbers and our mommies and families. We had a great time cooking this week!

Pumpkin Time

This month is Harvest Month here at Jibber-Jabber and we are having lots of fun with all the things that includes!

Last week the kids made Pumpkin Bread! They measured everything from the flour to the spices, cracked the eggs, poured in the water, and even mixed everything up! They were covered with cooking supplies by the end of it but they had so much fun! We baked our bread into muffins and I was so nervous the kids would be hesitant to try something we have never served before. They LOVED it! The muffins were not small by any means and they all asked for more! Pumpkin bread was a hit!

We also went to Goblin Gardens Pumpin Patch! The kids went a little wild when we got there. There was so much cool stuff! They had hay rides, giant pyramids of hay, tractors, and little rides! They all got to pick their very own pumpkin and they searched and searched for just the right one. The kids exhausted themselves playing with everything they could, and everyone was sleepy the whole car ride home. It was a great day!

If you can't beat 'em...

Since Fall has decided to act more like summer we have decided to join it. It is unusually hot so we broke out the sprinkler for some warm weather fun. It was wet and cool and just what we needed. When the sprinkler wasn't enough the kids moved onto filling up buckets and dumping them on their heads. I don't know if we want Fall this year...

Sandbox explorers

"Hey we got some new sandbox toys." Who knew such a simple statement would cause so much commotion. The kids came running. We put new sand and new sand toys in the sandbox. They dug and built and buried for hours. Just when they started to get tired of it, we put in some water and it became a whole new game. I love it when the little things make them so happy.

Star finders...

After a day of playing space invaders in the space ship we built, we decided that we needed to take in the sights while we were in space. And to do that we needed "star finders". We made kaleidoscopes from some tubes and crayon melting papers (the sky and stars). They went exploring every where. The playroom into another planet and were astronauts setting off to plant their flags.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

Today we made our own ice cream! It was so fun. The kids put the milk, sugar and vanilla in zip lock bags, put that in another bag with ice and salt and shake, shake, shake we had some ice cream. They each were able to eat their ice cream for snack.

3...2...1... BLAST OFF!

Today we imagined what it would be like to go to space. What we would see there, how would we get there, and most important, were the aliens friendly? We didn't seem to know the answers to all of our questions so we decided that we needed a spaceship. Out came the biggest box we could find...
After that was taken care of we decided that we needed to make it blend in with outer space in case we needed to hide from unfriendly aliens. So we made some sparkly stars and painted some planets to disguise the spaceship. The kids had sooo much fun painting the planets and talking about which ones were big and which ones had rings around them. It was great!

They spent all day playing space invaders. They were all so good about taking turns being the astronaut and the aliens. It was so much fun I think we might have to expand on it tomorrow. I will let you all know what I come up with...

Lets Create!

Today we painted with q-tips. It was a fun new way to explore the paint. The kids all got to choose their colors and try to move them around the paper with the q-tip. It's great to watch how they figure these things out. Some of them had no problem using the q-tip like a paint brush, dipping it in the paint and then making a picture with it. Some spent the entire time mixing their colors together with the tips. And some spent the whole time trying to paint the insides of their ears :)

We are joining the CiRcUs

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Friday we took the kids to see the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey's Circus. We saw clowns and elephants the kids were so excited! We got there a few minutes early and were able to go down the stage area to meet some of the performers. I think the boys were most excited for the circus superheros. Elijah and Danny talked about them all day, along with the motorcycles in the cage. It was great to see them all have so much fun! Thanks to the parent helpers that went with us! It made it so much easier to focus on just having fun.

Gardening Week!!!

Last week we learned about gardening. We planted some sunflowers in the backyard The children and I dug the holes for the seeds. Then we took out our rulers and placed the seeds all 8in. apart, we covered them with dirt. The kids learned all about how a plant makes it's food from the sunlight and that all living things need water and food to grow.So we watered our seeds and are waiting for them to grow.

A trip to the park!

With a break in the insane heat we've been having, we found us a new park to take the kids to! We had the whole park to ourselves for the morning, and it was shady and so nice! There were two different play areas so the big kids could go on slightly bigger slides. The little area was designed as a pirate ship, and everyone kept shouting that they found the treasure! We had a blast!

Turn on the siren!

Today we went to the fire station. We got to meet the crew at station 41. We took a tour of the station house and the kids were most excited about the cleaning supply closet. I told them they could clean at my house ANYTIME. They stood in there and oohed and awed at the spray bottles for several minutes. Then they went in and saw the beds and someone asked why they were not made. I kept thinking, who are these kids and can I bring these ones home?

We went out to see the fire engine and the ambulance. They kids were very impressed that the firefighters would take that huge truck out to rescue the cats from the trees. They had lots of questions about the switches and dials. It was a lot of fun, although very different than I expected.

Each of the kids got a turn to spray the fire hose and saw the truck drive with the sirens and lights :)