Wooden Beaded Necklaces

Over Christmas I scored the crafting jackpot at the Goodwill outlet, and bought a HUGE box of wooden beads, spools and balls for 50 cents a pound.
I finally got around to doing something with them- painted beads for necklaces. We painted a lot of beads, enough  for Sophia’s teachers (first grade, and her specials teachers) and the other Mom teachers in our preschool co-op. Plus some for the other special ladies in our lives….act excited if you get one as  gift, k?
We’ll also be doing thank you cards, but that will be another post for another day.

I spent one naptime and after bedtime listening to After the Jump radio show and painting beads. After the second coat, on day 2 I arranged them on dowel rods and a box to spray paint with clear varnish in the garage.



Then today Sophia picked beads for necklaces. I used leather cording from Hobby Lobby.  My personal faves  of the necklaces have only 3 or 4 beads to match an outfit. It’s super easy to switch them out if you make them for yourself. 

For preschool next week the kids are going to pick out beads and assemble necklaces for their Mama teacher. I considered having them paint the beads…but I wanted it to be something the Mom could wear (outside the house!).


Hooray for teachers, crafts and pretty beads.


 

Mini Scriptures and Treasure Chest

Tomorrow’s lesson for sunday is titled “Jesus Christ’s Teachings are a Treasure” or something to that effect. It’s all about treasuring the scriptures and a mini review lesson of stories from the past 5 months.

I decided to go literal.

In keeping with the theme I found a treasure chest paper craft from a Friend lesson.



I could print out jewels with scriptures on them, but why not put mini books of scriptures inside?



I could put blank pages inside, and have them write or draw a scripture, or I could peruse the pictures catalog and put in mini pictures. The gray borders are the cut out lines, the middle line is a fold line. Each strip is folded and glued to make a double sided page, then layer the 2 pages into the book of scripture and staple.


Assembled books, with staple in the middle.



Compared to my hand. Sorry for the nasty yellow pictures. It’s late, all my lights are not natural, and we’ll just pretend they’re trendy and taken with instagram!





Finished in treasure box. This was the small one- I sized it up the box pic  a few inches in publisher so it filled up the page. I suggest you do the same.

Hooray for the scriptures!

 

Z is for Zoo and Zebras

Today we did the letter ZZZZZ…..Which was appropriate because I am TIRED!  But we didn’t take a nap, we learned about zoos instead.

 

First we did some activities from some online zoo packet.

We matched letters to beginning sounds.

Zoo packet by Oopsey Daisy

Zoo packet by 2 teaching Mommies

 

We read some books about zoo animals- like Polar Bear Polar Bear, What do you Hear? Then we watched it on youtube:

 

 

We also made a mini zoo for our animal crackers:

 

And rolled an animal dice and graphed our results.

 

When we got flamingos we yelled “OH YEAH”

And when we were feeling out of sorts, we kind of went nuts. Natalie needed some alone time today, like all of preschool.

We also made some Zebra bread aka Marbled Chocolate Banana Bread

 

Mini loaves and muffins.

I wished we had been a little faster and had time to take a zoo out of your stuffed animals, feed and pretend to take care of them.

Hooray for the letter Z!

I'm Happy to Say that You're my Grandma....

For all the Grandmas out there....we sure love ya.

Happy Mother's Day!! Love, the Daleys

Go Dog Go! Party

Leo is a huge fan of this book, so it was a natural choice for a party.

The first step was an invitation…

 

 

We printed and folded up into a book (I split these up to print on a paper double sided, but you can rotate the top 180 degrees to print on one side and fold)

We made some decorations. I scanned in pics of the book to make a wall decoration. Blue wrapping paper from the dollar store, and some glue….

 

It hung on the walls in the dining area.

 

I used the tree from Candyland party for a DOG party tree.

 

For party items, I downloaded a Scholastic  Party Kit –it included tags for doggy bags, hats, and more….

The kids party bags had a dollar store jeep or matchbox car, and a stop and go little sign to play games with her cars.  We had party hats and blowers to play with too.

 

 

I also made a Go Dog Go sign with Sophia, so we could all be in the book.

When the kids arrived we played outside, they fought over cars, and played with shaving cream and cars. They loved getting the cars clean in water after getting it messy.

 

 

I also had plans to read the book, play Stop and Go with cars, give our cars a wash with sponge balls, and race cars on wrapping paper tubes, but they were playing so well we didn’t. I try not to impose the games on the kids if they’re not complaining. There are so many things you can do though- decorate hats, have different races (on skateboards, bikes, hopping, etc), and so many transportation games from preschool lesson plans. I tried to keep it fitting to the 2 year old guest list.

 

For lunch we had salad and fruit, and some chocolate covered granola bars. I saw a post where mini candy bars became cars with the help of teddy grahams and mm’s. It worked out pretty well, but many of my homemade granola bars fell apart in the dipping. So they were totaled cars. Still tasted good though. Another cute idea was to take apple slices and grapes into cars, but I didn’t have any lemon juice, so I couldn’t make them this morning before everyone arrived, without them browning. Oh well, I’m sure there will be more transportation parties in the future.

 

 

For the cake I made banana chocolate cupcakes, then frosted with green frosting and green tinted coconut. The scanned pictures of the book were scaled down to fit on toothpicks. I thought it came out pretty cute.

 

 

Leo did his best dog impression in front of everyone after enjoying his cupcake.

 

And he played with his new toys for a solid 2 hours before taking a nap this afternoon. (Zhiu pets are super exciting to a 2 year old, just so you know)

Our rainy day plan for the party was to play with his new train set. After getting these two sets for 1/3 of the market price at the local second hand shop, I am so in love with kids consignment stores.

 

We were so happy to have our friends come and play. Hooray for good books like Go Dog Go!

I’ll take a Slice of May with a glass of ice cold root beer please….

Swings and Popsicles.

Trikes and new patio sets.

Trampoline jumps at our neighbor’s house.

 

Budding scrabble players

 

Chapter book reader.

 

Curious george lover.

A mama duck guarding her eggs. And leading her hatchlings to their first swim. And she left two eggs behind.

Letter X. Q tip skeletons, x-ray handprints, tic tac toe.

 

Dancing Princesses.

Silly kids.

 

Something about the mirror behind reminded me of French Impressionism paintings with a mirror behind the bar. Love these girls.