Lowe's Build and Grow Kits

My uncle is a garage sale person. As he is a wonderful man, he keeps my children in mind as he searches for great deals. For Christmas he gave Michael a bunch of Lowe's Build and Grow kits he had picked up for a quarter each. I am officially telling him that the the gift is amazing. Thank you!

The kits are simple. They are wooden pieces with pre-drilled holes and nails. There are instruction sheets and stickers to decorate the finished product. Some examples are fire truck, helicopter, race car, pirate ship, and monster truck.

Michael, Ava, and I assembled our first kit last week. I just grabbed one at random and our first project was the monster truck. Here's a picture of the kit. They sell for about $9 at Lowes.

We all had fun assembling the truck with hammer and nails. Ava didn't have enough strength and fine motor control to hammer in the nails with her left hand so her job was to take the nail and push it down as far as possible into the predrilled hole by hand. Michael would follow up by hammering the nail down as much as he could and I finished off each nail.

I was pretty impressed with the way the kit went together. The pieces were well made and everything fit together well. The final product was sturdy and has held up to some pretty enthusiastic play.

After the monster truck was mostly assembled, but before we put on the stickers I suggested painting it. The children enthusiastically agreed. Ava painted the wheels black while Michael painted the truck red. We put on two - three coats and then let it dry overnight. Now we were painting it with washable tempera paint and I was a little concerned that it would rub off with sweaty hands so I finished it off with a coat of mod podge. Then we applied put the wheels on the truck with the last two nails and applied the decals.

Here's the final product. The children were delighted and Michael and Ava showed it off to every new guest to arrive in the house for days. Michael took it to his room to play with at every naptime and bedtime for days. I felt we got well more than $9 value out of the activity and the toy we got as a final result.

Painting a Polar Bear Landscape with Preschoolers

Gail from www.thatartistwoman.org posted an amazing tutorial on painting polar bears with her first grade students. I was inspired. I thought the paintings were beautiful and that I might be able to do the activity with my preschool aged children.

Here's how I adapted the activity for my two and four year old children. The key was to do the activity in stages during the day. They would go play while one stage dried. The break in between stages allowed them to come back excited about doing the next part of their polar bear painting.

I began by taping watercolor paper down to the table. I set out purple liquid watercolor paint, paintbrushes, toilet paper rolls covered in a paper towel held on with a rubber band, a pencil, and some coarse salt.

I showed them a picture of what the painting would look like when complete and we talked about the different parts of the painting. We identified the purple sky, blue ice, moon, mama polar bear, and the two bear cubs. We talked about how it looked like there was snow in the sky and how the ice looked cracked.

I introduced the term "horizon" and explained that the horizon is the line where the land (or in this case, ice) meets the sky. I told them we were going to draw horizon lines on our paper and asked them if they wanted a hill. Each child showed me with their finger the shape of the horizon line they wanted and I lightly drew it in with the pencil.

I reminded them that their purple paint was for the sky and so they needed to paint the part of their picture above the line purple and leave the bottom white for now. They did a great job painting the sky. While the sky was still wet they used the paper towel covered toilet paper rolls to blot up paint in the shape of a circle to make the moon (press firmly and hold for a count of ten). Then they sprinkled salt onto the still wet sky.

Then there was a drying intermission. The children went off to play for half an hour or so. I cleaned up the purple paint and replaced it with blue watercolor paint and I cleaned the paintbrushes. I also put away the salt and toilet paper rolls and got out a roll of cling wrap.

Half an hour later we all came back and brushed off the now dry salt. Then the children painted the bottom half of their painting blue and helped me press cling wrap onto the wet ice. The "cracked" appearance to the ice is formed by the wrinkles in the cling wrap, so the more wrinkles the better. Press down firmly and leave to dry.

We all dispersed for a 45 minute intermission. This time I cleaned up the blue watercolor paint and brushes and got out a container of white tempera paint. I also got out some polar bear stencils I had made the night before by printing out polar bear coloring sheets from the internet onto cardstock and cutting them out.

When we all came back I let the children decide where they wanted to place their polar bears. I held the stencil steady while the children dabbed on white paint (dab with the brush instead of moving it back in forth to minimize paint getting under the stencil).

Then it was just a matter of letting the final product dry and admiring the final result. They were so proud.

The Weekly Review: Week 48

Blog Post of the Week

Swistle gets the nod two weeks in a row, this time for her amazing OpportunityThink post. If you too are frustrated when someone offhandedly remarks how much you must enjoy your "free time" when the kids are in preschool, you would probably love this post as much as I did.

Ava this Week

I have a new trick for pleasantly dropping Ava off at daycare. She is no longer traumatized by drop-off. She hasn't been for months now. She continued to put on a performance for the attention though. I finally decided enough was enough. One morning late last week as we were walking in I simply told her that I didn't want any more whining and leg hugging when I left the room. We were going to play a new game instead. We're going to make silly faces at each other through the window before waving goodbye. It was a simple idea, but rather effective. Now she can hardly wait for me to exchange a few words with her teacher before pushing me out the door so she can make a few silly faces at me. The other children rather enjoy it too and I'm collecting quite a crowd of silly faces on my way out. It's cut my drop off time in half and made the process infinitely more pleasant.

Weekly Michael

I went to Michael's preschool Valentine's Day party. He knew I was going to be there. When I got there the class was in the gym and only a few parents were in the classroom. A few minutes later the class returned to the room. The look on his face when his searching eyes found me was priceless. The run to my side and tight hug was even better. It completely made the trip worth it in the first 30 seconds.

Weekly Procrastination

Hmm... I still haven't done anything to get ready for Ava's birthday. I really, really need to fix that before next week's review.

Ava's Weekly Home Therapy Focus

Yesterday's long-winded post on blends was probably already way more than you wanted to know about Ava's therapy focus this week. Let's just say that she's continuing to make great progress on final /s/ and /sh/, /l/, and a few blends. Now that her accuracy on /s/, /l/, and /sh/ has improved so much I'm doing the cards in pairs (for example, "Say rush, wash."). At first she was dropping the targeted consonant at the end of the first word in the pair, but with appropriate cues she's getting them now.