Adventures in La La Land

We're still working on identifying lower case letters and remembering which upper case letter they correspond to, so we did this fun little activity this week. It's similar to the Letter Scavenger Hunt we did a couple weeks ago, but with less motion and more stickers. :-) My original plan was to recreate this activity from Pinterest. But yesterday we made bookmarks with my scrapbooking stickers and Lucy was so enthralled by the letter stickers that I decided to go this route instead. I started by cutting out a bunch of hearts and taping them to a big piece of kraft paper. Then I put either upper or lower case letters on each heart. I went in order alphabetically because both Lucy and I are too OCD to handle anything else. Then I gave Lucy a sheet of stickers and told her to complete the heart with the missing upper or lower case letter. It was actually pretty challenging for her to figure out whether each heart needed the upper or lower case letter. And she'...

Lucy has had her capital letters down for over a year, but still struggles with some of their lowercase counterparts. So I came up with this quick little game. This is actually the second time we did it, but I didn't take pictures the first. Lucy was thrilled to do it again. The first time, I just wrote all the capital letters on a piece of poster board. But today I couldn't find any poster board, so I pulled out the Melissa and Doug "Responsibility Chart" (that has never been used for its intended purpose) and taped some uppercase letters to the back: Then I taped lowercase letters all around the house. You can make this as easy or as difficult as you'd like, and even have fun with it by putting the letters on corresponding objects. For instance: d on the dishwasher, f on the fridge, b on a book, etc. I didn't get that involved. I just scattered them around: Then Lucy ran around finding the letters and matching them with the upper case version on...

We did it! We made it to the end of the alphabet!! Our friend Esther works at Meijer, and got us a cardboard Z on super clearance. I tried to think outside the bo x a little, but I can't draw a zipper, the number zero looks too much like the letter O, and Lucy doesn't know what a zamboni is. So we made the stereotypical zebra! First we painted the whole thing white. Then we taped it off with blue tape. Finally, we painted over the tape with black. Lucy was really unsure about painting over the tape at first. Haha. Look how cute it turned out!

We're so close to the end of the alphabet, and I'm getting really lazy. This is the only Y activity we did all week. One piece of craft foam, a hole punch, and a skein of yarn. (Hehe. I just wanted an e xcuse to use the word "skein.")   Fortunately, Lucy loved it. She didn't lace a straight line like I intended, but I set aside my control-freak tendencies and let her get creative. :-) Only one letter to go!

When Lucy was a baby, she threw a book at my [open] laptop and dislodged the letter  x. So every time I type the letter  x, I have to copy and paste it from a word document saved on my computer. Haha. Just a fun fact for this week's letter!  I was very un-original and just used an idea from notimeforflashcards.com.   Lucy loved all the gluing, and I thought it turned out pretty cute!

We only did one craft for the letter V. I pulled the ads out of Sunday's paper and told Lucy to circle all the vegetables. Then we cut them out and pasted them on the V. Pretty e xciting, eh? ;-) She also tried her hand and writing a few v's. 

Lucy has a strange obsession with potty training. Her favorite episode of Daniel Tiger is "The Potty One!" She loves her Elmo Potty movie and potty books and all things potty related. So I knew she'd love doing an underwear craft for the letter "u." Word to the wise: make sure your "safe search" is on when you look for images of underwear on google. Lol. I couldn't find anything, so ended up drawing my own: I did the red one. :-) And I realize some of my u's look like v's. It's hard to paint curved lines! Haha. We painted them, and decorated them with Dora stickers and letter "u" stickers. So much fun! :-)

Lucy is the quintessential girly-girl, so when we got to the letter T in our quest through the alphabet, I knew we'd have to have a good old fashioned T ea Party! I found the perfect craft on Pinterest, and kind of made it my own. We used styrofoam bowls because they're easier to puncture than paper. I thought it was so brilliant to thread a headband through pipe cleaners so the kids didn't have to try to balance a bowl on their heads. I bought a couple flower vines at the dollar store and snipped off the buds (leaving an inch or so of stem to push through the bowl). Then I made a bunch of little tissue paper roses by twisting a square of tissue paper around my finger and tying it off with a pipe cleaner. I bought 5 teacups/saucers for 50 cents a pair from a thrift store, grabbed some stickers and a tablecloth from the dollar store, and found this awesome tea canister on a shelf in my parents' kitchen to complete the tablescape. I decided to set out some...

I was surprised by how few "S" crafts I could come up with this week. The first was a combination of 2 pinterest finds. ( Here and here .) I did the cutting and Lucy did the gluing and painting - her two favorite things. :-)  I got the idea for the snake craft here . We stamped the stripes on with a sponge to add in that extra "s." Lucy loved it.

My first plan was to do a color by number rainbow. This is how far Lucy got before giving up: She's not a fan of being told what to do. Ha! She enjoyed the second craft more. I found it on Pinterest , of course. First I wrote the letter R with dark marker on a light piece of paper, then cut out and numbered 12 pieces of colored paper. Lucy glued the papers in order over the R. After the glue dried, I turned the paper over and cut out the R.  Then we glued the R onto another sheet of paper. Isn't it cute?!

Lucy found some jewels in the craft stash the other day, so we had fun making a Q Queen. Then I found the idea for a quilt q  . Lucy doesn't even know what a quilt is, so I had to teach her. Haha. Fortunately, my dad has a plethora of odd books all over this house, and we found one about quilts ! Then I got out the scrapbooking paper, let her choose which ones she wanted, and cut them into squares for her. She loved gluing each piece to the paper.  We even found some stickers to spell out "Q is for Quilt." 

Insane day. I've got 57 minutes to get this up and still legitimately call it The Saturday 7. Time to get crack-a-lackin'. 1. We had a heat wave this week. I missed our old house and its central AC a little bit. Haha. But I sure did enjoy having a pool in our backyard! 2. Lucy and I worked on the letter P this week. I did a few activities intentionally focused on P, but as you'll see, much of our week involved the letter P! On Monday, we hosted a P ool P arty. It wasn't much of a party. I just invited some of Lucy's friends over to swim. No games or activities or anything. Just the pool and some snacks. Our other planned "P" activities included  p ainting a p icture of P inkalicious and reading  If You Give a P ig a P ancake. We never actually got around to making pancakes like I wanted to. It was just too hot. 3. On Thursday, we went to Kelly's house for a p laydate with P resley. (Although that was really just a guise to spend the day in ...

Credit for this idea goes to my friend, Kelly. We went to her house during "P" week and she whipped up this craft for the girls. She gave the girls a coffee filter and let them color it with markers. Then they squirted the filter with water, let it dry, and dotted it with their finger prints. Kelly cut out a peacock body, feet, and a beak, and let them go to town with the glue. Thanks, Kelly, for the great craft!

I got this idea from notimeforflashcards.com . Her owl was dotted with a Bingo dotter to make little O's. I don't have one of those, so I gave Lucy a pop bottle cap . She had more fun smearing the paint than dotting O's on the page. :-)

I was feeling super inspired this week, so we had lots of fun with M.  First up, was fingerprint m ermaids. Lucy loves  The Little Mermaid, so I thought she'd be thrilled with this craft. I got the idea from Pinterest , but the link is no longer active, so I just figured it out based on the picture.   First we painted Lucy's hand and stamped it on the paper to be the mermaid's hair. Then I drew on a body/tail. (I'm no artist. It looked pretty awful.) Finally, she fingerprinted some scales on. I'm not actually a big fan of handprint/fingerprint crafts so we almost never do them. Lucy was thrilled that I let her dip her fingers in paint, and got a little carried away. Mostly, it just ended up being a big m ess! We checked out the book If You Give a Moose a Muffin  from the library, then made our own m uffins. We used this recipe since I'm obsessed with all things peanut butter/chocolate.  And finally, we did some m arble paint...