Theme: Colors Day 3

Yay!  It’s my turn for girls’ club.  As the girls came in I had them go to the table to draw a little.  I asked them about the colors they were using.  The girls are so funny.  The colors they say are their favorites are very different than the ones they use.

We started with a short opening and circle time, ( I thought I took picture). Next we had a short discussion about what we already learned about colors and back to the kitchen for a color mixing experiment.  We had three jars, one with each of the primary colors.  We used coffee filters to connect the colors and allow them to mix.  There was something wrong with my Target coffee filters. They didn’t let the colors bleed much.  Guess I should’ve practiced this. Even though it didn’t quite work, the chicks were excited.  We had to help the color mixing along a little. Yes, my table is covered in plastic wrap.  I learned this from Emmie and it makes clean up a breeze.

At this point the chicks were ready for a snack and a break.  Uncle Joe was making waffles.  It was a little distracting.  After their snack they took off to Hal’s room to play.  What we’ve noticed with the two-year-olds is that sometimes it works better if we do things with them one on one.  So while the others were building, I brought them one at a time to the table to make their butterflies.  We started with our defective coffee filters and painted them with water colors.  The colors didn’t bleed as well as they did when I did this with my older kids…years ago , so we had a to work a little harder to cover the whole butterfly. I was trying to get the chicks to pick pretty colors and they kept going back to brown and black.

As you can see from Pooh’s tears, we still have a little fight club going on.  Someone took her coffee filter.

After letting our wings dry, we added a clothes pin and a little bling.  Tah-dah!

Hal has teenage siblings. Poses come naturally now.

Colors – Day 2

I’d be lying if I said I was completely prepared for what was to unfold in the next three hours. Even though I had repeatedly gone over the “lesson plan” in my head, it didn’t take long for me to realize I’d have to abandon most of it:(

My abilities as a single-child mommy was pushed to its limits….and my OCD/detailed/squeeky clean tendencies would have to be ignored. Watching/teaching four kids at once is a walk in the park for my sister-in-laws, but for me, I was about to enter uncharted waters!

The first thing the Chicks see when they arrive is the check-in board. To show “Whoo’s Here”, they had to find their picture on the wall, then stick it next to the matching photo on the whiteboard.

The other 3 Chicks arrived at the same time so check-in got a little crowded and it didn’t take long for the water works to start (my Tank sprung a leak first).  Notice how well dressed the Chicks are?  Going against my “no patterns, no clashing color, no purple” wardrobe rule of thumb, I asked the Chicks to dress it the most colors they could:)

Before opening circle, we had free play with some toys.  We regrouped to say an opening prayer and pointed out some colors we could see in our clothes.  Uncle KC read “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See” written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by Eric Carle.  He then read “Colors”, a touch and feel book which lead to each Chick pushing over the other to get a closer look.

Our first activity was creating a rainbow.  Labeled with colored paint brush printables I found online, I gave each Chick a rainbow to decorate.  Uniqua was content with just one swipe of each crayon, while Hal took her time and colored in as much as she could.  Finally, they had to find 3 felt flowers that matched the colors of their rainbow and use glue to place them.

I switched out the crayons with markers and had the Chicks decorate a dino wood cutout (I hotglued a magnet on the back).  Again, Hal worked very tediously and made sure every inch of her dino was colored in:)  I noticed Pooh Bear prefered the markers and worked harder when she noticed Hal’s coloring techniques.

After art, we had a little playtime together and tried pointing out the different colors in the toys they played with.

While they snacked on goldfish and tuna on crackers, I played an episode of Blue’s Clues that showed Steve painting and mixing the paint to create new colors.  I failed to keep track of the time so I wasn’t able to do a closing circle before the other Mommies arrived.  I hope they all had a great, first playschool at Aunty Kyra’s:)

Welcome to Girls Club

Without really thinking about it, I took the first day.  I had some ideas about how fun it would be to introduce Girls Club and the exciting new experience it would be.  I made a small sign and hung it on the door with pink streamers.

I didn’t even think that it could be a tired, grumpy, Monday morning or that the whole thing might be a scary new experience for them!

I decided to just jump right into it, sometimes talking over and around the crying.  I themed the day around “Pinkalicious.”  I started with a pink egg hunt and asked them what color their eggs were.  I also had them all come in pink so we talked about that too.  Our big activity was to make pink cupcakes like Pinkalicious and her mom do.  (It was a rainy day too so we could be even more like Pinkalicious!)  They enjoyed the stirring and I had them put in the cupcake liners.  And, of course they liked frosting and decorating.  I had them write a “p” for pink in the frosting with their finger, they liked that too.

We had planned to end early to meet and work out details and that was a great idea to make the first day a little shorter.  Lessons learned!