Monday, November 24, 2008

Ballerina

Well we are nearly finished our first term of ballet and Liana still loves it. Unfortunately, her wonderful teacher, Miss Mel is leaving at the end of the year.

Liana had her first performance at the local arts festival the other week. I think she did great especially considering she only had two lessons to learn the dance in!!

Here are some photos of the big day. Liana is the second from the right with the purple wings!!



Saturday, November 22, 2008

What Happens When You Leave a 2 Year Old Alone for 5 minutes?

...he paints himself of course!!




We had just had a bath and put our p.j's on. I was sitting down brushing his sister's hair and thought he was playing in the games room. No, he decided to grab a chair, open the craft cupboard, get the yellow paint our and paint his tummy. What else would you do????

Thankfully, it was only himself he painted. He thought it was very funny until he realised he would have to have a shower to get clean.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

We Must Be Doing Something Right!




You have to love a picture of a little one falling asleep with a book in their hands.


Notice the nice ripped off piece of wallpaper in the background...hmmmmm......

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

You Know it's Time for New Dress-ups When.....

...your little boy wants to dress up and he can only choose between being a ballerina, a princess or a fairy!!!!

In my defence, up until this week he has had absolutely no interest in playing dress-ups. However, suddenly he has decided that it is fun. So today we had ballerina Liam complete with ballet shoes and then Fairy Liam.

He dressed himself in the fairy outfit and ran out all excited to announce to me, "Look Mummy, I booful!" How could you not love that?

So, any suggestions for easy to make, cheap boys dressups??

So here are some photos of my booful boy and his big sister. I must say I do question his choice of accessories. I don't know if a wrench and drill really work with choice of clothing!!!!




Monday, November 3, 2008

Our First Montessori-ish Day

I say Montessori-ish because we are by no means true montessori sttyle. what I have done is taken the bits of this philosophy and many of the activities and changed other bits and pieces to meet our needs. Today was our first day using this new structure and I must say it was a success!!!

Because of all the new activities today was a lot of me demonstrating an activity to Liana then one to Liam, then back to Liana, the.....well you get the idea but both of the children worked really well on their activities and even Liam soon learned the idea of having to complete his activity, pack it up and put it away before moving on to another.

The good thing about the kids wanting to just do each activity one after another was that I could see what worked, what didn't and what I needed to change. I had to alter a few activities on the spot becasue they were either too easy or way too hard and I learned that flour is not a good option for the letter tracing tray. I quickly changed that to rice!

I forgot about the camera until about half way through, but as they worked on their activities for 1.5 hours I still got a few good shots. Liana worked solid this whole time and I had to make her stop for lunch. Liam worked on and off stopping to go and play with his trains every now and then and then coming back for more.

So I officially call today a success and am looking forward to tomorrow. Here are a few photos of some of our activities today.





Sunday, November 2, 2008

Tot School

Tot School

Our theme for Tot School last week was red. We went on a scavenger hunt around the house to collect as many red things as we could find. Picked out all the red blocks, made red jelly and ate red sausages, tomatoes and strawberries for lunch. We made a "What is Red?" mini book that Liam loved and carried around and read to everyone all week. We also did a red collage and of course painted with red!! I kept forgetting to take photos so only have a few to share this week.

Making a red collage....



Our red painting started like this....



Then moved to this......



Then this....



And finally, this!




Check here to see what others have done for Tot School this week.