A Creative Lunch

My children love to mix and combine and experiment with food.

To an extreme.

To my dismay.

Rachel had a nice lunch. Hot dog, yogurt, grapes, and ice water.

Apparently that was too plain so Rachel had to mix it up a little.

She showed me how to eat it. First you dunk your piece of hot dog in the yogurt.

Then you dunk the yogurt covered piece of hot dog into your ice water.

Then eat. Ummm, yum (I guess?)

Stir up your cloudy water and watch the grapes at the bottom spin around.

Add a little more yogurt because the water isn't quite cloudy enough.

Then use your spoon to dig for things in your water.

Yay! More soaked hot dog and grapes discovered!

Dallas Children's Theatre: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Really Bad Day

We had a wonderful day at the theatre today. We met some friends at the Rosewood Center for the Family Arts.

We saw Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.

We all loved the show and even Rachel enjoyed it enough to actually stay in her seat the whole time. As much as I love books and love to feed my book addiction and plans for that home library I'll have some day, I feel so negligent that I have never heard of this book! It was such a cute story that it is now on our wish list!

Helen Keller and ASL

Konos Unit: Attentiveness
Theme: Helen Keller

For this unit, we have read several books by Margaret Davidson including "Helen Keller" and "Helen Keller's Teacher" which is about Annie Sullivan. We've talked about deafness and blindness and how challenging life must have been for someone like Helen Keller. Several times throughout the studies I've had him close his eyes and plug his ears and just try to imagine living like this every day. I want him to truly understand and appreciate how important and how wonderful sign language and braille are to people who rely on these to communicate with the world around them.

I loved that the Helen Keller book had a true braille alphabet on the back so Nicholas could experience how challenging braille is to learn.

Nicholas read, "Louis Braille: The Boy Who Invented Books For The Blind" completely on his own. He read several chapters at a time until he had read the whole thing. We would find him quietly sitting somewhere reading it. It was neat to see him so engrossed in it and see how excited he was to tell us about the chapters he had just read.

We also watched the movie, "The Miracle Worker" which is all about Annie Sullivan and the miracles that she did in breaking through to Helen Keller and teaching her to communicate. Nicholas enjoyed it except for the parts where Helen threw a fit. He didn't like all the yelling and flailing around. I had been a little concerned about that too but I think the movie helped round out our reading experience perfectly.

Nicholas loves the little file folder games that I make for Rachel so I was excited to see a file folder game for American Sign Language or "ASL".

The file folder has each letter of the alphabet on it and you have to match the sign with the letter. The letter on the folder and the little cards with the signs each have a small piece of velcro on them so they actually stick well to each other when matched.

Here is the completed activity with all of the signs matched to their corresponding letters. This alone is a great tool for refreshing your memory on the sign language alphabet.

Nicholas was excited when he realized that he could spell his own name in sign language!

Here's another website I found that has some good worksheets to help teach sign language to children. There are many more great websites and resources on the internet if you'd like to look into this further.

Preschool Lacing Cards

Check out my post at Quirky Momma to see a fun lacing project I made for Rachel with a sink mat and some used ribbon!

Golden Triangle Animal Hospital in Southlake

One of our homeschool groups had a field trip to an animal hospital. What a fun outing this was!

We went to Golden Triangle Animal Hospital located at 425 West Southlake Blvd in Southlake.

Before we even started our tour, Nicholas was excited just looking at the giant fish tank.

It was nice but I was particularly impressed by the LSU fish we found! I might have to get a fish tank for the house just so I can have some of these guys swimming around cheering for my Tigers!

I loved this welcome! What a nice touch.

We toured the different rooms in the hospital. These were cages for small animals.

Talk about small. Look at this sweet little thing!

And here is a big guy in one of the big animal cages.

Next we visited the room for dental exams. As you can imagine, they usually have to put the animals into a light sleep in order to do a really good job of cleaning their teeth. I was surprised at how much is involved with dental care for pets.

Look at this guy's teeth! This hospital always takes before and after pictures when doing a dental cleaning.

Wow, they even have molds of animal teeth. It makes perfect sense but I just never imagined there was so much to it.

Next we headed to surgery! Everyone got a hat and mask to wear to be sure to keep the environment sterile for the patient.

Our patient was Mr. Lambie. It was really cute how they had Mr. Lambie hooked up to various machines to help teach the children about the whole process. Everyone had lots of questions at this part of the tour.

Nicholas even held a scalpel (without the blade!) and pretended to operate on Mr. Lambie. It's so funny that he and Rachel do lots of pretend operations at home on each other and on their stuffed animals, even on Mommy and Daddy. And now Nicholas got to pretend to do it in a real animal hospital!