Jelly Belly and Me~Building with Junk

In honor of Earth Day, Jelly Belly's preschool had a "Build with Junk" Day.  For weeks, we saved all of our recycable junk.  Last week, she learned all about it and ways to help the Earth.

First, we dumped all our junk in the middle of the yard.

Then, we talked about what she wanted to build.  She decided on a house!

Our house had a doggie house, a garden, a tree, a chimey...

I had a blast building with her and later in the week we received this:

Join us in Mommy and Me!

Hosted by Krystyn

Wordless Wednesday

Planted Pink Mums in Early October of 2009

October 31, 2009--our flowers were not surviving...we think too much H2O

Today

They were once ALL brown

There is hope for us!

Not sure how they will survive the AZ summer months.

For another planting experience, click here

Hunting for Bugs

Jelly Belly got bit by ants last week at her school! or I should clarify ONE ant.  I guess that is what happens when mama is at work and daddy and her decided she should wear flip flops to school. Hey--the weather is finally warm enough and this whole school thing is still somewhat new to us.  We forget we have to follow school rules.  Nevertheless it traumatized her.

  Since then she has been freaking out at the sight of little bugs. 

We were drawing outside this afternoon and she screams at the sight of an ant.  Now I know I am a wimp when it comes to bugs but I certainly do not need her to be.  I ran in her playroom and frantically looked for her magnifying glass.  I come out all excited and tell her to look at the ant.   She gives me the big eyes and says, "let's pretend we are hunters and we are hunting for bugs!"

Yay for her imagination! We spent a good hour outside examining bugs and discussing them. I am no bug expert so I will not share our conversation. The whole time I was wishing I had a good book to go along with it. Any suggestions?
She is still not convinced that every ant she sees will not try to bite her. At least I can tell her, "the only reason it bit you is cuz you eat so many sweets and they were thinking, yummy this jelly belly sure tastes good".

Float or Sink?

We did this a couple of weeks ago. I checked out a book from the library from the Think About Series called Floating and Sinking by Henry Arthur Pluckrose which gave me the idea to do this. We had been reading the book for a couple of weeks before we did it, so she was super excited. She had fun finding all kinds of objects to put in our bowl of water; she loves playing with water these days and picked up the concept pretty quick. She also flipped through the pages of the book to get ideas of what she could test out in our little experiment.
What I loved most, while she was looking for objects...I was folding laundry, and this activity kept her entertained for almost an entire hour.

Saguaro cactus

Today is Thursday, and that means it's story time at the Library. We have been going to the library since she was about 4 or 5 months old. Today the theme was the desert and I was excited because I recently checked out a book about a Saguaro cactus. Not quite her favorite because it is a chapter book, but I was surprised to see how much we have gotten through. The librarian asked the kids if anyone had ever seen a cactus, and Jelly Belly happily replied, "Me!" So today we checked this book out (among many others) and decided to read it during our picnic lunch on my empty dining room.
She seemed to enjoy it! We learned about coyotes, rattlesnakes, roadrunners and pack rats and of course our Saguaro cactus. Here is pic of the one in our front yard, and I did regret my great idea to go out in this Arizona heat in the middle of the day. It is hot today!

Picture taken by Isabella:

While searching for the image of the book, The Seed and the Giant Saguaro, I found some info about the author and some great teaching tools. I did not try the discussion guide yet but I will next time we read the book. Curious to see how she responds, it may be geared towards older kids.
http://www.jenniferwardbooks.com/Teachers.html

Our first planting experience

Jelly Belly asked if she could plant some seeds so she can water them. Not sure where she got the idea from but she asked more than once. At first, I thought...this is a project for daddy. But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. So we went to Lowe's to see what we could find. We bought this ecofriendly starter kit and a few flower seeds. I have never planted anything before, so this will be a new experience for me, and a great family activity. Hopefully our outcome won't be too dissapointing.

Pellets...

Looking at her flower seeds....








First, we watered the pellets and they quickly turned into soil.

Then, we sowed the seeds....

And watered them once more....

We will check them every few days and hope

to soon transfer them to our front yard. Keep your fingers crossed.

She was very quiet through the entire process and this was a great way to end a Monday.