My 5th year decorating a cake! It is same experience as always, days of planning ahead the theme and cake design, and hours of tedious cutting colouring and pasting, ending with a triumphant ta da! In the end it is always worth it!
Every time we look back at birthday pictures from earlier years, we’re reminded of what our kids were into those days! From Minions to Ninjago to Paw Patrol to Harry Potter, this has been our journey so far! I think I’ve been getting better and better with fondant every year! Mind you, my son just turned 7, so while he has been obsessed with the first three Harry Potter movies, he hasn't yet read the books (which explains the Ravenclaw colors!)
THE HOGWARTS THEME
Since my son was turning 7, and there are a million things you can do with the Harry Potter theme, I decided to stick to the Houses. Not just the scarves on the cake, but I also made a sorting hat and ties from every house, and hula hoops to match every house!
The SORTING HAT went around every kid’s head sorting them into groups:
“You are brave! You belong to Gryffindor!”
“You are loyal! You belong to Hufflepuff!”
“You are clever! You belong to Slytherin!”
“You are creative! You belong to Ravenclaw!”
THE HOGWARTS HULA HOOP GAME:
Divide all kids into 4 groups. Team members need to form a circle and hold hands.
Each team gets one Hula Hoop, that they need to pass from one kid to another without leaving their teammates’ hands! Whichever team completes two rounds first gets 10 points, and so on and so forth.
We gave them a practice round to figure it out and two rounds each. Two teams that made the finals had a round each to get to one winning team. Guess who won? Gryffindor!
We are Groot! This Halloween, we dressed up as characters from the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Yondu, Gamora & Groot! (Why Yondo, not Star Lord? Cuz Yondu is easily the more well developed character with more depth!)
Apart from a whole lot of face & body paint and dramatic make up, here is how I went about the crafty DIY bits:
Glued some green mossy stuff (from pipe cleaners) on the top of the mask
Finally, glued cheap brown glasses on the eyes of the mask
For the Groot body, I simply hot glued a crap load of brown paper on one of his old, never to be used again track suit.
Yondo’s headfin:
I first make a rough one with rough paper to get the shape right (every head is different!)
then finally used a material that was something between a cardboard sheet (I couldn’t find one thick enough) and styrofoam (you can’t paint over). Needed a pen knife/exacto knife to carve the shape out. I glued 4 head fins together to get the required thickness.
I cut out various shapes to glue on the sides to get the look
Finally, I painted it all over with rich metallic red paint.
I used eyelash glue to keep it glued over my husbands head!
I did the DIY stuff ahead of time, only to leave the face & body painting to be done that evening. We felt like movie stars with everyone taking our pictures!! Yes all parents who'd come with their kids to trick or treat and random people on the street on our way to the Halloween party asking us to pose with them! All in all, good fun!
Here are two fun games that are excellent for addition & subtraction practice!
4 in a Row: Roll Dice and the sum of the two numbers determines what number to cover. First player to get 4 numbers covered in a row wins!
3 in a Row: Roll the dice and the sum of the two numbers determines the starting number. Spin the spinner and get the final number to be covered. First player to get 3 in a row wins!
This game was born from my attempts to teach the Hindi alphabet! I taught him a bunch of them and before he got bored with all the coloring, I put sticky notes with letters written on them all over the house. everywhere!
And handed him a sheet of little drawings. He excitedly looked for the ‘letter’ and posted it over the correct object. For e.g f for fish.
So here’s a little 2 part printable for all your little kindergarteners who have started learning four letter, i.e. the BIG words!
Copy the words from page 2 onto sticky notes {Alternatively, you could cut out words directly from the sheet} and paste them all over the house. Over the glass windows, behind the couch if your kid gets frustrated easily and under the bed, on the top shelf if your kid loves to burn off energy!
Your enthusiastic kiddo will need to hunt for the words, and re-paste/place it correctly on the respective picture on the sheet! Give him/her the page 1 and say “go!”
I didn’t really think we needed costumes this year since we shifted to a school that doesn’t celebrate halloween. BUT I noticed the notice in our apartment building on 31st morning and sprang into action! The building encourages trick or treating!
and while I would've LOVED to do a Stranger Things{season is even better than season 1!}, a demo-dog or the 80’s look is impossible to manage in two hours notice. Hence a crayon! all you need is a paper in your kid's favorite color. Do check out our last few attempts too!
For our favorite Kid Science & Geography Interactive Games & Videos Click here!
Here’s a little video on what we’ve been upto the last two years in Chile, No wonder geography is one of my kid’s favourite subject!
EL TATIO GEYSERS, a sunrise spectacle of erupting water, steam and hot volcanic mud, stone and sand formations at the MOON VALLEY (where a prototype for a Mars rover was tested there by scientists because of the valley's dry and forbidding terrains!), LAKE CHAXA FLAMINGOES in the midst of rough lifeless crystals of the Salt Flats of SALAR DE ATACAMA, huddling up in the cold around telescopes to stargaze in the clearest skies at night. Lakes, Lagoons & Volcanoes, adobe huts & Llama meat.
These are apart from the road trips to the ANDIES, the PATAGONIAN RAINFORESTS, VOLCANOES, hot springs & hot tubs in south of chile.
There is a page in the end of every Usborne Encyclopaedia for beginners which directs us to their website for further links. and after two years of reading these books to my kid, I finally typed in the url and voila! Just like that I had access to a wealth of video & interactive pages resource!
and they’re wonderful!
From finding your weight & age on different planets, dressing up an Antarctic scientist, true and false games & more. Here are some of the interesting links from BBC Earth, NASA, The Magic School Bus, National Geographic etc that can be used for 5-12 year olds
{This a guest post from education.com. Do check it out for their exhaustive worksheets, lesson plans, songs & more!}
Here's a surefire way to get your kids practicing their ABCs. Create an edible alphabet out of marshmallows and toothpicks to reinforce letter recognition. Teach your child individual letters, or show her how to spell her name. And of course, she'll love munching on a few marshmallows along the way, too.
A week before we embarked on this road trip (2 families, 6 of us) I bought a book about Pingüinos de Humbolt to read it to my 5 year old. My over confidence about reading a children’s book in Spanish was quickly shattered when I realised I was never going to finish it!
Although the book is still unfinished, we *did* take the fabulous trip. In case you’re here because a nice search engine showed you the way, I am obliged to give you my recommendations. First of all, all links point to ‘tours’ for almost anything in Chile, which is extremely ridiculous. We are grown ups with a car and all (Went through all the tests to get our Chilean Licences too!) and need not be chauffered for a ridiculous amount of money. If you're a tourist, please hire a car! Cuz the best parts were in the trip itself!
We halted as soon as we spotted cool foxes (Zoro Chillas): Imagine our excitement of being surrounded by 10-15 foxes just strolling about on the road side and rolling down little desert sand dunes in the middle of nowhere! We spotted Guanocos too, or as we like to call them: Llama look alikes, after spotting Llamas on our way from Santiago!
Here are some cards I made last month. They were *soooo tedious*, really broke my back. I mean I had to literally write down words on pieces of papers, all so my 5 y.o. could practice blend sounds. Huh.
And the counting ones took the cake. He needs to practise counting up to 100, and he seldom forgets what comes after say 39. or 79. Hence I made cards card to clip the correct answer.
Phew. I need a long hot bath, wine and a Walking Dead marathon to feel normal again!
{btw you can print Free clip cards for beginning blends from The Measured Mom, she’s got some fab printables that I’ve used!}
This was a full 30 minutes of fun. Putting the egg & bunny shaped foam cut outs we decorated last week (with xmas decorations! whatever!) to further use. Punched a hole in each, tossed them into his messy sensory bin (it is *still* messy from the Where’s Waldo Activity!), to be fished out with a wire bent as a hook at the end.
These are simple flowers that I had bought for my neighbour on her birthday, a dear old lady, but they never got sent! Blame it on my dentist’s impromptu decision to pull out my molar and leave me in horrendous pain in spite of the painkillers & anaesthetics!
Not just that I couldn’t bare to take an elevator to go three floors up, I even scraped the outer rear view mirror while pulling the car out of the hospital parking and had to cancel all my plans for the next day!
Although I was eventually more than relieved to have the tooth gone, I felt sad for the wilting flowers that didn’t serve there purpose. Hence this project!
Quite simple, I’m sure some really creative kids out there could do much, much better!
I might as well rename this blog as the track blog! But each type of track we’ve made is *completely different* in the eyes of my son, and that’s what matters. Here’s how we used our craft sticks. Scroll down to see how we used cotton swabs, cardboard, yarn & what not in the past!
I live in the part of the world that is obsessed with Gnomes! There are these pretty ‘casa del bosque’ restaurants, small gnome statues for sale, large ones for decorative purposes. It’s cute!
Have a look at our homemade play dough & TP roll gnomes, and few of the ones we came across in latin america!
We’ll be moving to another house in soon, which mean it’s time to finish off all the art supplies and sell off books that we no longer read!
Selling off books is seeming to be harder than I thought, as I had a blubbering tear soaked 5 year old accusing poor mean mommy, sigh. I’ll probably try again next week!
But finishing art supplies equals happy child. So although his school began last week, we managed to make a name structure. Lot of cutting and sticking and happy pictures!
One day, two kids find a tree house in the woods near their house, they climb in and see it full of books! They open one, point to a picture and say I wish I was here and VOILA! The Magic Tree House takes them there within minutes!
Jack & Anne, have travelled to hundreds of years back to solve a mystery with the Ninjas in Japan, Mummies in Egypt and even thousands of years back in the land of dinosaurs!
While we’ve read aloud only 6 of the 12 books we have, the collection seems to be over 50. Lucid, informative, perfect for beginners to chapter books for read aloud and read yourself too (60/70 pages each, B&W pictures).
Our play room sometimes imitates the Where’s Wally (Waldo) book!
Utterly messy, jumbled up and chaotic!
Imagine a sensory bin that was only supposed to have coffee beans, now has magnetic alphabets, cotton buds, UNO cards, cars, pencils, bottle caps, dice, and COINS?
Perfect to play a Where’s Wally game! Take a picture of the select few items to be hunted before tossing them back in the mess. I put some Wally (Waldo) stickers we had on coins and tossed them in too. Don't forget to set the timer before you yell "go!"
