Millie Janalee and I are still moving right along through our books.  We are working on our third book now and enjoying it very much.  The last book we worked through from Before Five in a Row was The Big Green Pocketbook.  Millie Janalee is already obsessed with purses, so it didn't take much work at all to convince her this was a good book.  Ha!  The book is about a little girl who takes her green purse with her everywhere she and her mother go.  She fills the purse with all sorts of things from their day, but at the end of the day her purse is missing.  It was Millie Janalee to "found" the purse in the pictures at the very end.  She found it before I did and yelled, "OOOOOOHHH!  Puwse!"  She was so happy the little girl finally found her purse.  It was pretty cute.

We did a few activities throughout the week besides her taking her own purse everywhere we went.  We focused on the color green and circles.  Millie Janalee loves finding colors and shapes around us.  I pulled out the Do a Dot marker and the page for the letter A.  She spent some time dotting in the circles making a big "A" and little "a."

I'm biased, but I think she did a pretty good job for a 2 year old!

Green A

We also added our lower case "a" to the alphabet tree.  It took some time to make a decision on where she would place it.  And, in typical girl fashion...she did change her mind.  I helped give her a boost so she could reach her favorite spot. Right next to the big "A."  Quite opinionated, this girl.

Another day, after reading our book, we did some painting.  Ever since our "apple painting", Millie Janalee has been obsessed with paint.  So we took some yellow paint and blue paint, and I let Millie Janalee make green paint.

She was super focused and loved watching the colors mix.  She kept saying "GWEEN!  GWEEN!" as she mixed the two colors together.  Besides finding a few drops of green paint on our blinds later in the week, we made it out without much mess.  Ha!

Another day, we focused on circles.  Millie Janalee found all the circles in her little book we found at the Target $1 bin.  I thought I'd give it a shot letting her make her own circles.

Plus, I knew I would love looking back at her 2 year old attempt at tracing circles one day.  I've gotta say, she understood the circle-y concept.  Just not necessarily the tracing.  She loves to color in loops and circles now.

If you look closely, there are a couple circles that actually appear to be semi-traced.  :)

I pulled out the green Play Doh and showed her how to make circles.  It was a hit!

And before we finished for the day, I pulled out another Target $1 bin find.  Foam shapes.  I let Millie Janalee find all the circles. She piled them up. Then we found all the green stars.  We spent some time building all kinds of things with the blocks.  The most fun part is obviously knocking all the buildings down.  Ha!

You may remember that every day is not a big project day.  Some days we simply read the book.  Others we may count things or find objects in the pictures.  In this book, we found other people wearing glasses like Millie Janalee.  We found numbers written on price tags and addresses.  We counted flowers.  And, of course, we solved the mystery!  The purse was found.  But, I won't tell you where.  You'll just have to read it yourself to find out!  Hehe!

Another book, another memory for my baby and me.

BFIAR - I Am an Artist

While many of my friends were sending their bitty babes off to 2 or 3 year old preschool and MDO, Millie Janalee and I began our school year at home again.  I began researching something simple back in May.  Eventually my search kept coming right back to the same thing. Easy. Not complicated. And can be used year after year.  It's even great to use after school or during the summer if your children go to preschool.

Before Five in a Row.  This particular "curriculum" (I'm using that term lightly.) is for ages 2-4.  And basically you could just rotate the same books every year adding different activities. It is literature based.  We read the chosen book five days in a row completing different activities related to the book.  It is to be fun.  Just enjoing quality productive time with my sweet girl.  We don't have a strict schedule.  We may skip a week or two depending on travel and other obligations.  But we are enjoying moving through at our own pace.

Our first book was I Am an Artist.  I have never read many of the books on the reading list...including this one.  So I'm enjoying discovering these stories as much as Millie Janalee is.  The books don't go in any particular order.  We are working on letters (even though I think she recognizes them all already), so I chose this one to go with the letter "A."  Millie Janalee was an artist for the week.

In the book it talks about all the ways to be an artist.  One of those ways is to find shapes and objects in the clouds.  We talked about clouds, went outside to find clouds, learned that God makes the clouds, and then we painted our own clouds using cotton balls and clothes pins.  First I just handed her the cotton balls because they look like clouds and we talked about how soft they were.  She could've walked away happy at playing with cotton balls. Ha!

Then I clipped the cotton balls to clothes pins and let her paint her own clouds.  I didn't get a picture of the final product.  Oops.  She enjoyed it and now points clouds out everywhere we go.  She was quite upset yesterday afternoon when there was literally not a cloud in the sky.  Ha!  #toddlerproblems 

The following day, after rereading the book, we talked about rainbows.  Don't make fun of my "teacher-y station"!  I dug through my old teaching boxes to find these jewels.  Plus I filed these sentence strips away in my story file to use in the future when we go through our reading list again.

We talked about the colors of the rainbow, and we made our own rainbows.  [Side note: By the way, I do most of these art activities with her on my own paper so she can see what to do.  I wanted her artwork to be completely her own, so I had to do my own.  Ha! It's the OCD in me I guess.]  She loves combs, so I found this little project that was perfect for rainbows!

Total concentration

Having fun!

Taking a break to wipe paint off her hands.  LOL!  The drama.

Finished product

We don't do a major activity every day.  I'm seriously keeping it low key.  Some days we just read the book and talk about the pictures.  Some days we count things in the pictures or find shapes.  You get the idea.  Some days we walk outside and find things that we read about in the book.

"You are an artist when you find a star inside an apple."  We took a trip to the grocery store, and Millie Janalee helped me find red apples for our activity on this day.  We came home, and I cut one of the apples to eat.  It was yummy!  Then, I cut another one in half while she watched.  She loves to find stars, so finding the star inside the apple was easy.  Then, I showed her how to paint with our apples.

Painting with her apple

Great job!

To this day, she walks up to the table and says "apple paint!?"  And this was probably 3 weeks ago.  We actually went to the apple orchard yesterday to pick apples, so maybe we can apple paint this week.

Finished product

This day she recognized the letter "A" and we added it to our "alphabet tree."  Yes, I have a huge palm tree on our kitchen wall.  It's one of Millie Janalee's favorite things in our home.  She placed the lizards herself and became fast friends with the monkey.  Letting her add the letters to the tree herself has been a great highlight of her day.  Ha!

We have continued to our next book at our own pace.  We skipped a week or two when we were traveling.  But Millie Janalee is loving the fun hands-on activities, and she has LOVED the books so far!  I look forward to the weeks ahead and the mommy and me memories made.