Halloween Salt Dough

Basic Salt Dough Recipe:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup salt
1 cup warm water

Combine salt and water, and let sit for a minute or 2 to let salt dissolve. Add flour, and mix until dough starts to form. Knead with your hands in the bowl, or on a floured surface until a smooth dough has been achieved. Create project. Bake in a 200 degree F oven for 1-4 hours or until completely dry. Paint and embellish as desired!

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I split our dough in half, and rolled half with a floured rolling pin. Then used Halloween cookie cutters to make shakes of flying Halloween creatures (bats, witches, and ghosts.) I then used a straw to put holes in the Halloween shapes for hanging later. The other half of the dough I split between my kids for them to make pumpkins. (Note that since these are preschool and younger children, the pumpkins were solid and took longer to dry in the oven. Older children can roll our their dough and form it over a ball of aluminum foil to get their shape without using as much dough/ drying time.) I had each child remove a small piece of their dough, then roll the rest between their hands to create a ball shape. They place the ball on the table and made an indentation on top of the ball with their finger. Then used the small removed piece of dough, to attach as a stem. We baked these, then painted them orange with brown stems on a different day. After we painted the pumpkins, I provided Halloween colors of paint, and let the kids paint the cutouts. After they dried, we strung yarn through these, and tied them to baby hangers to hang as Halloween mobiles!

An unpainted salt dough pumpkin, and the painting underway!


Reagan's mobile


Adam's Mobile


Oh, and since we had the paint out, I let the kids paint pumpkins on canvas bags for Trick-Or-Treating! :-)

Halloween Craft Fun!

Starting last week we've been having a lot of fun with Halloween activities. We have been reading lots of fun Halloween books, and I've worked on coming up with several Halloween and fall themed crafts for the kids.

Last week we did drawings that we embellished with foamie Halloween stickers. Stickers are always a hit with the kids and they really enjoyed this one. I'm watching a friend's child, so she and Reagan had a great time doing this together, but before I could get a picture of Reagan work, Adam (who was napping at the time and missed the activity, got a little jealous, and tore all her foamies off!) Ugh. It was fun though, and there are letters in our set, so Reagan spelled out her name on her paper, and we helped the friend do that as well. Then the girls just had fun picking out letters, and naming them before adding them to their masterpieces.

On Friday we made salt dough for the first time! I rolled half and did cut outs with holes for hanging, and split the other half between the kids. Rob was home, so he helped out, and had a good time helping the kids make pumpkins out of their salt dough. I baked them, and we're planning on painting today! I'll post pictures of the salt dough, with a tutorial for our projects a little later. :-) On Friday we also made spiders out of egg cartons. I'll also post a tutorial for this simple and fun craft. :-)

One of Reagan's favorite Halloween books is The Biggest Pumpkin Ever. I think it especially resonates with her because we grew some of our own pumpkins this year. We had to stop by the hardware store for something on Saturday, and stopped to pick up some seeds for next year's vegetable garden (that we are already planning). So of course we had to get Big Max pumpkin seeds (they can grow to be 100 lbs or more!) Next year should be lots of fun, and maybe well get a prize winning pumpkin grown for the fair next year even.

Yesterday we did out first tap dancing class at home. Reagan has been very enthusiastic about this for awhile, but both pairs of shoes we had, were too small. Oma finally found a pair that would fit here, and they came in a package this week, so we were set to begin. Of course Adam wanted to dance to, and luckily one of those too small pairs fit him! The kids had a great time... even though they mostly just liked making a lot of noise. Reagan did get the general idea of some basic steps, and Adam tried very hard. I think well need quite a few more lessons before there's any level of mastery though. lol

Reagan of course, also sat down and did some work on her workbook, and confirmed for us that she can read all of her colors. She can do most activities in the preschool workbook without an instruction, but was reading what colors they wanted her to color specific things and doing it. She also spent a good amount of time in the morning sitting and reading Hop on Pop. She was actually reading it at first (and doesn't have it memorized- we've only read it once,) but then she got lazy and started doing it mostly based on memory and the pictures, rather than actually reading. But it's a great start! She really could read more by herself if she were willing to do it. It's too much work though. :-P

UPDATE

I keep promising that I'm going to keep up with this, and then keep falling off the wagon. :-( Thankfully, not updating the blog, doesn't mean that we haven't been learning anything! So here are some quick updates:

Adam: Counts to 10, knows most, if not all of his ABCs, and loves to sing along with the song.. his favorite songs are ABCs, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Bah Bah Black Sheep. Adam has also been developing more physical skills; gross motor skills at gymnastics, and fine motor skills building with Duplo blocks, and making lots of scribble pictures. He also loves to dance, and sing along to songs on the radio.

Reagan: What an explosion! She;s just learning to use stencils to draw things, and loves practicing this on her own all the time. The small shapes she draws have also helped her practice coloring in smaller spaces. There has been a lot more actual drawing recently too, and less scribbles, her favorite topics are animals, camping, houses, people, and rainbows. She LOVES doing her Brain Quest cards, but has been flying through the level 5 and 6 year old ones with such ease that we may have to find her a new set soon! She complained to me one day that her preschool workbook was boring and too easy, so I let her pick out a higher level one from our collection. She chose time and money. She still works on the preschool book, but is loving working on some more challenging stuff too. So far she can read all of the times on the hour on the clock, and can count with pennies, and pennies and one nickel. We're working on counting by fives so so can count more nickles, but she does it pretty well with a counting chart. Reagan has also been working very hard on developing better fine motor skills, practicing writing her name, doing pearler beads, beading, and needlepoint. She's very much looking forward to entering her needlepoint work in the county fair in a couple of weeks! She's also become very enthusiastic about learning about the pioneers, her heritage, and nutrition, so we've been trying to work on those things.

One recent activity:
We recently found a very big caterpillar in out back yard that was munching on our veggies, so we kept him in the house in a jar for a couple days. The kids enjoyed getting to see him crawl around at eat things. We read a couple of stories about them and butterflies, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Then we made our own caterpillars by coloring pieces of cardboard egg carton and attaching pipe cleaners for antenna. I had a couple other activities planned that we haven't gotten to yet, but hopefully we'll get to do those soon.

Snipping

Yesterday we completed 62 worksheets, meaning we're over halfway done with the Total Basic Skills Preschool workbook. Phew! I know we did some other activities.. but my head is so full of today's activities that I can't remember what else. lol

Today Reagan did 4 worksheets, an alphabet floor puzzle, an alphabet puzzle about 3 times, finger puppet play, we read the last 2 chapters of Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, chose a new book, went through the complete set of Things Outside Dora flap cards, did some play to practice with the 10 English/ Spanish cards in the set, completed one cutting practice worksheet (our first snipping activity!), and made 2 foam animal crafts. Reagan also spent some time in there reading with her Poingo. I'm sure we will do more this afternoon.. but I wanted to post before I forgot all that! :-)

Father's Day Prep Day!

This morning Reagan sat down and did 27 workbook pages. Then she and Adam each drew a picture while I read them a chapter of Madagascar 2. Reagan made wrapping for a gift for Father's Day and practiced using her cutting skills to do it. (I'll post a picture of this later.) In about half an hour we're headed off to a class to decorate a cake for Daddy for Father's Day, and then to a gymnastics demonstration Reagan was invited to participate in. It's amazing to think she's been doing gymnastics for almost 2 years now!

I'll edit this post to add more later in the day. :-)

Added at 4:15 PM

Reagan had a great time decorating her cake today! She did an awesome job, and only needed mommy's help with keeping the icing flowing out of the piping bag.

One of MANY pictures from Reagan's gymnastics exhibition.

Busy, Busy

We started a BIG workbook today in hopes that it would last longer. It's a preschool workbook, so it's pretty much all things that Reagan knows how to do already. And once she knows the directions, she can complete most activities by herself by recognizing what the directions are. Combining her work before and after lunch she completed a whopping 45 pages! She also took a break in there to draw a picture. We read 3 chapters of Madagascar 2, and played a game of Go Fish. Then she asked to listen to her Spanish Cd, so she did that. There was also some time on the Leap Pad in there! Phew! That girl is busy, busy! The also asked me to make a craft project for her to do this afternoon, but she was getting cranky and tired playing with her brother, so I sent her to play quietly by herself for awhile. We'll see how long it lasts!

Camping

We spent Monday, Tuesday, and part of Wednesday camping at Lynx Lake! The kids had a wonderful time. We read the entire The Littles go Exploring book while we were camping! We also saw a lot of wildlife, and read a book about the life cycle of butterflies. Reagan heard, saw, and found the feather of a crow.

On Tuesday evening the kids spent some time coloring, and Reagan did some beautiful drawings:

"Me feeding the ducks in the water" The large red is Reagan with lots of hair sticking up. Down at the bottom, the red line is the water, and the red and green are three ducks. She was very specific to give them beaks. At right, is a picture of the actual event.


"Daddy, Reagan, and Mommy hiking on the trail" The big red person with the hair is mommy, the red person to the right of that is Reagan, and there is a pale brown person standing in front of/ below Reagan that is Daddy. The yellow lines down the right of the page are the trail. The big red "rectangle" on the left is our car, and the black is it's bumper. It's parked by the trail, and has some nice rainbow colored grass below.


Reagan was also eager to practice her Spanish on the trip, and used Hola, and Adios regularly. She also asked me to help her practice the command words she has learned, for march, clap, sit down, and stand up. She knows 1,2, 5, and 8 in Spanish, and kept having me repeat the numbers 1 through 10 so she could work on knowing more.