Because Babies Grow Up

Raising Creative Kids through Play, Music and Literacy

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Star Spangled Crafts

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star_spangled_craftsSammi picked up a few craft books from the library last week. We’ve been enjoying Star Spangled Crafts by Kathy Ross as we anticipate America’s birthday next week. As the Fourth of July is just a few days before Sammi’s birthday, we are always in party-prep mode and love to decorate for July 4th.

Patriotic Eagle craftThe project that Sammi fell in love with was the American Eagle Magnet, though she had a different vision for her eagle. Her plan is to hang one in each room so it looks like it’s flying around the room. I love her creativity.

July 4th Eagle and StarsSammi invited me to join her in this craft and I let her take the lead. She loved telling me the steps and having me follow what she did. We started this project in the morning, let the glue dry then came back to it this afternoon after quiet time.

July 4th EagleHow are you preparing for the Fourth of July?

Mixed Media: Robots

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Last month’s Music Club theme was Robots. We had a fun day listening to robot music, doing robot crafts and reading a robot book. It was an all around fantastic playdate! Here are the details of our play date:

Music

I shared our play list last week. The kids loved all the robot music. Here’s a clip of the two most popular songs.

Beat-Box-a-Robot by Recess Monkey

Robots On the Dance Floor by Rhymezwell

I’m not typically a fan of rap, but the lyrics of this song won me over. Just this once…

Book


We read Lots of Bots. A cute big book about Disney’s popular robot, Wall-E. It coves robots performing different functions, dancing, and making friends. All the little boys were wiggling to the front to get a better look at Wall-E. Not to leave the girls out, there was one girl who had to get an extra long look at each page before we moved on. This book was a hit with the under 5 crowd. I love the rhyming patterns. (It’s only $6 on Amazon!)

Crafts/Activities

We started with musical instruments. The kids loved playing different instruments to the robot songs. We did a couple songs and they switched their instrument each time.

Next we pulled out the craft supplies and made our own robot heads. We had cardboard covered in tin foil for the head. Then the kids glued on buttons, sequins, googly eyes, safety pins, jewels, pretty much any craft supply I had on hand. I envisioned this activity for kids 30+ months old, but even the littler ones loved the shiny supplies and worked on fine motor skills picking up and placing such little things.

For the under 30 month crowd I had foam robot buttons for them to glue onto silver cardstock paper. They loved this! I think this age gets a bigger kick out of squeezing their own glue more than anything else. The next day Scott did this activity again. He made a train of robots, then stacked the robots on top of each other into little robot mountains. Then, just as I got ready to take a picture of his creation, he knocked the whole thing down and took off all the stacked robots. It’s the process that counts, right.

I also collected and washed out food cans of various sizes for a month or so. I had these set out for kids to build their own robots with them. I added in cake pans, bread pans, and measuring cups. This didn’t get much attention at the music club playdate, but my kids have had so much fun with this at home. They have been very creatively stacking these supplies for the last couple weeks.

Happy weekend! I’ve got some great new music to share with you next week. See you on the other side of the weekend.

Solar System Hotel

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After watching an episode of Olivia where she turns her house into a hotel for her friends, we were inspired to make our own home a hotel for the evening. Sammi was very excited about this project. She was convinced we were going to go so far as to have the pool that is her favorite part of staying at a hotel. We compromised with a bubble bath after dinner!

We decided to call our hotel Solar System Hotel. Sammi came up with this all on her own. The girls have been in love with Bubble Guppies since it aired in January and they are particularly fond of the space episode. I was thrilled since I happened to have the perfect craft and book to go along with our theme.

We decorated our welcome table where we had all our blankets, pillows and towels waiting for us when we checked in. (Bummed I forgot to take the picture before we checked in. The table looked great piled with all our stuff!) We also decorated the light fixture above the dining table. These crafts came in a set from Oriental Trading Company that I bought about a year ago. I can’t find them online anymore, but they have other great space crafts and resources.

The sign for our hotel hung on the girls craft table. We decorated it using the cover of Eight Spinning Planets as our inspiration. They sat there and checked us in. Sammi’s job was to write down our names and assign us each a room. Elli’s job was to hand us a piece of chocolate and our room key (actual card keys from the Hyatt) and then show us to our room. Sammi also checked off when we had received our bedding.

For dinner we had pizzas made on corn tortillas. The shape and cheese reminded me of the moon. We were out of pepperoni so we used olives for craters. The girls really love their olives! So does their dad who insists they put the olives on their fingers and then eat them!

We had so much fun with this impromptu activity. We reviewed what we knew about planets, comets and the moon. We colored, glued, and taped.  Sammi practiced her writing skills. Elli got to be the leader (a rare treat for her!) and we all had lots of laughs.

Today we are linking up with ABC and 123 for their Show and Tell!

Sisters, Me, and Flossing

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The other week I was sick with strep throat. I drafted this post then, with the sickness fully on my mind and consuming a lot of my attention. But it turned out that there was a theme that Friday, books to sing, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to share some of our favorites. So I tabled this post for a theme-free week and here you go!

So Few of Me by Peter H. Reynolds

Feeling under the weather helped me realize how much I do, and enjoy doing, on a regular basis. Having lost so much energy, appetite and desire to talk has really changed our patterns the last few days. With that on my mind, I kept thinking of this book my grandma gave me for Christmas. So Few of Me by Peter H. Reynolds is a quick, humorous read. This book is a great reminder to focus on what’s most important and doing our best. Definitely a message I need to hear again and again. Especially with little ones at home, it’s easy to lose sight of how important the things I do with them really are for them, their development and for our relationships.



Sisters by David McPhail

This week I have really been enjoying how sweet the girls are together. {This is becoming true of almost every week now!} One Wednesday I posted pictures of them being adorable and their status as sisters is really taking shape. Sammi loves to talk about Elli as her sister, and how she can help her and teach her. Sometimes it’s bossy, but most of the time it’s sweet to see them play together. And work together to finagle ways to get more juice. So we pulled out a book we got when Elli was born called Sisters by David McPhail. It talks about the ways two sisters are very different and then very alike. Some of the things are true about the girls so it’s easy for them to identify with the characters in the book. My favorite pages say, “Both sisters liked to help bake cookies…and to play in puddles.” That’s my girls to a tee.


Flossing Teeth

The last book I’m sharing today comes from our public library. Sammi found it on a shelf and begged to bring it home. I wasn’t sure how she’d like it, but it’s been much requested. It’s called Flossing Teeth and is part of the Pebbles Plus series on Healthy Teeth. Anna shows us the right way to floss to get food and plaque off our teeth. It shows a diagram of two teeth and where the plaque and food like to hang out where the brush can’t reach them. It also shows how teeth get cavities when they aren’t cared for. This was powerful for Sammi since she had a cavity the first time she went to the dentist for an official visit! She really identifies with this book and it helps her remember to take good care of her teeth so she doesn’t get any more cavities.

Have books to share? Want to find more book recommendations? Check out Feed Me Books Friday hosted by The Adventure of Motherhood.

And please leave a comment telling what book you read to death this week 🙂

Moving on to Chapter Books

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A year and a half ago Sammi and I took a brave step and read our first chapter book together. I was inspired by Jim Trelease‘s book The Read-Aloud Handbook. I selected Charlotte’s Web because I remembered loving it as a child and it was conveniently unpacked and sitting on our bookshelf. Sammi was 2 years and 3 months old when we started it. We read it every morning at breakfast and we actually finished it. She enjoyed it and so did I.

Since that first success with a chapter book, we haven’t really had much success with any of the other chapter books we already owned. We started a few, but we’d read them here and there and the story line got lost because of our inconsistent reading. Elli has also grown a bit and developed her own opinions about what we read and how long she’ll allow us to read books that are too big for her.

I’ve been feeling like we needed to find some chapter books that we in-between Charlotte’s Web and long picture books. One day at the library Sammi pulled a book off the shelf and brought it to me asking if we could take it home. It was Junie B. Jones Has a Peep in her Pocket. I flipped through it and loved the layout. There are illustrations about every other page, the font is nice and big and it’s divided into chapters. There were six chapters in this book.

It worked out perfectly that we were able to read it for a chapter at a time. Elli could handle that much of the book before interrupting us. It really didn’t take very long to read a chapter. In fact, we’ve read picture books longer than a chapter and some as long as the whole book. But it has a more grown up feel because of the chapters and the layout. The story moveds pretty quickly and Sammi was always interested in rading one more chapter. We picked it up a couple times each day and had it finished in three days.

Sammi enjoyed Junie B. so much that we got two more books in the series. We’re currently reading Junie B., First Grader: Boss of Lunch. Sammi is thrilled with this book, too. At the bookstore where we got it, they had a whole collection of them and I let her pick out two. She seems very pleased with her choice. These books are written in first person from Junie B.’s perspective. It includes typical grammar mistakes of an early elementary school child and a whole lot of spunk in her personality. I often skip over words like stupid and dumb if they are used in a context that Sammi doesn’t know yet (and I don’t want to give her any ideas!). Other than that, it’s a fun read for both of us and we’re excited to be reading chapter books.

We’re definitely hooked on Barbara Park and her Junie B. Jones collection.

Are there any beginning chapter books you’d recommend for us?

Have books to share? Want to find more book recommendations? Check out Feed Me Books Friday hosted by The Adventure of Motherhood.

The links to the books are Amazon Affiliate links. I like to include links to Amazon because they have great prices and a good collection of reviews and additional info. If you happen to make a purchase after clicking on one of my links, I’ll receive a small percentage of that sale.

Don’t miss this week’s giveaway from Baby Cribs Plus (it’s my birthday present to you!) Come celebrate with me!

Favorite Singing Books

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It’s been an interesting week around here. I went to the doctor on Wednesday and found out I have strep throat. I was pretty miserable Wednesday and then even worse on Thursday. I’m hoping that the medicine will finally start to clear up my throat and that I’ll have a fun weekend.

Today is Arbor Day. If you have a minute, please send a virtual tree through Hanes’ Facebook Page and they’ll plant a real tree for you! A simple way you can help make a big difference.

This week’s theme is books to sing. When we first started reading books with Sammi, the only ones she liked at all were books that had tunes. It was a great introduction to books for her and we had a blast singing.

Hush Little Baby by Brian Pinkney

I grew up to the song Hush Little Baby. My mom sang it to me every night and it’s always been one of my favorites. Brent and I have a hard time singing this together though because I always sing it “Mommy’s gonna buy you…” and he feels funny doing that. So when I found this version of Hush Little Baby in book form I fell in love. It’s all about a day when Mom goes on errands and Daddy is with the brother and baby sister. It’s so cute how the dad tries to make her laugh and forget that Mommy just left. Plus it was one that Brent loved reading/singing with Sammi.




Down by the Bay by Raffi

We have loved our Down by the Bay book to pieces. I really struggled with the tune at first because it was unfamiliar to me. Fortunately it has the music at the end of the book and I was able to plunk it out on the piano till I got the hang of it. The illustrations are great for this crazy song about moose kissing a goose, a whale with a polka-dotted tail and more. I liked this one because it broadened my horizons and taught me a song I should probably have known, but didn’t.



Ten Little Fingers by Annie Kubler

I’d recommend any of the song books illustrated by Annie Kubler and published by Child’s Play. They are so adorable and really bring the song to life. We received Ten Little Fingers as a gift when we were expecting Sammi. This was another one where the tune was unfamiliar to me and I had to practice a lot to get it down. But the actions are great and it’s so much fun to see little ones go from passively listening to the song/book to actively doing the actions and trying to sing the song.





Have books to share? Want to find more book recommendations? Check out Feed Me Books Friday hosted by The Adventure of Motherhood.

These books are linked to Amazon through an affiliate link. I provide the link so you can read additional reviews on the books as well as have easy access to more info about the book. If you happen to buy something through one of these links, I will earn a small percentage of the sale.