Celebrating the 100th Day of School

Last week, we finally reached the milestone of The 100th Day of Kindergarten for Sam!  Since we do school usually only four days a week, and also since we took a few weeks off last month while I was recuperating, it has taken us this long to reach day 100.  I used my plans from when we celebrated the 100th day of school with Leah.  You can click here to read the complete plan that I posted at The Homeschool Classroom almost two years ago.  

Everything at our house has been pretty low key the last several weeks, and celebrating the 100th day of school was no exception.  Sam and I did not do nearly as many activities as I did with Leah, but I still think he had a fun day!

 counting 100 cheerios for breakfast

 ten groups of ten cheerios

 Sam counted these 100 sweet gum balls while I walked up and down our driveway.

 doing 100 seconds of exercise

Sam and Leah did ten exercises for ten seconds each.

 snack time--counting out 100 M&Ms

 sorting the 100 M&Ms by color

lining up 100 dominoes and then knocking them down.

And that is all we did!  Of course, we also counted our numbers 1-100 that we had been putting up on the wall in our schoolroom each day.  I failed to take a picture of the wall.  This year, instead of writing the numbers on index cards and taping them to the wall, I used star shaped sticky notes.  They were smaller, and it was easier to just stick them on the wall.  I used one color for all of the numbers except the multiples on ten, and for those numbers, I used a different color.

My ABC Book Post

Today, I have a post over at The Homeschool Classroom all about the ABC book that Sam and I are making as part of his Kindergarten.  I have included some pictures of our actual book, so you can hopefully get some ideas, but also see that the book is actually Sam's book.  While I used a scrapbook and some scrapbooking supplies, I let Sam create the items that are put into the scrapbook, and I allowed him to place the pictures and stickers wherever he would like.  You can tell!

We are drawing near to our 100th Day of School mark.  We are on day ninety-something, but we will be taking a short break from school (I plan to blog all about it soon....very soon) before we actually get to Day 100.  We have about five or six letters left to learn, and the the whole alphabet will be covered.  Wow! This year has flown by in some ways.

You can click here to read the ABC Book post.  Happy reading!

Homemade Doodle Paint

I love Pinterest!  I have found so many cute ideas on there, and yesterday we tried one.  Here is the link to the original directions for Homemade Doodle Paint, and here is a recap of how we did it here at our house.

What You Will Need:

• all purpose flour
• salt
• plastic squirt bottles (I got mine in the cake decorating section of WalMart--$2 for 2 bottles)
• coloring--the original directions suggested gel icing, like I have in my picture below, but I found that regular food coloring produced much richer colors.

I found that mixing 1/3 cup flour, 1/3 cup salt, and a little more than 1/3 cup water made the right consistency.  I began by using a whisk, and then when I added the food coloring, I just used a spoon to stir.  If you want more paint, you can use 1/2 cup of each ingredient.

I mixed each color in the same glass measuring cup, so I had to wash the cup and spoon after every color.

This is the pink, made with red gel icing.  After making this light pink and a light blue, I switched to food coloring.  Much better!

Spoon the mixed paint into the squirt bottle using a funnel.  I snipped the end off of paper sno-cone cups to use as my disposable funnels.

After making eight different colors (and this took me about 30 minutes), Leah and Sam were eager to begin painting.  To paint, you just squeeze the bottle and draw.

Here are all the colors I made.

We used our doodle paint on cardstock.  The original directions suggested using poster board too.  I wasn't sure if the paint would dry, but the children painted last night while I was cooking supper, and this morning, they are dry.

Some of the finished products:

 by Sam

 by Leah

 enjoying the painting

by Leah

 by Sam

by Leah

I am not sure how long this paint should be stored, so I am going to encourage my children to doodle with it for the next few days.

Sam's ABC Scrapbook

Sam, sporting his new overalls!

He actually sleeps in them!

Today will be our 10th day of the new school year.  Sam has completed his study of the letters F and B.  We are on our second day of M.  After the fourth day of learning and practicing a letter, Sam and I complete his scrapbook page for his ABC scrapbook.  I had already pre-cut the letters and printed out the Bible verses.  We just arrange the items he made that week (some things don't fit....I am just filing them for now, and I may just put them in a binder or folder or something at the end of the school year....) on a two page spread and tape it all down. Then I give him an assortment of stickers of the letter or items that begin with the letter, and let him fill in the empty spots on the pages.  Lastly, I insert the pages into the page protectors.

Here are the pages!