Lovehearts Art

While I was checking out Kathy Barbro's tutorial for the Winter Birches over at the fantastic blog Art Projects for Kids I came across this super cool Valentine's art project.

L is super excited about Valentine's Day this year which she calls Lovehearts Day.

I was also excited to finally use the oil pastels I bought months ago.  We did the project on some leftover water color paper.  We used three different sized heart shaped cookie cutters to trace our hearts onto the paper.

L then chose her first color and outlined a heart with zigzag lines.  She did that about three times for each heart in different colors and then kept filling in more and more colors.  This was a pretty long project and I had to keep encouraging her towards the end but the result was totally worth it!

Here are the finished products.  L's is on the left and Mommy's is on the right.

Happy Valentines Day!

Thank you to Making of a Montessori Mum for inspiring me to make Valentines Day a special day for our family (the beautiful sunshine helped to!)

We made sweetheart necklaces for everyone out of salty dough.

We also hung some from the light with our Valentine star.

I totally ripped this idea off from Making of a Montessori Mum and L loved it. After finding all of the hearts once she asked daddy to hide them for her again and again.

Then we all went up to the mountain to play in the snow(well I lounged in the snow). This is the closest we'll come to having a chalet on the mountain ; )

The view from the balcony where we had our snack. What a life!!

Now we're off to catch up on what we've missed in the Olympics.

Montessori Monday

This post should probably be called Tonging Tuesday since L's been doing tons of tonging and it's already Monday night but oh well.
In honor of Valentines Day I thought we'd better do our bit so we made up these red and white ice cubes. Before she went to bed L poured some diluted cranberry juice into a heart ice cube tray. I didn't take a picture because I was too busy doing damage control. She's just getting the hang of stopping when she pours ; ) She also poured regular water into a circle ice cube tray.

The next day we put them all together into a bowl and she sorted them with her tongs. My mom named this activity "sort and suck"
I bought some colored wooden beads and added them to the felt beads I made. L really enjoyed making necklaces with them. We used a tapestry needle and some leather cord. The tapestry needles are great because they aren't sharp. Can anyone tell me though how to put the holes in the felted beads? My husband and I had a heck of a time trying to push a needle through.

More tonging.

Using the ever popular heart ice cube tray to put in little glass hearts. This is actually harder than it looks as the hearts have to be put in just right to fit properly.

L was chomping at the bit while I was preparing this activity. When I'd finally put it all together she sorted all of the objects in about two seconds. Once of those activities that took me way longer to prepare than for her to do! She's really got the hang of first letter sounds this past little while and can tell me things that start with a specific sound. We're going to have to move on to last letter sounds I suppose.

You might notice the table cloth in the background of these pictures. Due to my back we've had to move to the kitchen table to do most of the activities. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon. : )