Super Hero Party: The finished result!

It's always nice when a plan comes together. Weeks of research on pinterest, brainstorming, cutting, gluing and baking finally came together. This time for my son's 4th Birthday Party. Amazingly this is the first children's party where I didn't feel rushed at the end, no sobbing into the regal icing, I even had time to go back and try ideas shelved as 'if I get time I might try that' - all helped by a few late nighters of course.

When we first started party planning my son quite liked Spiderman (you may remember the mask post back in August) then he quickly discovered other animated series the Super Hero Squad Show, X-men and the Avengers and so the party evolved into a more general 'Super Heros' party. I tried to represent all of his favourite characters in the food and party items: Hulk Jellies, Iron-man Biscuits, Captain America Cupcakes, Wolverine Cake, Thor's Cheese Hammers & Spiderman Invites ... we even had a telephone booth to change in....

Play to Write-Write to Read Wednesday (week 1)

I found Mackenzie's blog last night and have decided to get involved in her "Play to Write-Write to Read" Wednesday playgroup sessions with Josh. He can write his own name most of the time, knows the phonics song and can recognise most letters so this sounded like a great next step - the lessons are really well thought out and not something I would have tried on my own.

We started today with the 'Partner Journaling' part of the week 1 challenge, where you encourage your child to talk about an activity or trip you've done together recently and help them to write sentences about the experience and then draw a picture.

Not only is this a great keepsake for the future, but shows that spoken words can be written words, helps them access short term memory, improves vocabulary and is a great all around bonding exercises.

Sadly we didn't have chance to go shopping for a journal to write in, but after my spate of printable creations i ended up making worksheets we can hole punch and add to a binder. On sheet I also made sure I had gaps for 'title' and 'date' (for my own reference) and I left room at the bottom for him to write his own name. If anyone wants to download these to use at home,the links are below :)

Download in: [BLUE] [GREEN] [PINK] [RED] [PURPLE] [ORANGE]

[Font credit: Janda Manatee Soild]

 

We choose to write about our trip to Longleat Safari park on Friday. It did make me very paranoid about my own handwriting and spelling considering my own childhood Dyslexia, but it was great to get him talking animatedly and having a proper discussion with him. We decided on what each sentence should say and I enunciated each word as I wrote it. I love the fact he choose to describe the Lions we saw as being 'quiet' and he ended up drawing a lovely picture of a green Lion laying on grass and leaves. 

I love this idea, and will be adding more sheets to the collection as he does them - he's already looking forward to writing a page about the car rally he's going to on Saturday.

Looking forward to trying the lines and mazes part of last week's task in the morning and then on to lesson 2. 


Boys will be boys: Simple printable target

At the shop today, after much debating my Son finally picked a magazine: Spiderman - and came with one of those freebie plastic guns that fire styrofoam 'darts'. The second we got home he tore it open and with some help loading was firing it all around the house -followed by missing darts, tears and long conversations on the subject of why you mustn't fire these things at people, cats and decorative objects.

Potty training : Free printable chart

Well, it's potty train time again in our household. Little Lady has been randomly choosing to do wees on the potty since Christmas but has resisted any attempt at serious potty training, with a month till Josh starts nursery and warm enough weather for Lowie to wander around the house in pants and a t-shirt I decided to take the plunge.

With Josh I stayed away from sweets/stickers and other reward style potty training techniques as I was worried he would always expect a reward for doing it - and it worked OK but he wasn't really ready till he was almost 3. This time I was thinking about using  a reward chart I saw some in shops and a few free downloadable ones from companies and blogs alike but didn't see anything with the format I was looking for, so I ended up making my own.

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It's might not be perfect for everyone - I made this for my daughter but hopefully someone else will find it useful. It has the 7 days of the week, 3 weeks per sheet (or possibly 3 kids per sheet for childminders or triplets) and space for lots of small circle or star stickers each day. I'm going to get mine laminated but currently have it mounted in a clear pocket file - so that the sheet is re-usable, but you could just print a new sheet every 3 weeks.

Download girls potty training sheet

Download boys potty training sheet

To download your own sheets simply click on the appropriate sheet above and either choose to save for later or print. When printing make sure to check the paper size and print preview. I hope this resource helps!

We've just started using it today, and she's got 2 stars and had one little accident.

Quiet book: Sandcastle page

The first completed page of Miss L's quiet book. This page was made from one of Stephanie's templates at imagineourlife. If you are thinking of making your own quiet book and need inspiration, it's well worth a trip to her site, she has some really amazing ideas - definitely a leading authority on quiet books.

I pretty much stayed to the pattern, although I did use slightly different felt colours to the ones suggested: I used cream for the sand, natural for the castles and tan for the doors and windows and the roofs. I changed the bucket colour to pink to make it more girlie with red rick rack stripes and swapped some silver cord for the handle instead of the felt. And I accidentally cut 2 extra 'towers' - but all the more for the kids to play with, lol!

It turned out perfectly, now just to work on the other pages :)