I is for Ice Cream (of course!)

 I is for an "I" snack - again, it didn't have to be fancy. Cucumber stick put in I and i shapes made her pretty happy. :)

 I is for ice cream stickers (which Dassah decided to put OUTSIDE of the big letter this time - I didn't push it), an ice cream sundae, and inchworm, and ice cream cones. Not much starts with I, so we did a lot with ice cream themed things. But they're fun, so neither of us minded a bit!

I saw an idea for a magnet ice cream sundae creating center online, but instead of buying it (and needing to cut and laminate the download) I did a similar thing out of felt! It took a while to cut it, but it's paid off.

 I first tried it on the Bible study kids, but it didn't last long. The idea I saw online had "recipes" of different sundaes to build, so I spent some time making some up (truth be told, it was relaxing and fun!) and made examples for Dassah to follow.

She's really enjoyed it! First though we spent some time where I would make one and she would copy me exactly. I forget if I told her to, or she just decided to. I think the latter. She was very thorough and exact, so I knew she would enjoy pictures to follow. It's been a good independent play thing to pull out every now and then, as well as something she really enjoys if Ryan or I has time to sit down and do it with her.

 There were ice cream do-a-dots, to work with numbers of dots, which we called "sprinkles."

 She assigned different cones to each member of our family, so we (mostly me - she's still learning!) cut them out to put at each person's place for lunch. :)

 I is for Iceberg Jumping. I brought back our activity from A week's Arctic Icebergs, and once again, she thoroughly enjoyed it. After jumping from iceberg to iceberg for a while, she had fun pretending to fall in the water for me to rescue her. ;)

 I have a few Usborne sticker books that she can do a page in each week, and it's always something she really enjoys. She's getting better tracing the letters too, which is fun to see. She really wants to do it well, though I don't push it.
 

 I is for Ice Cream scoops on cones. We numbered them 1-8 and had fun piling up different flavors. :) Dassah gets confused when she points and counts things still pretty often, but when she has to put objects down while she counts, she does really well!

 I i for inch worm. This idea (found online) was harder than it seemed. Try laying on your stomach, unable to use your arms, lifting up your back and inching forward. Dassah quickly gave up, while I was determined to figure it out. I think it was a bit beyond her ability because it was even a bit hard for me!

  I is for "If You Remain in Me..." It is a joy to teach my girl the same verse-songs my mother put together and taught me when I learned the alphabet. Though she doesn't usually sing with me, by the end of the week she could sing the entirety of John 15:7-8! Things put to music really do lodge in your brain well. Thanks again, Mom!

 I is for the Inside of things! There were very few books with I in the title, so we pulled out a lot of the "look inside" books by Usborne that I got for various topics/letters. Their "Look Inside the Human Body" one is pretty cool and always fascinating for Hadassah.

 I is for the story of Isaac's birth. Each week I do one Bible story that we first read from the real Bible and then act out. It's good to have her learn to sit for short periods to read things without pictures and in more grown up language, and then help bring them to life!

 Eventually maybe we'll have enough children to act out all the characters in a story, but for now we use stuffed animals. ;) These were the three visitors that came to Abraham and Sarah, who gave them food and drink.

 Sarah listened behind the tent curtain while the visitors told Abraham they would have a son, even at their old age of almost 100 years!

 Sarah LAUGHED when she heard such a thing!

 But God's Word came true and she had a baby named Isaac!

 Dassah almost always wants to act out the stories again, which is fun. :) This time she made the food she brought the guests a little more elaborate! ;)

 I try to involve fun things to make letters with when I can, so this week we made I and i out of tape. She always likes anything with tape. And of course she wanted to trace them to! And do-a-dot pages continue to delight her and give me a few minutes to get a chore done.

 We finished the week babysitting our friends' kids on a Friday night while they went out on a date. It's been such a blessing to trade babysitting and date nights. This time we had their 3 month old baby for the first time, so our hands were full! But it was also a lot of fun. Though there was so much to keep track of, when you're dishing up food for small plates, it isn't too much harder to dish up for four. Fun to think of years ahead. :) And to make it extra special, we made ice cream sundaes for the end of I week, with a tad of ice cream, some nutella (as I didn't have chocolate syrup), nuts, and chocolate chips. A sure fire way to delight children, and Hadassah was pretty excited to have something so fun to end our preschool week!

H is for Hearts and Hadassah

This week happened to be the week before Hadassah's birthday (which was on a Saturday). Pretty perfect to be studying the letter that fit for some focus on her! :D

 H is for an "H" snack. When the girlie asks for one and you don't have anything special planned, you make one out of whatever you were going to give her anyway. And she loves it! ;)

 H is for hands. Sometimes I use youtube to get a quick chore done. At least it was an active song which is always good for this energetic miss. And with it's simple words and actions, doing things slowly and then quickly (clapping, shaking, wiggling, etc.) it was a fun thing for me to use later with our little group of children at bible study.

 H is for Hide and Seek! It didn't take Ellie long to learn she was supposed to go find her favorite sister. :) It's what she does all day after all, trying to go wherever Hadassah goes! ;)

 We even got her to take a turn hiding. Oh how I love watching little ones grow!

 H is for Hugs. I can't even remember what prompted this particular one, but it always warms my heart to see sister hug. And Dassah has gotten better at not squeezing too tight... The height of the girls means Ellie gets almost strangled every time, but as long as Dassah doesn't squeeze too tight she doesn't mind. ;)

 H is for Highlighter. Sometimes it's the simplest things... Hadassah was curious about the highlighter, seeing me mark off things on our daily list for preschool with it. She wanted to highlight words too. And thus it began. This picture was taken a month ago. Since that day, nearly every day she has asked for something to highlight. Old church bulletins are her favorite. And it keeps her quite occupied, singing praise songs to God while she does or it, or reciting over and over (and over!) John 3:16. We've finally wised up and started collecting bulletins people leave on Sundays, because they are great time fillers that she really enjoys to highlight them! ;)

 H is for Hats. This was a fun freebie from Teachers Pay Teachers. Dassah really enjoyed matching the fun lower case hats to the uppercase penguin. She has gotten very particular about doing things like this starting from a and proceeding through the alphabet instead of just matching whichever hat she happens to pick up. Can be good and bad, but neat to see her really grasp the alphabet as a whole!

 H is for Houses of the Wise and Foolish - We read the story in Matthew about the man who built his house on the rock and the one who built it on the sand and acted it out a bit. Of course I had to make she only sprinkled the water on the rock, whereas we poured it straight from the bottle on the one on the sand...

 Because, yeah... if she poured it from the bottle on the one on the rock it also washed away completely. ;) You do what you can!

But she liked it so much she wanted to act it out again and again until we ran out of water! Of course we also had a Chinese mom and boy watching us almost the whole time, probably wondering what on earth we were doing!

 H is for Hearts. Cutting out different sizes in a variety of colors and then drawing hearts randomly on paper made a good activity for Bible study kids. They each took a glue stick and picked out the hearts they wanted and glued them down. Of course, it occupied all the children but my own. ;) Hadassah still isn't one for group/mostly solo activities...

H is for Heart Hunt! Having Hadassah's hearts left from the previous day meant I could use them the next day. I wrote sweet messages on them and hid them around the room for her to find.

 She really got into it then, and had the sweetest, awed smile as I read her the messages. She happened to be wearing a fitting heart shirt too!

 It was a good time to think of ways to encourage her. So much of motherhood is training and correcting and disciplining. It is always good for both of us to take time to focus on the positives.

H is for hearts on an H, a Hippo (who knew one could look so cute?) and a grassHopper! Okay, so the last one was just never done from G week so we did it this week. ;) Dassah is very into tracing letters these days - she enjoys that more than coloring.

H is for Hokey Pokey! Dassah actually followed along on most of the actions and Ellie got into it, dancing around herself and having a ball watching us. It's always fun for me to get up and move too!

 H is for Horsey Rides! The good ol' cross one leg over your knee and have them sit on your foot and bounce them up and down. Thankfully Hadassah helped by jumping up and down with her own legs too!

 Ellie absolutely loved it as well. The girls took turns until my legs couldn't take it anymore. ;)

 H is for Hadassah! It was fun to do a little "interview" of her. :) It will be fun to look back on her 3-year-old answers years from now. I have to say, though, she is highly influacable by what is around her. Take her favorite color: she almost always chooses purple things but just then she was coloring with a red marker, so I think that influenced her pick. ;) But the food is quite accurate. Youzi is a HUGE grapefruit type fruit that you peel in sections and eat. Dassah loves raw, grated zucchini, don't ask me why! And BiJiang Guangchang is the mall just 10 minutes taxi ride from us that has the best food we can find around here!

 H is for Heart biscuits. Biscuits just taste better in shapes when you're a little girl. ;)

 H is for Helper. It being birthday week, Thursday was the perfect day for Dassah to be my helper and make birthday cupcakes!

 H is for horse and our home! I love how Dassah drew each of us. Daddy had glasses, and each person got progressively smaller as she tried to fit them in the house. ;)

 H is for Heart lineup. Sensing a theme? There is just so many things you can do with hearts! Dassah did a good job lining up the numbers 1-10.

 H is for community Helper Bingo - This freebie makes for a fun game. Dassah has continued to ask to play it, so that makes it a winner!

 H is for Highlighting Hadassah. These days tracing anything is a win for her, and I like getting her familiar with how her name looks. :)

H is for Hiding Animals. I hid her stuffed animals around the room for her to find. Something about young ones means they love searching for things!

G is for Gumballs and Grasshoppers

I am way behind - we are studying K this week and here I am finally posting about G. ;) But there are so many fun things I want to keep sharing, though it may happen slowly! A water accident on Friday didn't help matters, as we spent the weekend wondering if our laptop had died. But God answers prayer, and all things are working well now - so grateful! Oh - and there's a G word to start us off!

G is for gumball. Funny thing is she has never used a gumball machine or eaten one. But she caught on to the concept quickly (kids seem to have no trouble imagining candy!) and enjoyed filling the numbered gumball machines with pompoms.

G is for God Made Me. We have used this "My First Hymnal" (a gift from my mom) so so many times. I highly recommend it. First it reminded me of children's songs to sing to my new baby, then she got to where she wanted me to sing straight through it whenever we could, and now we focus on one song a week. She doesn't usually sing WITH my for some reason, but often later on I hear her singing the songs as she plays. Nothing like that sweet, young voice singing praise!

G is for God's Great Plan. We start each morning with "couch time" where we review our verse, songs for week, and read books that have the letter of the week in the title. I really enjoy cuddling up with my girl and she really enjoys being read to. This book was also a gift, and is such a good, rhyming explanation of the Gospel for kids.

G is for Garden. For many of the weeks I have a new, educational book. I found good deals on Usborne flap books, and she really enjoys them. This one was no exception. :)

G is for Giggles. She laughed so much as I painted her foot for the craft we were doing (not wanting to waste paint/have the mess of her stepping into a pile of paint). But she didn't ask me to stop!

G is for Grasshopper. This Pinterest idea was one of my favorite animal crafts so far. :)

G is for Game. This little one never passes up an opportunity to play Candy Land!

G is for Green Light! She's always enjoyed Red Light, Green Light but she really really enjoyed it when I made a simple sign to use with it! This one you can see is already crumpled (the baby-meister) so I made another out of felt that has held up much better. :)

Dassah wanted to take turns being "the sign-ner" and Ellie really got in to playing the game too, though I had to hold her hand to make sure she stopped at appropriate times. ;)

We did some play with them going together. But that mostly involved in Ellie just walking and laughing the entire time. ;) Whatever gets us moving inside especially on rainy days, I am a fan of!

G is for Giraffe. I made a simple one out of felt and then told her (as I did some kitchen chore) how many spots to put on it. I changed the numbers a few times, and then told her to put them all on and count them.

G is for Gingerbread - she enjoyed decorating the man with glitter and stickers!

But she even MORE enjoyed making real gingerbread! ;)

G is for "grr." ;) We call these her "bear tracers" and she asks for them at least once a week, sometimes once a day! It's an easy activity that occupies her, and she is getting pretty good drawing shapes as she traces them!

G is for glitter! We used it to decorate her big G, and then traced little gs in the stuff that of course) ended up all over the table. ;)

G is for Garden again. We livened up this book by reading through it and finding the corresponding bug from the garden felt I made for her a while ago. :)

G is for Gymnastics. We practiced some sumersaults and hand stands, and then while I prepped lunch one day I let her watch some random videos of children in a gymnastics class on youtube. She was inspired and went out on the rug to do all kinds of gymnastics. Again, anything to get her moving!

G is for gumballs - This one was a flop for her. Could have been the wrong time of day, but after 3, she didn't want to match any more colors to the gumdrops. Oh well. I think at another time she would have enjoyed it, so there's still the idea if anyone wants it!

G is for Grandparents. Hadassah loves her grandparents so SO much! So I had her draw a picture of her with them, one for each set. Her pictures turned out adorable! I love the detail she gives them. No arms yet, but she carefully gives them hair and ears and sometimes "cheeks." :)

G is for another Game. Her little friend and her were pretty good at memory!

And Red Light, Green Light is more fun with a little buddy your size. :)

G is for Grin. Hadassah kept wanting to give Ellie a turn with the sign too. She had the hugest grin of feeling so very important and she walked towards us waving the sign the whole way. ;)

G is for G crafts. Love the grandparents. The water colors were a time filler while I skyped my sister. :) And the giraffe, yes I colored it. ;) She wanted to trace the letters, but didn't want to color that day. I kept doing some thinking to get her interested, but finally just finished it for the fun of it myself. :)

It was a fun week! Now I am weeks and weeks behind on pictures, of preschool play and just life. But oh well. Better late than never. I enjoy looking back at what we did. :)