Candy Corn Pizza and Painting pumpkins

More Halloween fun!  We painted our smaller pumpkins yesterday and made candy corn pizza the day before.  Candy corn pizza is just cheese pizza with a ring of cheddar sprinkled on before baking to make the slices looked striped.  We make it every year and the kids loved it.  We also watched It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown which is available via  Hulu if you missed it on TV like we did.  We had read the book, so the kids really wanted to watch the cartoon. We also went to a Halloween party last night which was great fun until my eldest managed to get poked in the eye on the hayrack ride!  That child is so accident prone.  This is the second time he has ended up in the ER with a scratched cornea.  Boo!  He has to wear a patch for 24 hours which means he should get it off in time for Trick or Treating tomorrow night which is good.

Halloween Fun

Well all week we have been celebrating Halloween and of course centering school around it as well.  I printed off tons of folder games for the kids and made some of my own, and we are doing lots of projects.  Here are some pics of some of our favorites!

Painting with Halloween cookie cutters was tons of fun!

We made monster mouths with apples and marshmallows.

Of course pumpkin carving is the all time favorite!!

We made spiders out of oreos, pretzels and smarties.

These are just a few activities that we have done, and I am sure we will have more to post before long!

First Grade Math Coin Sorting

We have been working with my Princess on her money sorting and counting.  Now with my eldest, we had all this play money for this purpose and a workbook, but we decided to skip all that with her and go for the real thing.  I have a little basket where I throw spare change, so we dug that out and just set to work in a very hands on manner.  I had her sit at the table and spread a bunch of change in front of her.  We talked about the different coins and what they are worth last year so we started with some review.  I showed her each coin, and told her the name of it and what it was worth.  Then I had her hand me random coins and tell me what they were worth.  Next we took a pile and made a sort of graph on the wipe of board and I had her sort out the coins by what they are worth and compare amounts.  We repeated these activities for a week, and then moved on to counting money.  So far she is doing good with the counting dimes by tens and we haven't moved on to nickles by fives but that is our next goal.  Right now she can count the dimes and pennies together fairly well.  Yay!  I am really enjoying working with the actual coins with her rather than pictures of coins or paper punch-out ones.

I really should take a picture of little guy too!  He loves attempting to sort the coins with her, and can sort the pennies out from the silver colored coins.

My Little Man is Growing up!

My eldest just turned 8 on Tuesday!  I can't believe how fast kids grow up!  He had a super fun cookout party on Monday.  This was actually the first year that I can remember it ever being nice enough to have his party outside.  Thank goodness for a bit of an indian summer!  We had a fire and hotdogs, and cake and ice cream of course.  We blew up the jumper and everyone had a good time.

Dairy Free Corn and Potato Chowder in Slow cooker.

Well, Little guy has been getting tired of his usual dairy free dining and is rejecting some once loved foods, so I went on the hunt for some dairy free foods.  Unfortunately most of them are ridiculously complicated, so I found an easy recipe for Corn and Potato Chowder and did a major overhaul on the ingredients.  Here's what I came up with and this is a large batch--makes 10 servings.

1 large bag of cubed hash browns
1 bag of frozen corn or two cans of corn drained
4 cups of chicken broth
1/2 cup of diced onions
salt and pepper to taste
10 slices of pre-cooked bacon crumbled
Instant potato flakes

Combine all ingredients but the potato flakes, and cook on high for 3 hours in a slow cooker.  Then add potato flakes to desired thickness and cook 10 more minutes.  We served with shredded cheese for those in the family who could have dairy and just plain for those who couldn't.  Little guy preferred his without bacon, but he loved it!!

Field Trip Number 2--to the ZOO

We decided last minute to make a Zoo trip Monday!  It was super fun and we invited a few cousins.  Everyone had a blast.  Little guy actually rode the ponies and loved it which kinda surprised me!  The older two have always been leery of stuff like that.  My princess won't even let me push the stroller NEAR the ponies or goats and was even scared of the elephants.  My eldest rode the ponies AFTER he saw how much fun his baby brother had!  lol  My princess got much braver in the bird house after she saw the Scarlet Macaws.  She loves them thanks to seeing them on Diego.  The boys both rode the carousel as well which she refused but everyone had fun on the train at the end of the day.

Oatmeal Playdough--Sensory Play

This was our Sensory Therapy activity of the day.  We made oatmeal play-dough and had tons of fun!  Bonus was this activity Little Guy even got in on, although he didn't want to help with the mixing.  He loves play-dough, so we are trying to add more textures to the experience.  This play-dough had a slightly dry scratchy texture.  Extra water makes it more on the sticky side.

1.  Mix 2 parts oatmeal with 1 part flour in a large bowl.

2. Mix measure out one part water and mix food coloring into the water.  The color mixes in easier this way.  Kneed with hands

until it forms a ball. 

 

 

We repeated steps one and two for more colors!

3. Play!!!

UPDATE::  We unfortunately discovered the hard way that this playdough recipe should be refrigerated for storage.  After a few days, it has started to get kinda smelly, so awesome playdough recipe though!  We will have to make it again and refrigerate!