well, hello there!

It sure has been awhile!  Have you missed me?  ;)  I have most definitely missed the blog world, and lately I've been feeling pretty inspired to give it a go again.  I'd like to introduce you to my biggest inspiration, my lovely new little friend and daughter, Elise.  She was born last July, and I am head over heals for her - sorry Hubs and Rosie, but you've kind of been replaced.  Ha, ha!  JK!  I still love my husband and dog -  having a sweet baby is just the icing on the cake.  Anyway, I've stopped teaching to stay at home with Elise.  I miss all my little pupils back at the Montessori preschool, but I am having lots of fun making materials and creating a Montessori environment for Elise here at home.  I've gotten many great ideas online (umm, pinterest is incredible!!!), and I'm ready to start sharing what Elise and I have been up to here on the blog.  There!  Now you're caught up with me, so what's new with you?    

peep, peep!

Happy Easter,

friends!!!

recycled egg crown tutorial

We wanted to celebrate Earth Day AND Easter, so we decided to make some festive eggs crowns using materials from our classroom recycling bin.  It was sort of a fusion of two projects I'd seen on the Crafty Crow:  Sew Together's Easter Egg Crown and El Hada De Papel's Easy Yarn Easter Egg Tutorial.  The children LOVED making these eggs.  Sometimes I feel like crafty projects require a little too much adult assistance, but this one was just right for the 3 to 4-year-olds in my classroom.  Anyway, anyone who's anyone around here wants one of these crowns, so I decided to put together a little tutorial.  Here it goes!
 

  What you'll need:

• broken down cracker boxes
• old catalogs, magazines, paper, etc.  {we also used unclaimed child artwork}
• sissors
• glue
• marker

DISCLAIMER:  I keep forgetting to take photos at school, so I put this tutorial together at home.  At school, we used a glue stick rather than Elmer's and we most definitely DID NOT use a Sharpie marker for tracing!
 

Draw an egg-shaped oval on the inside of the box.  The one above is free-handed; at school, we used a stencil.  

Cut up magazines and paper into strips.  Our strips were all 1/4 to 1 inch wide.  It doesn't really matter how long they are - it's kind of fun if they're different lengths.

Cut out the egg-shape and apply glue to one side.

Stick paper strips to the egg-shape until it's entirely covered.

 

At this point, the children were pretty curious about why I had covered up the egg-shape...

They were SO excited to see that the egg was on the other side - it was a little like a magic trick!  Love them!

Cut around the egg-shape, using the edge of the cardboard as a guide.

Turn it over, and now you have a lovely paper egg!  Oooooooo! Aaaaaaahhhh!

AND, if you are so inclined, staple, glue, or tape several of these eggs to a longer strip of paper attached at the ends, and you'll have a fabulous crown!

I picked Hubs up from work wearing the crown and these sunglasses, and he was definitely impressed! 


Happy weekend!

chicks {real ones coming soon...}

We saw lilla a's cute, felt chickies over on The Crafty Crow this morning, and just had to make some.  Not only are they fun to put together and sweet to look at, but they double as fab finger puppets, too!  Check out lilla a for the photo tutorial. 

peep, 

     peep!

busy hands

the ridiculously popular

bead work lesson, 

in action

building towers 

with the knobless cylinders

 skip counting by eights 

{can YOU do this?}

building and writing a useful word 

with the moveable alphabet 

{useful words are words that get used frequently, 

but you can't quite sound them out - the, is, of, are, was....}

exploring objects from the 

"l" drawer of the alphabet box

{explore OUR alphabet box here}