Saturday, May 26, 2012

Making House Work Fun!

 One day, while cleaning up the house I thought of a creative way to get the kids involved. I made name tags! Yup... that's it! Name tags is ALL it took to get the kids doing house work. I'm serious!! It's true!! Not only that! They expanded it into reading, writing, and they also decided to do more than what the name tags implied they should do! 

Her name tag read "Official Duster Girl" and his was "Official Floor Boy". We redid his name tag to include other tasks. I can't remember what the final name tag said. 

They decided to grab the small clip boards that we bought recently at the dollar store and some recipe cards and started to make a check list. After each task was done they'd put a check to the side of each task they wrote down and would give me a verbal update of what is finished and what they still needed to do.

When Zoe cleaned the table and chairs, she made an "Out of Order" sign for each side, so that nobody would sit down and get wet. 

I was so impressed with how one simple thing brought about such an educational, imaginative, and fun day!

Monday, May 21, 2012

Book Sharing Monday - Animalia

 This is a book we've borrowed and read many times since we have moved back to Ontario. I'm not sure why it's a favourite, but it could be the cool pictures and the interesting alphabetical descriptions.

Zoe usually is the one bringing this book home. Austyn's favourite page is the one on dragons.

We discovered, after reading this book a few times, that there is a child hiding in every picture. My kids love looking for hidden things in pictures, so they loved this book even more then they already loved it.