Friday Favorites and Freebies: General Conference Ideas

Our family really looks forward to the first weekend of April (and October!) for the special broadcast of General Conference.
Confessions of a Slacker Mom has put together a very comprehensive pinterest board for General Conference of outstanding ideas of ways to keep even the {littlest} of viewers excited and learning.
I'm also a big fan of her Walk Beside Me preschool curriculum that she creates and shares for free for our {little} people like this one:

This article has more great ideas about how to make Conference meaningful before, during, and after with some great ideas of traditions to start in your own family.
So many fun things to learn...so {little} time!  Enjoy!
Happy Weekend!

Rice Krispies filled Easter Egg Treats {surprise!}

Filling plastic eggs with jelly beans and candy is so... predictable.


Want to give them a happy {little} surprise instead?

Surprise!


My kids LOVE these rice krispie filled easter egg treats!

{this Little Project} is easy to make and festive too!

Follow the instructions on the package to make rice krispie treats but instead of putting them in a pan, you will form small egg shapes instead.


{little project tip}: rub some butter on your hands. It makes shaping them soooo much easier!

Then check to make sure the treat will fit into your plastic eggs and go ahead and roll it in sprinkles!

Then close them up and wait.  


No one will suspect, so it's a fun {little} surprise when they are opened!

And yes, the grown-up version of {this little project} means I dip them in chocolate ;)


It's the {little} things, right?

BONUS! {this little project} is kid-friendly to make 
(especially if you melt the marshmallows and butter in the microwave, like I do!)

More Moving in the "right" Direction

I'm over at abcand123learning.com today teaching more about following directions with some fun music to learn the directions (right/left and north/south/east/west).  

They go along perfectly with the
 {little} mapping egg hunt {project} here. 

 Come over to find some fun songs to sing and learn with!

Mapping An Easter Egg Hunt

It's that time of the year when I get a {little} sneaky and use 

our plastic Easter eggs to have a {little} extra fun learning.

My son Jay loves maps. He's pretty good at reading them so 

the other day we bought a compass for him at the store to try out.  

All the way home he told me which direction I was driving. 

It was a lot of fun!  

So instead of the usual Easter egg hunt, I put together a 

Direction egg hunt to help him practice learning to follow 

directions and direct himself using north, south, east, and west 

with his compass.

Kay isn't quite ready for the compass so her egg hunt was 

about counting her steps and practicing left and right.  

With Easter coming up and plastic eggs everywhere, 

I thought I would share {this little} resources with you 

as a fun way to practice learning to move in the right direction.

Since we were doing 2 different egg hunts, we have the boy eggs with directions for using the compass in them to find them all:
   
And the girl eggs to practice counting steps and turning right and left.

The great thing about using colored eggs is that when you hide 

them you can note which color that the kids will find first, 

second, etc.--just in case they get confused at some point 

and need to backtrack. Re-tracing their steps is all part of 

learning which way to go.

For each egg I put in a paper in that describes:

the type of movement (walking forward/backward, hop, etc.)

the direction of the movement (right/left, or north/south, etc.)

Here are some fill-in the blank papers I used:

Compass Egg Hunt Directions

You can fill in the blanks to fit where you hide your eggs.
When you are done, it would be fun to draw a map of where your hunt took you, looking at the clues you used to find the eggs.
I also used {this little} activity to talk about how important it is to follow directions to get where they are going and not get lost.  There are a lot of applications for teaching {this little} lesson.  
Of course learning about which direction is which is an important {little} lesson too :)

p.s. I am a guest writer at abcand123learning.com and shared some fun songs and musical activities to go along with {this little project} {here}.

Butterfly Snack (craft!)

Some of my favorite {little} projects are the ones we get to eat!
This past week we've been enjoying such warm spring weather and we put together a {little} butterfly snack to go with our butterfly finger puppets.
This a photo of the one that Kay made:

To make {this little project} start by cutting 2 circle crackers cut in half for the wings(use a sawing motion to cut for best results)
cover the crackers with peanut butter (you could use marshmallow spread if you have an allergy) 
and then add rainbow chocolate covered sunflower seeds to the "wings" 
The "caterpillar body" in the middle is a gummy worm, of course!
 Jay decided to watch the praying mantis life cycle this year, instead of the butterflies we did last year. And good news!  Our praying mantis egg (and the fruit flies to feed the baby mantises) arrived in the mail today!  
We have one excited little boy!  I'll have to let you know how {this little} science experiment turns out.  
I have a feeling we won't be making a look-a-like snack for them though ;)

How to make a Leprechaun Trap (2 of them!)

Well, we didn't catch any leprechauns in our traps this year...but Jay's art teacher did such a good job designing them and Jay had so much fun setting them, that I had to share them anyway...for next year, right?

This first leprechaun trap has a clothes hanger attached behind the rainbow that is cut and bent to go under the green paper too.  The clothes hanger is bent to hold up the plastic container. 

  

The "pot of gold" has pennies in it to weigh it down to hold the string in place.  When the {little} leprechaun comes to snatch the treasure the trap (plastic container) will fall on him!  

The "gold" on top is a gold foil wrapper in a mound that looks like gold!

His teacher told him that leprechauns do NOT like rules.  So they made a sign to stay off of the grass, just to tempt them closer!  

This is the second trap they made:  It's from a 2 liter soda pop bottle.  They cut off the top and used a cottage cheese lid to go over the top and covered it with felt.  The gold on top is the pop bottle lid upside down with pieces of gold circle fabric in it.

When the leprechaun climbs the ladder (bamboo skewers, I think) he walks across the top to get to get to the gold and he falls inside!  They had cut a hole in top of the lid and holes in the felt but covered it with felt so he wouldn't know!

Kay and Ellie have had fun setting it off...or was it the leprechauns that had escaped?  
It's a good thing we still had our own leprechaun peg dolls in their village to play with so we're not too disappointed.  
And you know those {little} shamrock necklaces and skirts?  They made the front page of our local newspaper for St. Patrick's Day!

Good Luck catching some {little} leprechauns!

Shamrock Necklace and Dress Up

For St. Patrick's Day my mom sent the cutest little shamrock skirts for Kay and Ellie.  

My mom is an amazing seamstress.  And since I was an irish step dancer for many many years, we take the holiday seriously and get all decked out.  Actually, we don't need much excuse for a party around here--we love to have an extra reason for fun!

We made {little} shamrock necklaces to go with the skirts she sent.  

These shamrock necklaces are super easy and quick to make!

Just take a sparkly chenille stem and bend it in half.  That's the top of the shamrock.  Basically you shape 3 hearts after that.  The part that is left is the stem and you twist it together to close it up.  We used green yarn to hang it.

Jay didn't get a skirt, but he wasn't going to be entirely left out of {this little project} so he got one too.

We certainly have some silly {little} leprechauns around here!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

St. Patrick's Day Tangrams

Jay has been at work designing tangrams for Kay to do.  I love watching him come up with new ideas.  After he builds them, we trace them and then Kay has a pattern to work with to build them too!
There aren't many ideas on the web for St. Patrick's Day tangrams so I took some photos of what he came up with.  I don't have patterns to share because my scanner won't cooperate...
Shamrock Tangram:

Irish harp tangram: (not our best, but our best effort--this was a tricky one!)
Tangram Leprechaun:
Tangram Pot of Gold:

Enjoy!

Leprechaun Land (in the village)

We've been playing with {little} people this week: the leprechauns have been at our house!

Jay has 2 leprechaun traps set in our house but those sneaky {little} leprechauns keep escaping when the traps go off (The traps he made at his art class are darling and I'll try to get some photos to share.)
Since we haven't had much luck catching them, we made our family into leprechaun peg dolls instead!

We have had so much fun with other {little} building projects in our village and playing with our pilgrim peg people in our Thanksgiving Village.   
So, naturally, we had to make a Leprechaun Land to add into our village.  For those of you who haven't seen our other village projects, it's kind of like a doll house, made into many houses.  There's so much more fun to have that way!
Want a tour of {this little} magical land?
You got it.
There's quite a bit of dreaming up that you can do with some felt and the invention box.
Here's how the leprechauns get from our land to theirs...This magical lane was made from the side of a cereal box, and chenille stems, and then covered with some rainbow fabric.
This is a leprechaun apartment (cardboard covered with fabric).  Here's a close-up:  leprechaun Ellie has a toadstool table, leprechaun Kay is taking a {little} nap.

Our toadstools (on the left) were drawer pulls painted by Jay and Kay.  The top of this house in the middle is from a top of a spray cool whip can.  Under that is a yogurt cup with part of a lei glued around the bottom of it.  The leprechauns like to hid in there with their gold!
We like to use scrabble tiles to practice spelling words while we play in our {little} land.
Are you wondering where all of the leprechaun gold came from?  It was a gold colored bead necklace that Jay and Kay cut up to put in their {little} buckets.  It's perfect!

Kay likes to count the gold...
And Ellie likes to dump it...and gather it....and dump it...
We made a paper towel tube into a rainbow that they can slide down.  Right now it looks like they land in the swimming pool when they come out!  But there's gold there too, as promised!


Here's our family turned into {little} leprechauns.  
Jay told me that he read in a book that there are no girl leprechauns--it's strictly a guy thing.  Whatever.  As if girls always have to be pretty little fairies....
So I'm on the lookout for a book that includes the female gender in the leprechaun tales.  Let me know if you know of any!


 I love seeing {little} minds and hands busy imagining and learning.  So {this} was definitely a lucky {little project}. 

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Leprechaun Peg Dolls

We've caught some leprechauns at our house!

These cute {little} leprechauns have been found all over our house!  

I'll try to catch them at work and show you their leprechaun land tomorrow ;)

 

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p.s. if you want to make your own peg people, check out {this little project} from the archives for more details.

Good Luck Treat Tag Printable

This past week was a {little} extra busy around here.  We had our Nana here, celebrated Ellie's birthday, and all my piano students completed a major national piano test.  I'm a nationally certified teacher in piano performance and {LOVE} teaching.  But this test was not for the faint-hearted!

This test pulled out all the stops with testing in performance, sight reading, theory, transposition, technique, and ear training.  I've never heard so many talented pianists in one day before.  These kids were amazing and worked so hard.  It was more of a {little} by {little} kind of project, since it added up to a big day!

I wanted to send my students with a {little} extra luck so I sent them home with {this little} good luck treat at their lesson.  

Here's a little money-saving tip: I love to buy extra bags of m&m's after Christmas when they are on sale.  I pull out the red ones for Valentine's Day and the green ones for St. Patty's day.  This year I got extra bags of mint m&m's and there were white and green together in them.  I knew they would be perfect for {this little project} in March...and don't worry, the expiration date on those bags of yummy Christmas m&m's isn't even close yet!

For {this little project} I used the "fonts for peas" fonts by Kevin and Amanda on the gift tag.  They are some of my favorite fonts and they are free to download!  

You can find them here.

March seems to be a busy month with all kinds of reasons to send some good luck vibes so I'll share the tag so you can send some good luck too!

Good Luck

  

These {little} tags are simple to make: punched circle, sticker shamrock, green baker's twine, and a printed green tag (above), with green and white m&m's.


Have fun sending someone some extra luck!

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