Turkey Cookies

It's great when your child gets old enough to start helping out in the kitchen. It's wonderful time spent together making memories, developing skills, and it opens the door to have great conversations with your children.
Usually when it's my daughters' turn to bring a snack to pre-school, we have her take something healthy. Because that's the way we eat at home.
But, with Thanksgiving next week, I thought it would be fun to have her help me make a fun snack to take. And it involved sugar. Lots of sugar!
But,the Holidays come around only once a year, right?
We took fudge striped cookies, Nutter Butters, mini m&ms, and frosting and made these!

Cute little booger, huh?

Enjoy creating memories with your children in the kitchen this Holiday Season!

Themes

I am a theme person! It makes planning so much easier, and I believe that some (not all) play needs to be organized and planned. So for example here is my theme for this week:

A Mad Hatter Tea Party
this is because Orem Library is having a Mad Hatter Tea Party Teddy Bear Picnic the week of June 7-12

Here is what we plan to do to get excited for the teddy bear picnic:


Mad Hatter Hats fro TLC
These are made out of a brown paper bag!






Edible Teacup from Disney Family
Totally looks simple!


And of course we will head outside for a round of croquet!

I only do one thing a day, so I plan for 10-15 minutes to do our activity.

Reading Time

Well, this is my first post, I'm a little nervous! But since we are talking about books and reading I thought I would share as well!

I LOVE reading! I always have! I think it's because my MOM read to us for as long as I can remember. My mom home schooled all 6 of us kids. WOW! I have no idea how she did it! But we would start each day with a devotional. We would sing a hymn {maybe a future post on that}, read out of the scriptures and then my mom would read us a chapter out of a book. She read us children's books like ' Mrs. Piggle Wiggle', 'Stewart Little', older children's books like ' Chronicles of Narnia', Harry Potter, and then books like ' Lord of the Rings', the classic 'Robin Hood' and 'the Black Arrow', among many others.
So you see, at a young age we had been exposed to great literature, and now all of my siblings and I LOVE to read. I thank my mom for instilling that love in us!
Now that I have a young daughter, I have been reading to her from when she was a newborn. A newborn? Yes! You can never start reading to your children too early. As babies, they will just love to hear your voice, even if you are just reading your magazine articles out loud to them! When babies get older and you start reading picture books to them, let them turn pages. Even if they skip a few pages, just read whatever is on the page they skip to. At that age, they won't really notice what you are reading anyway.
As they get older, they can start to turn individual pages and recognizing the sequence of the story, so they will know if you've skipped a part or not!
Anyway, reading to babies and young children is sooo important! It helps with their language development, helps them to learn to focus and listen,is great bonding time, and provides wonderful 'quiet time'. Now-a-days children can get sooo over stimulated!
So read away to your children, young and older. They will grow and learn from it, it provides a great bond between the two of you, and they WILL remember the times when their mom read to them!