Family Pictures 2012

A few weeks back we had some family pictures taken.  We try to have them taken once a year. It's fun to see the changes in the kids from year to year and in our family.  We also had my sister's family and my parent's come so we could get some pictures of the entire family.  Enjoy!

One of my favorite family shots

My little girl is growing up so fast!

Love him!!

Love this picture of Drew and me

The whole family...and everyone's actually looking at the camera.

Paw-Paw and Maw-Maw with their grandkids

Sisters and our precious kids

My sweet nephews!!  Love them!!

Cousins

Love this picture of my parents!

Jenna ran over to this rock and "posed" for our photographer.

Fall Festival

It just happened to work out perfectly that our church's Fall Festival was at the end of our Letter P week.  So even though Fall Festival starts with "F", there were plenty of pumpkins around to make it feel like a pumpkin festival - plus, Jenna wore her pumpkin shirt, so it works.  ;)

This was our church's 2nd annual Fall Festival and both years have been a lot of fun.  It's all free and there are game booths, candy prizes, door prizes, free lunch, inflatables, a costume contest (which we didn't participate in this year due to the fact that I'm behind on costume prep), a hayride, and pony rides.  Jenna has quickly figured out that you don't even have to win the games at the booths to get the candy prize - oh boy!  She was ALL about the candy, practically running from one booth to the next.  Of course we let them have a few pieces after dinner that night and I put the rest of the stash in a container in the pantry and, surprisingly enough, they've both forgotten all about it.  Maybe we can get that lucky with trick-or-treat candy too!

At the Fall Festival - both kids in their Halloween shirts.  Grant's is a glow-in-the-dark ghost shirt that I picked up at a garage sale this summer and Jenna's pumpkin shirt was handed down to us from a friend.  Believe it or not, the black shirt underneath was her Halloween shirt from last year with a glow-in-the-dark cat face on it.  I think this is the first time in her 3 1/2 years that she's stayed in one clothing size for more than one season.  I have to say, it's really nice!

The cutest little scarecrows.  I love how Jenna is the man and Grant's the little girl.  Haha!

On the hayride.  My cousin, Phil, drove the tractor for the hayride.  You can see his son, John, sitting up there next to him.  He loved helping his Dad!

Jenna on the hayride sitting next to her (2nd) cousin, Silas and another friend from church, Alyson.

Sliding down in the inflatable jumpy.  She loved this thing!  I think if that's all they had, she would have been completely happy.

Jenna on the big "pony."  There was a small pony there for the smaller children.  If you were over 50 lbs you had to ride the bigger one, so Jenna was in that line amongst all the big kids.  Grant and Drew stood in line for the small pony ride, but when it came to Grant's turn, he said he didn't want to ride it.  Stinker!  I think he would have enjoyed it, but no need to force it.

Brian, Kelley, and the boys came for a little bit, so we went on another hayride with them.  Aiden and Bentley's first hayride!  :)

A family pic on the hayride.

We had a great time and look forward to next year's Fall Festival! 

Week 8 - Letter P

So now we're back to our Letter of the Week program, but have skipped to the letter P.  In case you hadn't figured it out already, we're not going in alphabetical order.  I've moved letters around to specific times of the year where they fit better with the theme.  And since we were doing a lot of Pumpkin activities with the letter P, I moved it to early October.

Our memory verse this week was: Psalm 147:1 - "Praise the Lord!  For it is good, to sing praises to our God."

Computer game for the letter P - a favorite of both of theirs!

Letter P puzzle

Doing her magnet page - she wanted to fill the pumpkin with orange pom-pom magnets and was getting frustrated that there weren't enough. I finally convinced her that it was okay to use other colors. :)

Letter P Wikki Stix

Letter Search - I was able to stay next to her for this activity, hence the reason she stayed on task and only dotted the p's.  She loves her Do-a-Dot markers and sometimes goes a little "dot crazy"!

The pumpkin cut-and-paste.  There was a decent amount of cutting, which she grew tired of quickly, but with some encouragement she persevered through and got it done.

I pulled out some pumpkin-themed books I had from teaching - The Runaway Pumpkin was one of my favorites.

We made chocolate covered pumpkin pretzels.  Of course they didn't turn out as beautiful as the picture in the recipe, but they were still DELICIOUS!  Neither of the kids really wanted to dip their hands in the chocolate (probably because Mommy kept making them wash their hands when they put their chocolatey fingers in their mouths), so they helped put the green M&Ms on as stems instead.  Jenna also did a great job separating the green M&Ms from the rest of the colors.

Letter P Pattern Blocks

Do-a-Dot markers for the letter P

We used paper clips this time for our number cards instead of clothespins.  It was really good fine motor practice for Jenna to attach them to the cards.  Took a little practice, and a little help from Mommy.  I'm thinking I'll try this again, but maybe I should pick up more colored paper clips this time.  Color always makes things more fun for preschoolers, right?  :)

Poke page - I picked up some (magnetic) large thumb tacks in the clearance section at Wal-Mart.  Six for 25 cents - score!   I figured that would be more fun to use than the toothpicks, especially since the toothpicks easily break.

Pre-writing practice - She used her left hand on these pages.  Notice the bottom left-hand row - I was trying to have her practice resting the side of her hand on the table instead of holding her hand straight up.  It just looks so awkward with her hand up in the air, but then of course she started erasing her work as she went along.  It must be tough being a leftie. ;)

Another fun, Pinterest inspired, gross motor skill - pounding golf tees into a pumpkin.  Grant did pretty well considering the weight of the rubber mallet.

I figured Jenna would enjoy this activity, but I wasn't sure how easy (or hard) it would be to actually hammer them in the pumpkin.  Luckily she did just fine with it and REALLY enjoyed it!

Jenna glued pumpkin seeds on the letter P page from her ABC binder.

Pumpkin size sort - Jenna sorted them easily, so we tried to have Grant do it as well, but he wasn't interested at the time.  :)

How Many Pumpkins?  I put the number on the paper and she counted out the correct number of pumpkins.  She wanted to switch roles, so she picked out a few numbers and had me add the pumpkins.  Thankfully I passed!  ;)

Patterns

A few more pumpkin books that we read...

Grant helped Jenna make the letter P with their bodies.

The kids just love painting, so they got to paint some pumpkins one day.  The plan was then to put green hand prints as the stem once the pumpkins dried...but, as it seems to go, we didn't end up finishing the project.  (It was a REALLY busy week!)

Grant obviously wanted to paint more than just his pumpkin orange.  :) I kept telling him to paint on the pumpkin and not around it, but then realized that there's no reason he can't paint outside the lines.  This is his project, so he should be allowed to paint wherever he wants as long as it's on the paper.  I'm learning to let go and let them do their activities how they want to instead of how I envision them.  Boy can that be tough for me though!  :)

Jenna did a great job with this pumpkin file folder game.  She had to find the missing numbers in the number sequences. 

Pumpkin Letter Search

Pumpkin Graphing - We used pumpkin seeds to graph the number of pumpkins in each box.

Letter P Tracing Page - She even tried printing "p" on her own to the right of the tracing.

Grant gave it a try too

Pumpkin Lace Card

Letter P writing page

Coloring Page - I had her trace the words on the page this time and was impressed with how well she did.

After school one morning we had Popcorn for a snack and watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown."

While I was busy with Grant, Jenna moved on to the cutting page and did this page completely on her own.  Not too bad.  :)

Don't you just love her GIANT capital P? 

At the end of the week, we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and put the letter P on our coconut tree.

 

 

 

 

Jenna sporting her pumpkin shirt.

 

 

To go along with the Letter P, we did a few more P activities - we carved Pumpkins and went to the Park.  I know this post is getting long, but I thought I'd tack on some pictures of those fun activities. 

Pre-pumpkin carving

Grant looks a little nervous about sticking his hand in the pumpkin.

He did it, but wasn't too keen on how "yucky" it felt.  So Daddy ended up cleaning out the pumpkin while the kids watched.  We did some observations of the pumpkin using our five senses - how it felt, what it looked like, if it made any noise, and...

...how it smelled!

We then voted on which eyes, nose, and mouth we should use in carving the pumpkin.  Thankfully Mom and Dad's vote counted too, so we had a little sway in what was decided, especially since Daddy would be the one carving it.

The final carved outcome.

Mommy jumped in for a picture.

A visit to the park on a chilly night.

Swinging time

Daddy and Grant sliding down the slide together

 We also read a Pizza story, Pete's a Pizza, took family Pictures (I'll be posting those soon), and went out for Pizza.

We had a very busy, but fun week with the Letter P!