Top 5 of the Week

I decided to join in the fun with a new Mr. Linky on one of my favorite blogs Superheros and Princesses. The task is to write your Top 5 things that you enjoyed last week. Here is goes….

5. Homemade Playdough (Plastilina hecha en casa). We play outside when it is cold. We play outside when it is wet. We do NOT, however, play outside when it is cold AND wet. Needless to say, we have been stuck in the house A LOT this week. Thank heavens for the playdough that we made earlier in the week and the hours of entertainment for the boys (and sanity for mommy) that it has provided. Click here to get recipes in English and Spanish.

4. Maploco. I just added the widget for the Maploco on my blog and I have to say that I LOVE IT. It shows you where in the world your readers are from. Each day D and I look at the list and then find the places on our globe. So far we have located Japan, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, England, Spain, and Italy (just to name a few.)

3. Papa Murphy's Pizza. I do not know if you have this pizza chain where you live but it is awesome! It is a take and bake type of restaurant so I took the boys for the second time to watch as they made our pizza and we took it home to cook it. It is cheap, it is entertaining for the boys, and they give us free cookies while we wait. As my high school students say, “Score!”

#2 My son’s preschool. D attends a Spanish Immersion preschool two days a week while I am at school teaching. (I am a part-time public school Spanish teacher.) This week he was chosen as the Super Estrella de la Semana (Super Star of the Week.) This meant that mommy got to help him make a poster about himself (which I will brag, I mean blog about soon) and bring an item for show and tell. I was sad to miss his first-ever presentation so I was so excited when his teacher gave me pictures that she took for me during his presentation.

#1 Working part-time. It was a hard sell to my school district two years ago. I wanted to continue teaching, but part-time. I felt like I was missing so much the first year and a half of D's life when I would be gone from 6:30 to 5:00 or 6:00 (depending on tutoring and other after school activities). I was miserable. Nobody thought that they would accept my offer but here I am two years later and extremely happy. It is such a blessing to work part-time. I get to make some extra money that we desparately need, but I also get to eat lunch with my boys every day and take them to pumpkin patches in the afternoon. :)

Spanish Enrichment- Semillitas de Aprendizaje

Last week for Spanish Enrichment, I shared a link to watch one of our favorite cartoons on YouTube- Pocoyo. Today I want to share a link to an excellent bilingual preschool website called Semillitas de Aprendizaje or Seeds of Learning. I found this website this summer when D and I were learning about dientes (teeth) before his first dentist appointment. I do not remember what I googled to find it but I found this site with a cartoonish story in Spanish about un cocodrilo que ha perdido un diente (a crocodile that has lost his tooth.) D LOVED it so we explored the website more and found more simple preschool appropriate stories and games that covered topics such as colors, counting, and shapes. If you have a preschooler (or you yourself are a beginning level Spanish learner) you should check out this website. The games are simple and the narrators speaks slowly and clearly. Another bonus is the English version that you can listen to if you did not quite understand everything. If you get a chance to check out this website, please let me know what you or your child thought of it!

What my child is reading...

Our favorite book of the week was Mariposa Mariposa (Butterfly Butterfly). I could not find a picture of this book on Amazon but you can find it here. It is a very simple and colorful book about a little girl who finds and then loses a butterfly. While she is looking for the butterfly she finds other creepy crawlers (un gusano (worm), un escarabajo (beetle), etc.) This is an excellent book to learn the vocabulary of bugs and colors. All Spanish.

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We have checked Si Llevas un Ratón a la Escuela out from the library several times. D grabbed it again on the way out this week. We love all of the books in this series and as I am sure you know, they are available in English. D's favorite part of this book is when the mouse makes a mouse house out of blocks and furniture out of play-doh. I caught D making little chairs while playing with his play-doh this week.

El Primer Halloween de Clifford. Clifford and Halloween. Enough said.

Open Ended Art- El Monstruo

This is the first time that we joined in the fun at Open Ended Art by Growing By Leaps and Bounds. This week the theme was fall colors- red, orange, brown, and yellow. I pulled out paper of each of these colors and ask D what he would like to do with them. He, of course, wanted to cut, ALOT. He spent a good twenty minutes cutting shapes. My favorite part was hearing him talk about the cuadrados (squares) and how they have cuatro lados (four sides). When he finally finished making a pile of cut paper, I asked him it he would like to glue them on the orange paper and make something. He created the monstruo (monster) that you see below. Overall, it was a very fun experience and we will be doing Open Ended Art again!

Plastilina hecha en casa (Homemade Play-doh)

It was a raining afternoon and M took an early nap so D and I made play-doh or in Spanish "plastilina." We used to make it every couple of weeks because D LOVES play-doh. When M got old enough to sit with us but not old enough to not eat and throw play-doh everywhere, I put it into retirement for a while. Today we made a big batch and divided it into three bowls. I let D add red and yellow to one bowl, yellow and blue to another bowl, and red and blue into the third bowl. D loves to mix colors and I figured that anaranjado (orange), verde (green), and morado (purple) were Halloween colors anyway. :) If you would like a recipe in English click here. (I like recipe #1 best.) If you would like a recipe in Spanish click here.

M is making that face because play-doh does NOT taste good. M apparently still hasn't outgrown eating the plastilina. :)

B de Bruja (Witch)

D and I have been working on his letters for well over a year now. We used to do one letter-picture a week but I stopped when it was obvious that he knew all of his letters. Lately he has been asking to do a "letra" and I obliged. I always find such cute ideas for letter-pictures on other sites but they usually do not work for us since we are focusing on the Spanish alphabet. This day D requested to do "B" so we made a bruja. I traced the pieces and he cut them out. By far, his favorite part was cutting the gray yarn. (I was excited too because I have had that darn gray yarn forever and had no idea what to do with it.)

I am going to start including Spanish vocabulary that we used during our projects. I hope that you find it useful. :)

yarn- el hilo

scissors- las tijeras

hat- el sombrero

broom- la escoba

black cat- el gato negro (Notice the cat that D drew under the witch.)

What my child is reading...

M is about to turn 18 months (my, how times flies) and is very into books right now. D has always been a book worm but M just started to sit down with books for more than two seconds. Today I am posting a couple of M's favorite books this week.

Muu. Bee. Asi fue is a book about different animals and the sounds that they make. We have liked all of the Sandra Boynton books. You can read them in English and in Spanish. They are board books which are great for my Mr. Destructo.

¿Dónde está el ombliguito? by Karen Kat is a lift-a-flap book. Each page ask where a certain body part is and the child lift the tab to see it. This book is also available in English.

Este no es mi perrito is a must-have for babies. Each page shows a different dog and explains that it can not be my dog because (for example) it is has soft fur and then the child can actually touch the soft fur. These books are available in English as well.