The Smith Family Adventures

I got a bit behind on writing for the blog. Nathan and I have been spending our evenings after the boys are in bed taking in Arrested Development season 4. We got a free netflix trial for one month so we’ve got to take advantage while we can. Last night, we finished the 15th and final episode so I told Nathan I needed a break from tv watching.

We talked about the letter G in our house last week. To be specific, we talked only about hard G. We had a lot of fun so we’ll keep plugging along the alphabet. Here is what we did:

Saturday: G is for Goody’s

We took a trip to Sunriver, Oregon over Memorial Day weekend. One long standing tradition of our family trips to Sunriver has always been going to Goody’s ice cream shop. Since Elias doesn’t like ice cream, I bought him a chocolate covered pretzel instead. When I offered it to him, he stated emphatically that he did not want it. He did, however, steal the chocolate truffle I had purchased for myself. I was skeptical if he’d do more than take one small bite. However, after his first bite, he said, “MMMM!” and popped the rest of it in his mouth where he struggled to chew it for the next couple minutes. He enjoyed that truffle a lot!

Sunday: G is for Goliath

Since we were out of town and not attending church on Sunday, I thought it would be good for us to do our Bible lesson on Sunday. We did the David and Goliath story. Nathan read it aloud to Elias and talked with him about it. When we went to the pool in the early afternoon, we drove past the Sunriver community church and saw the parking lot was packed! That made us feel like sinners….I guess no one is perfect.

Monday: G is for Glitter

Elias has enjoyed using glitter in his art class so I thought it would be fun to do a project with glitter. However, the nice thing about art class is that you don’t have to deal with the mess! Since we were going to be at home, I went with glitter glue sticks instead of traditional glitter. I was going to have Elias accent a piece of art/picture with the glitter glue, but he had a hard time getting it out at first. Once he figured out how to squeeze the tubes and actually get some out, he mostly wanted to make big piles of it. So I just let him go to town on a blank piece of paper. He asked me to help him write his name and draw a few shapes so he squeezed while I moved his arms. But mostly, he just had fun trying something new!

Tuesday: G is for Gorilla

We read the book “Goodnight Gorilla.” Elias loves that book!

Wednesday: G is for Greg

We talked about Uncle Greg, who has moved to Ohio, and we painted a few pictures to send to him. I will not show them here so that they will be a surprise to Uncle Greg once I figure out what his new address is.

Thursday: G is for Guitar

We did a guitar art project, then I got out our guitar and played a bit for Elias. First, I cut out a guitar shape from a piece of cardboard and let Elias paint it with tempera paints. After that dried, we cut out a black circle and attached pipe cleaners for the strings. Then we got out the guitar. Unfortunately, I hadn’t played for a long while and I found that I had forgotten a lot of the chords I used to know. Luckily I was able to manage a couple songs to sing with him. I held the guitar and fingered the chords while he strummed. He was so excited to actually be playing.

Finally, Elias got to hold and “play” the guitar all by himself. He played for Simon who was quite interested in the sounds it was making!

On Friday, Elias showed off his guitar to Baba

Friday: G is for Garbage

I checked a bunch of books about garbage, garbage trucks, and recycling out from the library. We read them together. Some of Elias’ favorites were I Stink by Kate and Jim McMullen and Trashy Town by Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha. We also read a couple nonfiction books about garbage trucks.

We had a lot of fun studying Ff this week. One day this week as I was talking to Elias, I asked him what words he knows that start with F. He named the words we had studied already (flowers and friends). Then I asked him if he knew any more words that start with F. He said, “F is for fuh….fuh….fuh….kangaroo!” Well….at least he knows what sound F makes even if he isn’t really connecting it with the beginning sounds of words yet.

Saturday: F is for Flowers

Elias filling the pots with potting soil…or “we’re doing dirt!” as he put it.

Saturday morning my husband went fishing so I was home with the boys. I took Elias to the Fred Meyer gardening section and allowed him to choose some flowers to plant in deck pots for our balcony. He had a lot of fun picking out flowers. Later that evening after my husband was home to watch the baby, I took Elias out on the deck and we potted the flowers together. He loved it! Every day since then, he has wanted to water the flowers. Unfortunately, it has been raining so he hasn’t had much of a need to water his plants!

Adding some more soil after we potted the plants.

Smoothing out the soil to get it ready for plants

Watering his plants

Elias wanted to show his plants to the camera

Proud boy!

Sunday: F is for Fire

Sunday was Pentecost so I thought that F is for Fire would be appropriate. I made us grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and I surprised Elias with a birthday candle in each one. He was delighted! We explained to him about the birthday of the church, and then he got to blow out the candle…his favorite part!

Monday: F is for Friends

On Monday, Elias got to make a gift for some of his friends. He is part of a play group on Tuesdays. He chose a paper mache box of a different shape for each of his friends. Then, I got out our tempra paints, and let him paint away. He loved painting of course! On Tuesday, we gave them to his friends to take home.

Tuesday: F is for Frogs

On Tuesday we sang lots of frog songs. Elias’ favorite was Five Little Speckled Frogs

Wednesday: F is for Father

We sang the “Our Father in Heaven” song which is the Lord’s Prayer set to music. Then, we talked about how Father is another word for Daddy, and he painted a big letter F which will be part of a Father’s Day card for his Daddy. I won’t put a picture of the finished product so that it will be a surprise for Daddy, but here you can see him just starting out:

Thursday: F is for Food

Today we played with his wooden food. We prepared breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and pretended to eat it. We also went grocery shopping in the evening and talked about the food we were buying.

Friday: F is for Fishermen

Well…I don’t think I would be considered a Bartle if I did not include fish in some way this week. Tomorrow we will play with Elias’ fishing pole. Since it is the Bible lesson day, I am going to read him the story of Jesus telling the fishermen to cast their nets again, and they get more than they can carry!

This week was Ee week in the Smith household. Elias liked it because his name starts with E. He kept saying, “I start with E!” I think Elias can definitely hear the sounds in words, but often he only talks about words we’ve used in our study rather than applying it to new words. But he’s only two after all. He seems to be most interested in talking about the letter B and words that start with buh. Almost every time I brought up the letter E this week he either referenced his name or wanted to talk about Bb.

Ee was a difficult letter for me to think of letter of the week activities so I had to break my trend and do both long and short E. I have been trying to only do one sound per week (only short a, only hard c, etc.), but I could not think of enough words for either long or short e, so I just did both.

Here were our Ee activities:

Saturday: E is for Egg

I got out our plastic Easter eggs so that Elias could play with them again. He loved opening and closing them, counting them, and putting them in and out of the basket. He tried putting them inside each other, and mixing colors. He had a blast, and wanted to play with them all week!

Sunday: E is for Eagle

Nathan’s adult coed slow pitch softball team is called the Screaming Eagles. I decided we would go cheer on the Eagles during their game. Unfortunately, it was raining so we didn’t get to go. I couldn’t justify taking a two year old and a three month old out into the rain just for an alphabet activity. Oh well.

Monday: E is for Elmo

I let Elias watch a little bit of Elmo’s world, and he colored some pages of his Elmo coloring book. We also talked about all of the Sesame street characters and what color they are. Elias said his favorite color is red like Elmo.

Tuesday: E is for Endangered

I read Elias some stories about Endangered animals. I tried to explain to him what endangered means, but I don’t think he really got it. We chose some of the animals that we read about, and searched for pictures of them on the internet. Then we printed them out and Elias colored them. He chose a tree frog, a manatee, a panther, and a gorilla.

Wednesday: E is for Elephant

We went to the zoo! Unfortunately, it was raining on this day as well, but I figured that we are in Oregon after all and we aren’t afraid of a little rain. Elias had a blast at the zoo. He knew we were going mostly to see the elephants, so every time I tried to stop at an animal on the way he just said he wanted to see the elephants first. After we had watched the elephants for a good long while, he named some other animals that he wanted to see. His favorites (besides the elephants) were the polar bears, the otters, and the leopards.

Lily playing with a ball!

Eiias watching the elephants

We witnessed an optical illusion while viewing the giraffes.

Thursday: E is for Elias

I couldn’t resist using Elias’ name for one of his words this week. I bought a canvas and let Elias choose some paint colors at the craft store. Then I used masking tape to spell his name on the canvas, and let him paint over it. When it dried, I took off the masking tape so that his name showed. The tape did not work as well as I had hoped. There are splotches of paint underneath where the tape was so the borders are not smooth. I will have to go over the borders in black or dark green paint before we hang it on his wall, but I think it will turn out pretty cute in the end. Elias certainly had fun painting it!

Friday: E is for Elijah

Our Bible story for the week was about Elijah. Lots of good stuff, and the stories are relatively new to Elias .