Today was a very exciting day! Our first alphabet date together with Pretty Girl, Bro Bro, and Little Man from Stay at Home Adventures. Letter A astronaut adventure was at our house this week and we planned a TON of things to do since this was our first alphabet date and who knows how anything is going to go when there are two 2 year olds, a 5 year old, and a newborn. Surprisingly we actually managed to do everything! That was very unexpected.
After a few minutes are getting ourselves together and letting the kids mingle we decided it was best to start with some painting since we would need this to dry for a craft later. First we let the kids paint gray paint all of the white paper and smear it all over. Then we sprayed each kids paper with water a few times and let them smear the paint some more to get a moon effect. Then it was off to drying for these papers.
When we were done with painting we decided to more onto space bags. I filled gallon size bags with clear gel, a couple drops of black paint, and some glitter. Then the most important step... I used packing tape to tape the tops closed. I used a lot of tape, which turned out to be a very important step when all three kids tried to open the bags. Pretty Girl and Bro Bro practiced writing their capital A and lowercase a, Gooba practiced writing circles. Circles are kind of like lowercase a's.... right? Either way the space bags were a huge hit!
When we had our fill of space bags someone - not mentioning any names (Gooba) - was getting a little on the cranky side. It was definitely time for snack. Earlier that morning I had made a batch of moon balls for the kids. See the Super Snacks tab above for the recipe. So we chowed down on some moon balls and milk and everyone (Gooba) started feeling a little less cranky and a little more cooperative.
What seemed like the next best thing to do after eating a bunch of moon balls? Playing in the rocket that's what! The rocket was a little too small and pink for Bro Bro, but Gooba and Pretty Girl had a "blast" playing, hugging, and tickling in the rocket. The rocket mainly consisted of a long tunnel to crawl through as the entrance, a pink pop-up princess tent, and a large box covered in shiny pink wrapping paper, which was a prop from my fifth grade talent show at work. I linked all the pieces together and threw some blankets in there for the girls and voila! instant rocket!
After some time in the rocket, we had noticed something strange had happened outside.... ALIENS had invaded the driveway!!!! Or mommy slipped our and drew a bunch of aliens with chalk on the driveway while no one was looking.... either way... ALIENS! Fortunately we had some expert astronauts to help us with this problem.
First we needed to identify the aliens, so we knew what we were dealing with. I forgot to take pictures of this step. We called out all of the colors and ran from alien to alien. After we identified the threat we got our squirt bottles out attacked the aliens. This took a little longer than expected, which was AWESOME! All three kids loved this activity. We also got in some body part identification - Spray his hands etc.
This was hard to top, but the fun continued from here. Now that the aliens had been neutralized we were free to the moon rock toss. I cut a milk jug up and we drew some circles (craters) on the driveway and threw the moon rocks (marshmallows) into the milk jug. Lesson learned here...marshmallows get very sticky very fast in the sun. Pretty girl and Bro Bro seemed to pick up on this concept extremely fast - Gooba seemed to be the most interested in squishing the marshmallows between her fingers. After squishing them she tried eating the dirty, sweaty, sticky marshmallows.... ewwww. That's my girl!
After marshmallow toss, a well deserved clean giant marshmallow to eat, and a super garden hose hand wash, we busted out the moon sand/ moon rock letter sort. The moon sand recipe is in the craft tab above. Earlier we had marked ten rocks I got at the dollar store with silver permanent marker and buried them in the moon sand. I had painted them the night before, but in the morning the paint had all come off. Then we drew a capital and lowercase A in the circles on the driveway we had used for marshmallow toss. The girls dug around for the rocks and sorted them by letter.
By this time we had worn the kids out a little bit and it was time for some nice lunch on the deck and a little bit of water table time. Neither of those were letter A related, but they sure were fun! This also gave the mommies a little chance to catch our breath and clean up a tiny bit. After lunch it was craft time again. While the kiddos were eating I took their gray painted paper from earlier and cut out a half moon and a lowercase a. This kids glued these on a half sheet of black construction paper and added some glitter glue to look like stars. We had some glitter glue issues so we just smeared it on with our hands.
Then we moved on to telescopes. We cut out rectangles of silver wrapping paper and had the kids decorate them with star stickers. Once they were done decorating we wrapped the paper around a toilet paper tube added a little bit of tape and.... instant telescope!
These telescopes came in handy for our alien moon rock treasure hunt in the front yard. Earlier I had spray painted 31 small rocks with florescent orange paint and tossed them all over the yard. We had the kids use their telescopes to find the rocks. As you can see from the pictures those library binoculars are still a huge hit with Gooba. She apparently needed the binoculars and a telescope to find moon rocks! I knew this would be a big hit for her since essentially it has an Easter egg hunt but for rocks instead. Gooba loves her some Easter egg hunting!
So that pretty much sums up our first alphabet play date of the year. All in all I feel like it was a pretty successful day! Looking forward to finally doing some B activities next week. Frankly, mommy is a little tired of the letter A. Gooba however has recognized A's all over the house, so I guess we're doing something right! And if we're not, we sure are having a lot fun! Thanks again to Stay at Home Adventures for a wonderful day!
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