New week! Welcome pals! This week we took a poll between the boys for a theme. Teddy wanted rainbows, William wanted dinosaurs. I wanted rainbows, but I don’t really get a say. I told them they had to agree who would go first, and who would have to wait until next week. I honestly thought they’d come back to me within 3 minutes with an answer. You’d think I’d been a parent for 6 minutes, not 6 years. What a fool I was. After. full 30 minutes of screaming, and negotiating, and insults, and bargaining, we decided to let the baby decide. I wrote both on cards. held them out to Arthur, and he picked dinosaurs. So here we are. Next week we’ll do rainbows, and Teddy and I will be appeased.
Normally, as you may have noticed, I start the week with an easy easy coloring craft to get us going and chatting about the theme. But this dinosaurs, and there are 7 quintillion ideas for crafts online. So we skipped the coloring and headed straight into flying pterodactyls.
For the craft you will need
- A printer
- colored card
- popsicle sticks
- tape or glue
- scissors
- string or wool
- template for pterodactyl (linked below)
I found these adorable pterosaur’s on instagram by The Craft Train. The concept is pretty simple. You print and cut out the template then attach it to string. I printed out the template a few times onto different colored card to give the boys some choice. once they had their color suggestions I was planning on having them decorate their pterosaurs before they cut them out. Here’s a bit of a flaw in the template though: its only printed on half (ace for ink saving!) so you have to fold and cut neatly to get both sides equal. I realized here that the boys were not going to be able to manage this alone, so I popped them on the computer to watch a wonderful Nation Geographic about the origins of pterodactyls, and cut out their dinosaurs for them We then all got a bit distracted, ate a couple of pop arts, did a load of laundry, argued with Arthur about dumping puzzle pieces everywhere. The average Monday. We finally regrouped and the boys got to decorating.
Before I go on, yes my kids spent the day in their pajamas. If you’ve got any comments bout it, pop it on a postcard, then burn it. I feel no shame about this. Some days you get dressed and wear a shirt with buttons, so days you wear Star Wars pajamas and eat pop tarts. Balance.
Anyhoo, once our pterodactyls were all decorated I used scissors to cut out the two marks where the string goes. I have mentioned it in a previous blog, but I really need to find my hole punch. There have been an increasing number of days recently that I’ve needed it. You don’t need a hole punch for years, then suddenly a global pandemic comes along and you need it all the time. The worst.
The boys cut and threaded their own string (we used wool because it’s what I had closest, and frankly the garage is a state and I didn’t want to go digging for something better.) I tied the knots, then the boys taped the other end of their string to a popsicle stick. You don’t really need this stage, but it gave them an easy to use handle.
After all the hard work was done we took them out for a spin! The boys had made two each, but of course the minute Arthie saw them with them he demanded he hold one. Teddy generously handed one over and we headed out to the deck (yes, still in our pajamas) to play. The boys gave their pteros silly names, and spent a surprisingly long time wiggling their sticks to make them fly around the place.
For our academic portion we kept it nice and simple today. Teddy has some awesome sight word cards from Twinkl that I printed out onto green card. Each sentence had three copies, one with a picture. I laid them all out on the table (then eventually the floor and the table as he needed space). He chose one with a picture and we sounded out the sentence together. He then took it to the pile on the floor and tried to find the two matching sentences. It wasn’t a very complicated activity, but he always gets so very excited when he sounds out a word correctly.
William had an even easier activity. I printed him off a read works 3rd grade comprehension. The ULTIMATE in lazy homeschooling. But it’s Monday, and I gave up coffee today, so forgive me for giving myself a hall pass. He adores them though, so I don’t feel all that guilty. He sucks up all the details from them, then parrots them to me at every possible opportunity. It’ll be a joy when my caffeine headache kicks in later…..
That’s all she wrote for Monday folks. Come back tomorrow for popsicle stick dinosaurs and an easy slime with a couple of house hold items. Bye for now!
LINKS AND SOURCES TO RESOURCES
- Craft: Paper pterodactyl template
- Read: Tyrone the Horrible
- Educate: Dinosaur simple sentence cards
- Watch: Nat Geo pterodactyls
Raising Truffles 