Fun Dinner With The Kids

"Hairy Hot Dogs"

I love the fact that because my husband is a fireman there are plenty of occasions that he works nights, especially because I can get away with making this for dinner!!!!

The boys and I had lots of fun putting the hot dogs on to the spaghetti.

Just throw in a pot of boiling water and here is the result (sorry for the overly bright picture - my flash was a little screwy tonight).

I originally saw this done on the blog Plum Pudding.

But we jazzed them up a bit by adding some of the Velveeta cheese sauce from a package of Kraft Velveeta Shells and Cheese (I saved the pasta shells for an upcoming dinosaur project that we will be making).

The boys loved them but I got a little nervous that it might be a choking hazard for my little guy so I cut his up, which did not make him to happy.

Calling All Women....

I have a question to ask....

Every time I see the commercial on television for the Clear Blue Easy brand pregnancy tests, I always seem to giggle when they make the following statement -

Clearblue® Easy Digital Pregnancy Test –Unmistakably clear results in words Did you know that 1 in 4 women can misread a traditional pregnancy test result?

I am just curious if this is true because I personally never had a problem, have any of you?????

The kids are still napping, can you tell that I am bored?!?!

WFMW - The Perfection Game and Fine Motor Skills

I am always on the look out for cheap ideas to teach my sons especially those items that are great multi-taskers. This week it is the Milton Bradley game of "Perfection" that works for me.

We use it as a puzzle to practice fine motor skills since the little shapes can only be picked up and placed in using a mature "pincer grip", great for shape recognition, eye-hand coordination and when I tell my 4 year old to start at the top left and work across each row he is practicing a great early literacy skill while training himself to think left to right, top to bottom!!!! All that and we have never even turned it on yet!

Now that is a great multi-tasker!!

Improving Hand Strength and Writing Skills

Isn't he cute....he loves to color (and hoard all the crayons and markers as he works). If you look at the next two pictures you can also see that he still has an immature hold on those crayons and does not use a "tripod" grasp.

you will not get those extra crayons and markers away from him!

Since my big guy has had lots of Occupational Therapy, I feel that I have some tricks up my sleeve to help the little guy with his coloring and writing skills that I would like to share with you all.

First of all, a lot of our crayons look like the one below. Actually we have a whole box of them! Some were broken unintentionally, others were broken by the big guy when he was learning to color because he would hold them so hard his knuckles would turn white and they would just snap in half and most of them I just broke in two as soon as they came home.

No I am not just a crayon murderer, the smaller size no longer fits in the palm of his hands, promoting the proper tripod grasp.

We have not tried these markers yet made by Crayola but they would work the same way due to their smaller size (they are on my list when I find them on sale).

Another great idea is to use an easel and have them color and write on it instead of a flat surface. Working on a vertical surface helps strengthen the whole arm which is an important foundation skill for writing plus it helps position the wrist correctly.

This is the type of tabletop easel that we use at our house. It is made by Battat for Parent's Magazine Toys, I purchased it a long time ago at Target for about $20.00.

Another good activity to improve the strength in the small muscles of the hand is to load a big ball of play-doh or therapy putty with small beads. It is also another way that the big guy and I work on counting skills. I just tell him that there are 15 beads hiding, can you find them all?

"Magical" Rocks

Well, they are MAGICAL to me!

A wise friend who works in "Special Education" told me awhile back to write letters on rocks for my son to help him learn the alphabet. At first I must admit, that although it sounded like a good idea, I had a hard time thinking that something so simple could possibly work since he was having so much trouble at home and at school.

My son attended early Pre-K at a local church starting at age 2 1/2 and since the age of 3 1/2 he has attended a Special Education and Therapeutic Preschool. So, with two solid years in actual school and all the work we did at home he still did not know how to spell his name, recognize more than three letters (only 1 was in his name) and occasionally confused numbers for letters until the MAGIC ROCKS!!!!!

As some of you already know, my son has been diagnosed with PDD-NOS and like a lot of kids on the Autism Spectrum who have attachments or fixations on certain items my son does too and his "thing" is rocks...the kid loves them!!!! My friend kept insisting with me to use the rocks to my advantage, he likes them and will pay attention!

On Friday night my mother handed the boys each a set of rocks with the letters of their names printed on them and kept arranging them in the proper order for about 15 minutes while reciting the letters.

After the initial 15 minutes the big guy had is name down pat!!! The next day he still had it plus if we included the little guy's letters into his pile he still knew which letters to pick out.

He still gets a little confused with the actual "names" of the letters at times but he knows which ones belong to him!

I guess I have to get out more paint and make some more letters soon!

If you have a child who is having some difficulties learning letters try using the things they truly love...I have a feeling I will be buying some cheap wooden trains in the future and using my Sharpie marker to make an alphabet train for my little guy.

$5.00 CVS Challenge - My Week 18

Trip 1 -
The following items plus the local Sunday newspaper without sales, coupons and previously earned Extra Bucks would have cost a total of $23.18 but I paid $6.99.


Trip 2 -
The following items would have cost a total of $37.97 without sales, coupons and the Extra Bucks earned in trip 1 but I paid a total of $7.00 out of pocket.

Here are this week's totals:

Total Amount of Merchandise (prior to discounts) - $61.14

Total Spent Out of Pocket - $13.99

Savings - $47.15

Extra Bucks Remaining - $6.00

Interested on how to get the best deals? Check out my post on how I make CVS work for me!

Tot School - Farm/Garden Theme Part 2

Grammie came to visit the boys this week so we focused a little more on "Life School" which included shopping at the mall, restaurants, lots of swimming in the pool and the boys first play which we saw at a local children's theatre.

I have to apologize at the lack of pictures of the boys actually doing their activities this week, but it always seemed that when we were working on our planned "Tot School" activities my camera was outside by the pool and I was to hot, tired and lazy to go get it.

In honor of our second week of Garden/Farm themed activities we played this old game a lot. (I just realized that I had two of these games in the closet).

We took some rocks from the boy's "collection" that reside in one of our gardens and wrote a letter on each so that both boy's would have there name. This was a learning technique that I was asked to try by a dear friend to help my son learn the letters of his name. I will be writing a separate post about this activity soon.

The big guy worked on a "What Does Not Belong" worksheet that I printed from my Kid Soup.com membership. This was so easy for him (one of his big strengths is visual concepts), it took him seconds to put his "X"s on the items that did not belong.

Although we continued to work on the letter "C" for carrot, I also worked on "Beginning Sounds" with the boys using little barns printed from Kid Soup. It was great practice although the boys did have some difficulties. There were several pictures for each of the letters (H, P, C and D).

I also tried another Upper and Lower case letter match-up game (again from Kid Soup) with the big guy, he did much better than he did with our beach/ocean themed one. I am thinking it was easier for him since it was on a smaller scale plus the clothes pins are a great fine motor exercise.

I also printed this great "chick" pattern pages for the big guy, he had trouble with some of them (there were 5 or so pages) but all in all he did a great job.

We read the same books over that we read last week which you can see them listed in my original Garden/Farm theme post.

Don't forget to check back next week for some more of our fun themed ideas. We haven't started anything yet today but I think we will be doing "Dinosaurs".

In the mean time, if you are interested in the fun ways that other's are teaching their tot's, stop by 1+1+1=1.

$5.00 CVS Challenge - My Week 17

Trip 1:
The items below without sales, coupons and previous Extra Bucks would have cost a total of $26.49 but I paid $4.43 out of pocket.



Trip 2:
The items below, plus an additional box of Shredded Mini Wheats which must still be in the car would have cost a total of $20.76 without sales, coupons and previous Extra Bucks but I paid a total of $1.52.


Trip 3:
The total of the the items below would have cost a total of $34.33 without sales, coupons and previously earned Extra Bucks but I paid a total of $2.55 out of pocket.



Trip 4:
The items below would have cost a total of $42.19 without sales, coupons and previously earned Extra Bucks but I paid a total of $11.13 out of pocket.

Weekly Totals =

Total Amount of Merchandise Purchased (no sales, coupons, etc.) = $123.77

Total Out of Pocket = $19.63

Total Saved = $104.14

Extra Bucks Remaining = $8.00!

Tot School - Garden/Farm Theme

Since we are still fairly new to "Tot School" I will introduce ourselves again, my boys are 28 and 51 months (special education, PDD-NOS) and my goals for participating in Tot School is to learn new ideas from others and to track my boy's achievements in meeting their goals. Our biggest goal right now is getting my 51 month old ready for kindergarten (one more year to go) and hopefully into a mainstream class.

I started this week with these awesome assessment sheets from Making Learning Fun to measure where my big guy is at now. I was very excited that they matched our theme - even Mrs. Wishy-Washy!

The big guy got to mark each circle that he knew correctly with a bingo marker. As you can see, we have a long way to go with the Alphabet.

The little guy worked on his colors this week with this file folder game that I printed from my membership to Kid Soup.

We worked on the letter "C"...

I printed this "card game" from Kid Soup and it was supposed to be used for a sorting game, "farm animals" from "zoo animals" but neither boy had any interest. I just worked with the little guy and his animal identification.

The big guy worked this week on a chicken and baby chick matching game that I printed from my membership at Kid Soup. I see improvements in his counting every week - I am very proud of him!

I printed a "Cow Roll and Color" page from Making Learning Fun, which the big guy loved!

After reading "Growing Vegetable Soup" we made big soup bowl pictures with construction paper, macaroni, foam letters and vegetable pictures that the boys colored.

After reading "Oh Say Can You Seed" the boys and I did a quick art project showing some of the things that make plants and flowers grow. Occasionally, I like to do art projects along side them so they can take a look at mine as they go along to get ideas.

Here is mine...

Here is my big guys...he was so proud that he grew tomatoes (the big red circles at the end), he had also "planted" red and purple seeds for tomatoes and eggplants. Pretty good imagination emerging!

The little guy didn't pay to much attention to this project and just drew "dirt" but he did keep it fairly within the different columns. He proudly professed that he drew "big, huge rocket ships".

We worked in our garden this week and even sampled some of the carrots that we planted (although they are not fully grown yet).

These are the books that we read together this week...

Since I planned way to many Farm/Garden themed items for us to complete this week we will be extending our theme to next week also so don't forget to check back.

If you are interested in what others have been doing with their tot's be sure to stop by 1+1+1=1 to see the links.