First Time Mom and Losing It

I have been homeschooling my three year old consistently since September. We have our little routine and I have acquired a ton of homeschooling supplies. I find free lessons online that are fun for her with themes of characters she likes. I have recently found a whole bunch of nice workbooks at the discount stores and even Aldi's supermarket.


She is doing really well with everything I have taught her but the one thing that she was having difficulty with was writing. She did great with all of the tracing worksheets I have given her but wanted her to start freehand writing. She didn't understand what the lines on writing worksheets meant so her letters were there but all over the place. I tried teaching her what the lines meant but she didn't get it until I thought up the name tiles. My idea was to enlarge the lines and make tiles of them so that she could write the letters one at a time.


To my amazement it worked! My daughter was writing out her name using the guidelines correctly. Within a few days she knew how to write her entire name. A couple of days later she memorized how to spell her name. The first two days we used the tiles, I modeled how each letter should go on the guidelines and then let her do it. After two days I was giving her one tile at a time, asking her what letter came next and then had her write it. I am so proud of my little three year old. We are working on her last name now. She knows how to write every single letter and is now memorizing how to spell it.

Letter Tiles
Step 1: Download the name tiles page. Print out as many as you need for each letter in the first and last name.


Step 2: Cut each name tile out and laminate each tile. Use, erase and reuse.

**Now that my daughter can write every letter in her first and last name and using the guidelines correctly, I have moved on to writing strips. I found these strips in the teacher section of my Dollar Tree and have laminated them to reuse them.

What are your handwriting tips? 

As the weather gets colder we go outdoors less and less. We had a really cold week a couple of weeks ago so our walks went out the door. I don't want my daughter to be on her iPad or watch TV all day so I try to come up with fun ways for her to use her hands and get creative. It's been cold but not cold enough for snow yet and my daughter has been anxious for the first snowfall to come. To get her excited about the snow that should be coming soon I created this DIY Kids Snow Globe Artwork.

Supplies

• Winter Scene Printable
• Snowman Printable
• White Confetti 
• Silver or White Glitter (Optional)
• Gallon Ziplock Bag
• Scissors
• White glue

How do you keep the kids entertained during the Winter? 

I have been homeschooling my daughter everyday for a few months now. To make it fun for her I found some amazing Christmas themed lessons. She has been more enthusiastic about these lessons but still gives me a hard time sometimes. I wanted to create a Christmas Tree that we could hang up but that also had a lesson included with it. I decided to create the Christmas Tree with some pom poms because that is my daughter's favorite.

First I created the template by creating a green tree and adding some circles. I colored in some of the circles to stand for the ornaments. The circles are the placement holders for the pom poms. I had tons of pom poms but not enough green so I went to to my local craft store to pick up a bag of green pom poms. Then I found some sparkly pom poms for the ornaments.


I printed out the Pom Pom Christmas Tree template onto some card stock so that the art piece would be more durable and easier to hang on the wall. Once I printed out the template I placed it onto my daughter's learning table and spilled out the pom poms next to her. Then I asked her if she could help decorate the Christmas tree by adding the pom poms were they belonged.

To make the process a little less messy I placed some Aleene's Tacky Glue onto a little paper cupcake cup that I had. This way she could dip it in instead of squeezing a ton of glue onto each pom pom. Since the Aleene's Tacky Glue is thicker it helps the pom poms stick on better and stay on faster. When all of the pom poms were placed we let it dry for a few hours before putting it on the wall. I used foam mounting tape to hang up the beautiful pom pom tree.

What Christmas themed lessons or crafts do you do with your kids? 

**I received the product below free for my review. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be a good fit for my readers. All opinions are 100% my own.


For as long as I can remember I always loved crafting with printables. I started designing graphics and custom made all of the decorations and souvenirs for my sister's baby shower. I remember trying to do everything on a budget so I made everything myself instead of ordering from custom websites. Everything was coming along until I ran out of ink! Not only the black cartridge but the color one too. Back then cartridges were about 35 bucks each so buying that ink really set me back in my budget. Since then I started to only print what was extremely necessary like coupons and confirmations and only printed on the draft setting.


Now that I am homeschooling my toddler I saw the tremendous need to start printing again so HP Instant Ink came to the rescue! There are a lot of great homeschooling websites and pins that I wanted to print them all! With HP Instant Ink I #NeverRunOut of ink and I can print them all! With HP Instant Ink you are saving up to 50% on ink by having your HP Instant Ink eligible printer know when it is running out of ink and signaling a shipment of new ink right to your door. Instant Ink is extremely affordable too with packages ranging from $2.99 to $9.99 depending on how many pages you print monthly. I love that Instant Ink counts the number of pages you print and not what you print. You can print out all full-page photos if you wanted and it would still be the same price.
HP Instant Ink can be cancelled at any time and there is no annual fee however there is a really great 3-month offer.



I like to use our long car rides as fun learning time so I created these booklets that I could print and just take along with us. Making them is simple. All you have to do is print each page out and sew a long line of stitching to bind them. If you don't have a sewing machine you can just use a stapler.

Title Page
Colors Page
Letters Page
Numbers Page
Shapes Page
Coloring Pages

If you never ran out of ink, what would you print? 

Stenciling with freezer paper is one of my favorite ways to DIY a tshirt. DIYing a tshirt is my favorite way to dress up my daughter for the holidays :). I wanted to jazz up my normal stenciled tshirt so I thought up a way to add streamers to the shirt using ribbon. I thought it would be more fun for my daughter if she could actually play with the streamers as opposed to me just painting them on. This is how I made the 4th of July Ribbon Streamer Fireworks Shirt.


Materials

• white tshirt
• fabric paint: red, blue
• 1/8" ribbon: red, white, blue
• foam brush
• freezer paper
• fabric glue

Step 1: Click on the link to download the stencil. Open the .PDF and print it out using the "fit" option.


Step 2: Place the printable under a piece of freezer paper, paper side up. Trace the three stars. Using an exacto knife or sharp small scissors cut out the stars.


Step 3: Iron on the freezer paper stencil to the upper middle part of the shirt shiny side down. Place some paint onto a paper plate and using a foam brush paint inside of the star stencils. Let completely dry and then carefully peel off the stencil.


Step 4: Cut a piece of cardboard or card stock that is 4" x 3". Wrap the three colors of ribbons around the cardboard randomly. Take a small piece of ribbon and tie a knot onto the top of the wrapped ribbon. Cut the bottom loops of the wrapped ribbon.


Step 5: Grab the ribbon like the image below. Run a line of fabric glue along the back of the ribbon the entire width.


Step 6: Carefully glue underneath the stenciled stars taking care to press the ribbon into the glue and shirt. Let dry completely and then pull on the ribbon to make sure it is all glued on. If you have lose ribbon add some more glue and press firmly onto shirt.


Check out my other tutorial for my stenciled flag shirt.

I have been homeschooling my toddler since September so that I can prepare her for pre-k. We have been doing pretty good and I love downloading and printing out worksheets for her to work on. I usually laminate the worksheets that she will use over and over and give her a dry erase marker. I wanted to try something different as she was getting bored of the same worksheets.


I got to review these amazing and brightly colored liquid chalk markers that work great with glass. I decided to get some frames that I could slip the worksheets in to write on top of the frame. Since the liquid chalk markers were so bright, colorful and liquidy my daughter really had fun using them. They wrote really smoothly on the glass and were easy to clean up with just a baby wipe. She loved having so many colors to choose from and it helped her practice all the different colors she knows.


I made some worksheets for her to work with that you can download below:

• Shapes Worksheet
• Numbers Worksheet
• Letters Worksheet
• Colors Worksheet

My precious, sweet little girl will turn 3 this week. Where does the time go? I can remember when I first set eyes on her. She was such a long waited for gift so my husband and I treasure her immensely. She has grown up to be such a funny, smart and beautiful little girl. In honor of her birthday week I came up with a fun number 3 shirt the she can wear on her special day. Here is how I did it:


1. Print out the printable. Click on the link, download and print out with the "fit" setting.
2. Tape the printable onto a table and then tape a piece of freezer paper, paper side up, on top. Make sure the piece of freezer paper is bigger that the printable.
3. Trace the number three and remove the freezer paper. Place another piece of freezer paper on top and then trace the crown.
4. With an exacto knife or small scissors cut out the inside of the number three. Do the same for the inside of the crown.
5. Place the three stencil on the shirt in the middle. Then place the crown stencil. on top at the same position that it is on the printable. Carefully slide the number 3 stencil without moving the crown stencil.


6. Iron on the crown stencil carefully. Making sure all of the edges are stuck onto the shirt.
7. Place some fabric paint onto a paper plate and with a sponge brush and paint in the crown. Wait for it to completely dry and then peel off the stencil.
8. Place the three stencil on top of the shirt matching where the crown should be on top of the three. Use the printable as a guide. Iron on carefully making sure all of the edges of the three are stuck on.
9. Paint in the number three with a layer of fabric glitter glue. Sprinkle on some fabric glitter making sure to coat the number completely. Place a piece of freezer, paper side up onto the glitter and take the bottle of glitter and roll over the glitter to make sure that it is sticking to the glue. Wait about 5 hours for it to dry completely and then carefully pour off the excess glitter onto a piece of folded paper. Pour the excess glitter back into the glitter bottle. Peel off the stencil.
10. You can outline the crown with some fabric puffy paint and add some rhinestones to the top of the crown if you like.




**I am not sure how well the glitter will hold up to washing so I recommend turning the shirt inside out and hand washing, being careful not to agitate the part with the glitter. I would also allow it to air dry.

If you celebrate Memorial Day with the kids this is the perfect activity to keep them busy. I have been lightly homeschooling my toddler and love to create holiday themed learning activities for her to do. It is easy for me to try to explain to her why we have certain holidays while she has her hands busy with some crayons and stickers. Even though we don't have close family in the military I showed her some military heroes from some coloring pages that I printed out and explained to her why we celebrate them.


This activity is super easy to do and has lots of opportunities to learn different things like numbers, colors and shapes. I explained to her why there were 13 stripes on the flag and why we should put fifty stars on the blue rectangle. I know she is too young to understand what it really means but I love to just immerse her in as much information as possible. Then we went over the different shapes on the flag and she explained to me why each shape was a rectangle. She knows all of her shapes by now and can tell me how many sides each shape has.


This activity is super cheap too because all you have to do is print this printable and get some star reward stickers in the dollar store. First I took the stickers and peeled off the excess sticker paper. It is easier for my toddler to peel off the stars that way. I laid out the blue and red stickers and the printable. Then I added a sticker in each section of the stripes to show where each color went. Then we counted out fifty silver stars and had fun fitting them all in the blue rectangle.


How do you celebrate Memorial Day with your family?