Art Inspired by Song

As I was scanning over some great ideas on Pinterest, my little man caught eye of an Eric Carle video. 

"I want see that, Mommy." 







I was excited to find something that  we've never seen from Eric Carl- I See a Song.  After watching the video, I shared it with my older girls and we decided to paint  while we listened to the music in the video.  What song do we see in our heads?  How are we inspired by the music?

This was such a great creative activity to start out our day!   And by the way- yes, my daughter is painting in a cast.  She broke her wrist- ugg! Luckily, she is sporting a water proof cast and it really hasn't slowed her down too much. 

Enjoy your day being CREATIVE!

Jen

éclos Anti-Aging Skin Care Review & Giveaway #EclosBeauty

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of éclos Skin Care for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
A couple of weeks ago, I pampered my girls with a spa night.  This week, I'm excited to be able to pamper you!  As Moms, we get so busy taking care of our families that we sometimes  forget to take care of ourselves.
Recently, I had the opportunity to try éclos Skin Care.  e'clos features Apple Stem Cells that are extracted from a rare swiss apple, the Uttwiler Spatlauber.

The éclos  Anti-Aging Skin Care Starter Kit contained the following samples:
Facial Cleanser Skin Prep- gently cleanses and purifies skin
Cellular Activator Face Serum- awakens dormant skin cells to increase longevity and to reduce wrinkle appearance
Moisture Therapy Regenerative Cream- protection for skin stem cells for self-renewal and to slow signs of aging
Restorative Eye Cream- reductions of fine lines around the eye area
Instant Radiance Facial Scrub- microdermabrasion properties to improve texture of skin
Skin Renewal Clay Mask- cleanses, absorbs impurities, and un-clogs pores

Over a weeks time, I used every product in the kit daily, except for the Facial Scrub and the Clay Mask. I used the facial scrub every other day and the clay mask twice. Products similar to e'clos can be found in specialty and department stores, but with a higher price tag. éclos is the first to bring this active ingredient to mainstream stores making it more affordable to women. In the past, I've had a difficult time finding products that are affordable, but that also work well with my sensitive skin. My usual regimine incuded a face wash and moisturizer only.
Pros

• no synthetic fragrances or dyes
• no sulfates for petro-chemicals
• enjoyed the clay mask and how it made my skin feel after application
• the facial scrub was great on my sensitive skins
• favorite product- the restorative eye cream (gentle on the delicate eye area)

Cons

• strong fragrance to some of the products
• not impressed with the feel of the regenerative facial cream
• didn't like the sticky feel of the serum
• personally too many steps for me

The products that I may purchase in the future are the restorative eye cream and the skin renewal clay mask. After a weeks time, I didn't notice a significant difference in wrinkles reduction and the overall appearance of my skin.  For this to occur, I think it would be necessary to use the product for a couple of weeks. I did notice that my skin looked refreshed, especially in the eye-area.

Would you like to try éclos plant based beauty? I'm giving away one sampler kit (valued at $19.99) with all of the above products mentioned and an éclos terry cloth head band.

For your chance to win, please leave a comment tellling me which product you are most excited to try!

Giveaway only available in US/Canada and ends 6/14/2012.

Transportation- Bug Style

Just jump right in, I'll give you a ride!  Little man took one of his buggy friends for a ride today in his toy car. (I just had to snap a pic.) 

Yikes! Good thing he wasn't alive, because LM has no fear when it comes to bugs.

Happy Wordless Wednesday!

Jen

For more WW, be sure to visit 5 Minutes for Mom.

Mystery Plants

What do you think the kids are growing? 

Answers:

Plant A- daisies

Plant B- tomatoes

Plant C- corn

How did you do at guessing the mysterious plants? 

We know what we are growing, but wouldn't it be fun to randomly plant seeds and try to guess with the kids what is growing? 

I just might have to try that with some different seeds!

happy planting...

Jen

Help Support a Dream!

Meet my sweet and beautiful niece Kaci!! 

She is one of 30 finalists for America's Next Top Model- College Edition.  They only pick 13 for the show, so we need your support.  She is a very talented, compassionate, and well rounded young lady. 

You can like her photo on the link below!!  You vote makes a difference and is greatly appreciated.  I am so proud of all of her accomplishments. 

Go Kaci! 

Here's the link:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150843333740748&set=a.10150843332335748.401670.8816160747&type=1&theater

Also, please share the link with friends and family!!!!

THANK YOU!!!

Take Care Bloggy Friends,

Jen

Zoo Activities: Day 2

Yesterday little man made this zoo scene!  Isn't it cute?

Materials: $1 pack of stickers, file folder, sharpie marker

I drew the little fence and wrote the word zoo.  Little man put the stickers on the folder one by one.  As he put them on, we talked about the animal and the letter that the animal began with.  Next, if he found another animal that started with the same letter sound, he would stick that animal next to it. For example, Tt is for tiger, turtle, and toucan.  This was great for language development and talking about letter sounds.  As well as fine motor and decision making. He was very proud of his zoo! 

I have two more sheets of the same stickers left, so I'm thinking about making a game with them.  Any ideas for the leftover stickers? 

Literature:

Today we read Animal Snackers by Betsy Lewin.

We enjoyed learning about what different animals eat. A gorilla, a koala, an anteater, too! Great illustrations and poetic rhyme.

 

Looking forward to our zoo trip!  Thinking about creating an A to Z scavenger hunt to do as a family or something similar.  I like this scavenger hunt from Scholastic, too.

For more zoo fun, read yesterday's post..Zoo, Zoo, Zoo.

 

Take Care,
Jen

Zoo, Zoo, Zoo...

We are going to the zoo on Thursday, so I decided to focus on zoo animals this week!  Today we had fun...

 -reading zoo books
 -creating a zoo scene with stickers
 -eating zoo animal crackers

Here's what we had fun reading...

 Tomorrow we will read...

We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo....

Stay tuned for more zoo fun this week!

ps.  Any great zoo books or activities that you recommend?

Jen

Museum Sensory Play

Look at the size of this sensory bin?  AWESOMENESS!! 

I was just a little excited to come across this at our most recent museums visit.  There were plastic lizards, dinosaurs,snakes, frogs, and insects galore!  Silk flowers, leaves, rocks, and sea shells, too. 

Little man and I decided to sort bugs and create a display.  We added rocks and leaves.  He enjoyed talking about the different bugs that he found and placing them in our little creature collage.  I think he could have played here all day if his big sisters would have let him. 

Peanut (age 8) decided to categorize things that are green for her collection.
 

Sunshine chose frogs as her collection theme!

After completing their collections, they labeled a card and displayed them on the musuem shelf.

I liked the idea how everything was mixed together and the kids could sort and categorize based on their interests!  So many possibilities! 

Jen

Pearl Mountain Image Converter Giveaway

Recently, I tried out the Pearl Mountain Image Converter, a picture converter for batch converting and processing images. 
 
Here is some information from their website...
 

 
 
Pearl Mountain Image Converter... "allows you to convert images to other formats, resize, rotate, crop, add watermark, apply effects and add border to thousands of images at a time. With one click your digital photos will be just right for the Web, blog, e-mail, photo printing, Facebook, MySpace, mobile phone..etc."





What did I like about this product?  being able to add a watermark and border to multiple pics at a time.  I only had to add my border and website name of one pic and it automatically adds it to all of the pics that you uploaded.  This is an efficient way to organize pictures for my blog without having to put a border on each individual picture. You can choose from a variety of fonts and colors. 

Would you like to try Pearl Mountain Image Converter for free?

Just enter my giveaway to recieve one of 20 license codes that I'm giving away!

To enter: Leave a comment below on how you think you would use this product. 

Extra entries:

1-follow me on twitter (@JenSCreative)

1-follow me on facebook

1-follow on Pinterest

1-follow Creative and Curious Kids!

2- blog or tweet about this giveaway

Be sure to leave a comment for each entry with an email address. Thanks!

Good Luck!

Jen

Ends- extended deadline... 6/8/2012

Disclaimer: I was given a license code to try the above product and multiple codes to give away to my readers.  The opinions expressed above are my own and may differ from others.  No monetary compensation was given for the above post.

Little Angels

Stop over at my other blog... God's Shining Stars for a coupon link for Little Angels DVDs. ($3 off for the month of May) 

Also, I'm giving away a signed DVD sleeve by Roma Downey and Little Angel wall decals. 

Enjoy your day!  We're off to the Children's Museum today.  :)

Jen

Letter Tt Activities



Play-doh Cavity Critters Activity

 Tt is for Tooth!  My inspiration for this group of activities was.....

Yo Gabba Gabba!

Yes, those little guys can be annoying, but they taught my son a lot about teeth through music and play.

Activity 1: Play-doh Cavities (see pic-top of page)

Materials- laminated tooth, laminated tooth brushes, play-doh

Object: Scoop the play-doh off of the tooth so you don't get cavity critters!- fine motor fun, concept development

Adaptation: roll a die and scoop off the number shown- counting

                    

Activity 2: Happy Tooth, Sad Tooth Felt Board

Materials: Felt Toothbrushes, felt Letter Tt, card stock teeth

Object: Clean the tooth with the toothbrush- now it's a happy tooth! Color recognition, concept development

Activity 3: Toothbrush painting

Activity 4: Matching Tt's

Object: Match the letter Tt

1. You can match an upper case T with a T or lowercase with each other.

2. Or match the uppercase with the lowercase.

Clipart source for teeth... http://www.freeclipartpics.com/

Teeth printable



Oh, he loves the letter Tt! Oh, he loves the letter Tt.......

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        For more fun with the letter Tt, check out            Tt is for Turtle.

Jen





Mother's Day Cards

A little scrapbook paper and a little love! 

Mother's Day cards for our Moms. 

My inspiration came from Pinterest! 

I found a similar card made with construction paper.

Have a wonderful Mother's Day!  You are SPECIAL!

Jen

Voki?

Look what my 8 year old taught me how to use today! (about 5 minutes ago, so of course I had to share) It is called Voki and is used by her foreign language teacher.  You can choose your character and  background.  Also, you can record your own voice (like I did) or type in what you want another voice to say.  My kids are having a blast with it!  Of course, Mom would like to use it for educational purposes.  What ideas do you have for using Voki? 

If you test it out, let me know!

Jen 



First Strawberries and Activities

Our First Strawberries from the Garden

Look what's growing in our garden.  Yeah!  We planted strawberries last spring and they weren't very successful.  This year they started popping up on their own.  I need to work on keeping the critters away from our yummy strawberries!  The kids love growing just about anything and eating food that they planted.

Activities

1.Read books about strawberries!

2. Preschool Fun with Fruits and Vegetables: The Strawberry Patch    

   (wonderful  resource- pages of multi-sensory learning)

3. Visit a strawberry farm.

4. Mother's Day Card Strawberry Craft

  What are your kids growing?

Enjoy these beautiful Spring days!

Jen

Clipart... source

The Many Benefits of Children's Theater

When my first child was one years old, I took her to see a Sesame Street Live show.  She wouldn't stop talking about the characters and her experience at the theater. I decided to take her experience and make it into a book.  First, I drew the characters and wrote her words down. Then she painted the pages with water colors.

This little girl is now 10 years old and has truly enjoyed children's theater throughout the years from Japanese puppetry to Junie B Jones to High School Musical and even Hello, Dolly.

After watching my niece play the lead in her high school play- Footloose, I think my kiddos got the bug!  They were inspired by her ability to memorize so many lines, her singing, and dancing and....to do all of this on stage in front of so many people. 

Recently, Sunshine had her turn on stage and had the opportunity to sing a solo in the children's play..The Little Mermaid. Peanut danced and sang in the show as well (and let me tell you how adorable she looks dressed like a shark!) So proud of them and their hard work!  Little man loved seeing his sisters perform and has been dancing around the house singing the songs for weeks. To hear him sing Ursula- hilarious! What a great way to enhance his language and gross motor skills.

If your thinking that you'd like to take your child to the theater, but it's too expensive for your budget, be sure to explore community theater.  It doesn't have to be a fancy show to enrich a child's life.  International Children's Theater is wonderful for little ones and often feature plays and puppet shows based on popular children's story books. One of my favorites... Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. 

Why bring your child to the theater?

1. language development
2. enrich musical intelligence
3. entertainment
4. inspires imaginative play/creativity 
5. family friendly

For more information about the importance of exposing children to the arts and theater, be sure to read Why Children Theater Matters from education.com.

See you at the theatre!

Jen