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JDaniel4s Mom

growing & learning with him

Deirdre Smith writes/owns JDaniel4’s Mom. After twenty years as a elementary school and technology resource teacher in Northern Virginia, she became a stay at home mom in upstate South Carolina. Her blog features ways she and her 5 year old are exploring learning, crafting, creating healthy meals and living life to its fullest. Deirdre can also be found on twitter as @jdaniel4smom and on her blog's FB page. You can also check her out on Google+.

Great Posts I Came Across This Week- November 13

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Mom Related
Things I Can’t Say has a wonderful meme called Pour Your Heart Out. The post she wrote last week is similar in its feelings about blogging to the Southern Institute post I mentioned above but is written in her own style. It is called Pour Your Heart Out: When Blogging Changes.
Mommy of a Monster (I Mean Toddler) has a great guest post by Organic Mother with Cool Whip called Baby Boot Camp that you will love.

 

Bloggers Need to Know This
Eat Move Make, had a post last week on scrapping. I had no idea what it was or how to stop it. Her post called Have You Ever Had Your Blog Scraped? taught me facts I needed to learn about it.

 

Marvelous Mom Reviews has a post called Featured “Twitter Partygoer” At TweeParties that introduced me to the fact that I can get an email letting me know about some of the Twitter parties coming up.

 

Read.Explore.Learn.- Veteran’s Day

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Welcome to Read. Explore. Learn! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing the ways you have learned with and explored books.

 

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

Veteran's Day Book for Children -My Big Brother

The book we read this week is called My Big Brother by Miriam Cohen. It is about a little brother who tries to fill his brother’s shoes when his big brother joins the army. This is a sweet story about how hard he works to do things just as his brother would have. It also talks about what he does to remember his big brother while he is away.

What did we do?

We have a number of members of my family that war veterans. My sister Kate has served in Qatar and Iraq. My grandfather and JDaniel’s grandfather GranDan served in World War II. I decided to share some of his GranDan’s memorabilia from his service.

Observed a Model

First, we carefully looked at a model GranDan made of the plan he flew in the Navy.

wooden plane made by GranDan

Created an Album

We looked through old pictures of GranDan and put them in a photo album from JDaniel to look through. GranDan passed away last winter. JDaniel loves to look at pictures of him.

 
ABCs of Exploring Books with Children: A-H Grandan book
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Hungry Ants Come Marching In!

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We have a little ant problem in the kitchen. We have sprayed and put out traps. The ants seem to disappear only to reappear a few weeks later. As I started sweeping them up after breakfast this morning, this song came into my head. I have changed some words to fit our situation. Please feel free to sing along.

The Ants Come Marching In

The ants go marching one by one. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching one by one. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to pick up a crumb,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching two by two. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching two by two. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching two by two, the little one stops to gnaw on a fruit chew,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch. Boom, Boom, Boom!

The ants go marching three by three. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching three by three. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching three by three, the little one stops for a scrap of turkey,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching four by four. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching four by four. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching four by four, the little one finds a Cheerio and looks for more,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching five by five. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching five by five. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching five by five, the little one looks for a morsel to survive,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching six by six. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching six by six. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching six by six, the little one eats a strand of  a celery stick,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching seven by seven. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching seven by seven. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching seven by seven, the little one searches for food not swept up by eleven,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching eight by eight. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching eight by eight. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching eight by eight, the little one snacks on tidbits that fell off a plate,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching nine by nine. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching nine by nine. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching nine by nine, the little one thinks small food scraps are fine,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

The ants go marching ten by ten. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching ten by ten. Hurrah, hurrah!

The ants go marching ten by ten, they don’t realize JDaniel’s Mom set a trap of them,

And they all march under the table to see if JDaniel left them any lunch, Boom! Boom! Boom!

Here’s hoping we stay ant free!

I am linking this to Serenity Now’s Weekend Bloggy Reading!

  

Muffin Tin Monday- Veteran’s Day

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Veteran's Day Lunch for Kids

In honor of Veteran’s Day on Thursday JDaniel had an American flag lunch. I guess it should be called a silicone tray lunch this week rather than a muffin tin.

The tray contained a breadstick cut into fourths, the tops, and bottoms of meatballs (The centerpieces were removed and used in my lunch.), daps of tomato sauce for dipping, and apple stars. I usually do a better job of balancing JDaniel’s lunches with veggies and much less meat. After the fact, I thought cherry tomatoes or grapes would have been better than so many meatballs.

I will do better next week when the theme is the food pyramid.

 

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Great Posts I Came Across This Week- November 6

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Christmas Related

Fawn Dear has a number of Christmas resources for planning in a post called The Best Holiday Planner – By You, For You!

Giver’s Log also has a great Handmade Holiday Organizer. I love that you can print it out and carry it on a metal ring.
Mother Related
A time to be Faithful in the Little things… is an inspirational post by There is a Time. It is all about lessons you can learn from your children.

Sweetest Jane has a super post on How to Get Your Babies to Clean the Bathroom. JDaniel is big into cleaning and helping right now. Her little guy reminds me a lot of JDaniel.

Sellabit has a beautiful post about her daughter I really loved. She called her post-Growing Up..

Blogging Related
Confessions of a Cookbook Queen has a wonderful post called Blogger’s Code of Ethics. It is so well written and hits on really important points about blogging.
Child Related

Love and Lollipops has a cute idea for helping your children learn colors in her post Colour Fun #9- Buckets of Colour. While you are there you may want to check out her World in a Box.

 
 
 

Read.Explore.Learn.- Electing to Change

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Welcome to Read. Explore. Learn! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing the ways you have learned with and explored books.
Steps:
  •  Link your activity below.

  • Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. the badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

    Read.Explore.Learn badge

Read.Explore.Learn badge

  • Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.
  • If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.
My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

Ordinary Oscar by Laura Adkins reminds its readers that it is okay to be you. Oscar wants to be famous. He is bored with his color, his night eating, and sleeping during the day. He gets a Fairy Godsnail to grant him three wishes.  He gets each of them. The final wish is the only one that truly makes him happy. It isn’t the wish to look stupendous and spectacular that makes him happy. It isn’t the wish to be huge that fulfills his dreams. Can you guess what it is? Did you guess that he wanted to be ordinary again? If you did, you were right!

The Bear with Sticky Paws Goes to School by Clara Vulliamy is about a little girl named Lily who doesn’t want to go to her school. It is boring. When she goes to visit Sticky Paws school she realizes, she misses the routine of her school. Sticky Paw’s school is filled with chaos, messy play, and a little counting. He only wants to play and do work that focuses on him. Lily learns a wonderful lesson about school routines and in the end finds a friend who loves her school too.
Coloring and Tracing

 I printed a snail coloring page and we traced the outline of the snail together.
Playdough Fun

JDaniel has learned to roll snakes with play dough

We wrapped the snakes around the snail until JDaniel got bored with it and started piling play dough on the snake.

 

Getting Out The Vote!

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Many elementary schools hold mock elections for their students. It gives them an opportunity to experience the voting process and grow in their understanding of what an election is. The first school I taught in Virginia held a mock election in my fourth year teaching. I will always remember it, because of a wonderful little boy named Clinton and his zealous desire to see his candidate win.

Clinton was a smart little boy. He loved learning and absorbed everything that was going on around him. He came in on Election Day all fired up about voting and the candidate he wanted to win. He had listened to the T.V. ads and talked with his parents. Clinton was filled with reasons his man was the best man to be president.

As the other students filtered into the classroom, I heard a loud voice from the coat closet in the back of the classroom saying, “I can’t vote for him. My dad used to work for Perot.” I rushed to the back of the room just in time to hear the tail end of the conversation. Clinton was saying to a little boy named Kevin, “Do you know what he will do to our country?” “I don’t care,” Kevin replied, “I have to vote for Perot.

I called Clinton out of the coat closet and asked him if had been trying to persuade other children to vote for his candidate. “Yes, I have,” he said, “They don’t have any idea who to vote for.” “You know they can pick anyone they want for president,” I told him. “My guy is the guy,” he informed me. “You know this is not a real vote don’t you Clinton? We are just voting to see what voting is like,” I told him. “Oh! No! This is real,” he said. Clinton went on to tell me that he was the only one voting in his family in this election. His vote had to count. His candidate needed to win. The other candidates would destroy our country. Bush needed his vote!

He was right. Bush needed his vote. When he came in the next day he looked crestfallen, the election had not gone the way he wanted it to. He was now worried about what would happen to his country.

I loved Clinton’s passion for voting then and I still love it now. Clinton has been old enough to vote for years. I hope the disappoint he had in the American voting system in second grade hasn’t kept him from going to the polls.

 
 
 

Trick or Treating Pictures

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We went trick or treating with our next-door neighbors. JDaniel wore a Dalmatian costume his Aunt Kate sent him for Halloween. Nathan, the little boy next door, was a police officer. As you can see JDaniel was always a few steps behind Nathan in their search for and seizure of candy.

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He had a great time!
 
 
 

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