August 18, 2010
'Twas the night before school
August 14, 2010
Nickel Clean Up
When every flat surface in the house looks like this:
I save nickel clean up for days when the house is really bad. For day to day picking up and cleaning, it's the usual nagging. A variation on nickel clean up is jelly bean clean up. We just replace the reward with some little treat. They like that too.
School Bus Rice Krispy Treats
I wanted to make a cute back to school treat, but couldn't find anything I liked. I thought the school bus idea was cute, but had only seen it with a twinkie, and that just seemed gross to me. So, I decided to try it with Rice Krispies treats.
I started by making a double batch of the recipe found on the side of the Rice Krispies box and pressing it into a 9x13 glass pan. I wanted it to be thick, and it didn't look like it would fit at first, but it did. After I let the treats cool, I cut them into 16 rectangles, took a few out at a time, put them on their sides, and cut a little out of each one to make the bus. I bought the Betty Crocker dark chocolate brownie topper frosting to help with decorating. I also bought the plastic serew on decorating tips so I could have a think pine. That frosting dries pretty hard, which I was not aware of, but it worked well because it was thick and I didn't have to make my own frosting.
After trial and error and fingers in frosting, I discovered the following order works best in order to avoid messing up the windows:
1 - put on the wheels. I used the mini fudge stripe cookies and used toothpicks and the frosting to try and get them to stay on. Once the icing had dried I could take out the toothpicks and the wheels stayed in place just fine. Mini Oreos might also work for wheels.
2 - put on the lights. I cut a red jelly belly and a yellow jelly belly in half to make the lights and secured them with frosting.
3 - draw the front window and put in the bear driver. We cut the legs off of some mini Teddy Grahams for the driver and attached with frosting.
4 - draw all the other windows and black lines on the sides.
Voila! School buses for sharing. At first we tried putting bears in all the windows as well, but my daughter got tired of cutting off the legs of the bears and we decided it was easier to just have an empty school bus. We found that we could do about 8 at a time assembly line style.
When we were done, I let the kids create their own masterpieces with the cut out leftovers of rice krispie treats and frosting and candy. They had so much fun with this!
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Back to School YW survival kit
Back To School Survival Kit
Included in this kit are some things to help remind you how to make this a successful year:
M&M’s - Be a Member Missionary!
Pencil - You are writing the story of your life daily
Now & Laters - the decisions you make will effect you now and later
Eraser - Sometimes you will make mistakes
Purell - just remember the cleansing principle of repentance
Smarties - Study hard!
Life Savers - prayer can be a life saver when you need help!
Gum - Stick to your principles even when things get hard
Lollipop - Rely on the Holy Ghost to help you lick the opposition
100 grand-remember your great worth
Hershey Kisses - you are greatly loved!
Snickers - It’s important to laugh at yourself sometimes
The picture of our Savior is to hang in your locker so that you always remember who you are and why you are here. You can be a great influence for good in the lives of others through your example of righteous living. We hope all of you have a great school year! We love you!
Love,
Your YW Leaders
It did end up being a lot of candy I guess, but you can simplify and just choose a few things you think will mean most to your girls.
August 12, 2010
Back to School Primary singing time
Articles of Faith incentive
Building a Happy Home
Well we finished our warm fuzzy jar, went to Gatti-Town and had a great time. Then we needed another incentive to treat each other kindly. So, we our now building a happy home. I built a simple house out of legos, took off 60 pieces and put them in a container. Now whenever the kids do something that helps build someone up, they put on a brick. If they do something that tears someone down, they take off a brick. Hopefully it won't take us as long to build our happy home as it did to fill our warm fuzzy jar.
August 9, 2010
"I'm the thief!" (aka Kids' Book Club part 2)
Joshua chose a Cam Jansen book for his turn at our summer kids' book club. Specifically, he chose "Cam Jansen: the mystery of the stolen corn popper" in which the kids' are shopping for back to school supplies and someone keeps stealing shopping bags. For his meeting, we did some fun mystery type games. We started by splitting into two groups and doing a mystery vocabulary contest. I put words such as "alibi" and "victim" up on the board, read a definition aloud, and teams took turns coming up with which word fit the definition. If they missed it, the other team had a chance to get it.