Dr. Seuss Party

Hello everyone,

Last week my son turned one.  I know...it's crazy... time flies and I cannot believe he is already one! We did a Dr. Seuss theme party. I love The Cat in The Hat and the other characters, and I thought it would be a cute idea for his 1st birthday party.

Below are a few pictures of the party. The colors of the decoration were red, white and aqua.

This is a picture of my little angel :).

I decorated a coffee can to put the spoons. I made the truffula trees using broom rods and used tissue paper to create the trees.

The party favor.

I am very proud of the cake, it looks beautiful and tasted delicious. It was a 7 layer vanilla cake with alternated filling of vanilla buttercream and strawberry buttercream. The outside icing was swiss buttercream. Everything homemade and absolutely amazing!

I made sugar cookies, and chocolate vanilla buttercream icing cupcakes.

To entertain the kids my son helped them to make their own cat in the hat craft.

 A happy baby!!!!

 

A picture of all of us together, which you may also see how everything was put together. My oldest was The Cat in The Hat :).

 

It was surely a great party to celebrate our little one.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Happy holidays!!!

Thanks,
Fabiana

Newspaper Basket

Hello my friends,

On my last post I promissed to share a special craft I was creating for the teacher appreciation week. I do apologise for not posting it earlier, but my little son was ill and I did not have the chance to do anything. Thank God he is better and I can share my project.

First of all, I would like to share a few pictures of my little one :), he is 11 months old now. Time flies!!!!

He loves potato, broccoli and carrot puree :).

Love those legs up in the air when we take walks to the park :). That's what we call chilling!!!!!

Back to my special project :). I made a super awesome basket from newspaper. I was searching on google ideas of how to make a homemade basket and found this amazing idea. It is very simple and easy to make, and the result is fantastic!!!
I found a video on youtube that explains really well how to make it.  Here is the link of how to assemble the basket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_pmSdCGnAU

I filled the basket with homemade baking goods. I made bread, cookies and apple sauce. My son wrote a card and we put the paper flowers we created (the previous post explains how to make the flowers).

We gave the gift to three teachers and they all loved it, they found everything wonderful, specially the basket.

I personally loved the idea of making a basket from newspaper because it is totally unique, creative, personal and helps to save the planet. These baskets could be used for any type of gift, for example: Easter basket hunt, Halloween trick or treat, or for Mother's/Father's day. You could fill it with baking goods or beauty products or whatever you find appropriate. The basket usage is infinite.

Hope this post inspired you :). Have a great week!

Thanks,
Fabiana

Paper flowers

Good evening,

This is a very important week for our teachers as we are celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week. I believe that we have to show our appreciation for their hard work every day. However, I also think it is fantastic that they have a week to celebrate allowing we, parents, to demonstrate our love and respect. There are many ways to show our appreciation: we can cook a meal or desert, make a flower bouquet craft, bake a cake, buy a gift, give a potted plant and so much more.

I am preparing something very special to give to a few teachers. By the end of this week, I will share the final version of my project. Today,  I will share a paper flower craft that I created to complement the project.

Materials:
Buttons
Construction Paper
Glue
Hot Glue
Stick
Fabric
Cork
toothpick stick

Instructions:

1st: Cut the petals of your flower. Cut them in a heart shape form with the paper color of your choice, and glue them together coupled with the button in the middle. Set it aside to dry.

2nd: Cut a piece of your chosen fabric and glue it onto the cork.

3rd: Insert the stick into the cork to create the stem.

4th: Using your hot glue, attach one flower onto of the top of the stick and two toothpick sticks on each side of the stick to create the branches. One on the right side and the other on the left side of the stick.

5th: When the glue is dried, stick the other flowers to the toothpick sticks. If you wish, you may also add a leaf to each flower.

This is a very simple and easy to make craft that turns into a precious flower bouquet.

Hope you enjoyed the post. I will keep you updated on my special project :).

Take care,
Fabiana

Dressing up

 Hello my friends,

Spring is just around the corner and I am very excited. The weather is becoming better in Chicago, which gives me a lot of motivation to exercise :).

As I expressed many times before, my son loves dressing up and playing super heroes. This weekend I made a Batman costume out of construction paper. We both had a lot of creating it, and he looked very handsome :).

Another thing that I did last week was to bake a cake. There is a baking website called Sweetapolita which is fantastic. I tried her recipes many times before and it always taste deliciously perfect. The recipe for the cake below is called perfectly delightful vanilla cake. I made the cake for a potluck and I received great positive feedback. They loved the taste and the decoration of the cake, which is something I am thriving to achieve. This recipe is easy to make and assemble; when you make it please let me know your thoughts.

 On Monday we had a homemade sushi night. I enjoyed making and eating, it tasted great.

As I said in my previous post I am working on decorating my sons room, which I finally finished. I wanted to do a nautical theme but on a budged. 

The most laborious decorating in the room was to paint the walls. The actual painting as it were was not so difficult but measuring the lines was time consuming However, the end result was fantastic.

I also gave a complete makeover to one of our chest of drawer to complete the nautical theme. It had a very boring brown color, and I painted it with nautical blue color. It looks like a brand new chest of drawer. When I remembered to take the picture, I had already painted one of the drawers hence the reason the old one has a missing drawer. With old drawers you may have to change the tracks as my husband did to make the drawer opening and closing smoother.

I bought a set of pictures from Etsy, framed and hung them above the chest of drawers.

I am very happy with the result of the room and my son really loves it, and my hubby was quite happy that it did not cost much :).

Have a great week ahead :). Thanks.

Fabiana

Smoothies and more

Hello my friends :),

Winter in Chicago has been extremely cold. Although, I am from a part of Brazil that has cold winters; I have never in my life experienced -27 degrees Celsius, which was -57F. When my family in Brazil asked me to described how cold it was, I could not find words to explain the level coldness here. However, we are surviving (rsrsrs). We are trying to do as much as we can to entertain ourselves indoors, and sometimes we play Ninja as an option (rsrsrs).

Since I gained a lot of weight with my second baby, I have a lot to loose. The cold winter is not helping much with outdoor exercises, hence I am focusing on my diet, trying to eat as many vegetables as I can. I make a smoothie, which is super delicious and nutritious, and I also give it to my baby, who loves it. Every time I make it,  he eats all of it.

My little baby is 7 months old and he is already eating solid food. With my first baby I pureed all his vegetables and fruits, I never bought pureed food at the supermarket. With my first son this was also the case, I am determined to do the same with my second one. I believe that making your own food is cheaper, healthier and my children will most probably eat vegetables. My oldest is already proving to me that I was right as he loves salads and vegetables. Thank God my kids eat well and whatever I give them they eat.

The recipe is:
1 orange
1 banana
5 strawberries
5 blackberries
5 raspberries
1 handful of spinach
2 leaves of kale
2 leaves of collard green

After blending it I add a tablespoon of Chia seeds, which helps to balance your blood sugar, has omega 3, gives you energy for the day, and has anti-oxidants that helps to loose weight. It does not taste like anything. I also do not give the chia seeds to my baby. So, every day I drink about 1 cup of this delicious super healthy smoothie at lunch time as well as my baby. Sometimes I put rice pudding to make it thicker for my baby. 

 There is always a happy baby every time he eats his green food.

Furthermore, I have been decorating the house. The other day my son helped me to paint tomato sauce tins with chalkboard paint to organise his study room. We also painted a board to stick the tins onto. My husband drilled the nails through the tins onto the board to make it secure, and after he screwed in the wall.

My son organized his pencils, rulers, scissors, crayons, markers, colored pencils, pens and erasers into the tins. As my son is bilingual, Portuguese and English,  I labelled the tins in Portuguese.

 His desk is painted with chalkboard paint too. We hung the tin organizer above the desk. It looked super cute and it is a great way to recycle.

Lately, my son is very much interested in making scientific experiments. He has a few books from the "Times for Kids" which is completed with interesting facts and experiments for the kids to learn. This week he wanted to make a "blubler". Blubbler is a thick layer of fat that insulates animals in Winter. This experiment is very easy to make as well as easy to comprehend as a concept.
What you need:
vegetable shortening
2 ziplock bags
a bowl of ice water with ice cubes

Directions:
1 - Put vegetable shortening into one ziplock bag until its one third filled.

2 - Turn the other ziplock bag inside out. Place it inside the bag filled with shortening, and spread out the shortening evenly. The shortening  should be trapped between the two bags like a layer of blubber.

3 - Put your hand into the inside out bag.

4 - Put your bare hand into the ice water to feel how cold it is. Then put your blubber mitten into the ice water.

Questions to ask:
Does the water seem colder with the mitten hand or bare hand?
Will you explain the meaning of blubber?
Can you give me examples of animals that have a layer of fat to keep themselves warm?

Thanks for reading my blog, I really appreciate your support.

Love,
Fabiana

Bilingualism

Hello everyone!!!

Today I would like to talk a bit about bilingualism. At home we speak two languages: English and Portuguese. My son speaks English with his father, and Portuguese with me. It is really amazing to watch when we are having a conversation and my son switches from English to Portuguese and vice-verse without stopping to translate. In an article shown by the New York Times, it says that being bilingual improves the brain’s executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind. In other words, being bilingual is a great deal for my son to help him to stay focused :). 
Another advantage stated by the New York Times is that being bilingual, makes you smarter, and it can improve cognitive skills and even shielding against dementia in old age.

For me, raising my son bilingual is very important because of the many benefits for the brain aforementioned, as well as to keep his family roots. I want him to be able to communicate fluently with me and our family in Brazil.

I always spoke in Portuguese language with son but never taught him how to write or read. I wanted him to be alphabetized in English first, and then introduce the Portuguese grammar. Hence now, I believe it is the right time for him to be alphabetized in the Portuguese language.

Last week we began our lesson by sketching his body and labeling its parts in Portuguese language. My son drew muscles, which are the squares on his chest, and he also started coloring a t-shirt but has not finished yet :).

I also labeled things around the house. I wrote in Portuguese and English.

 

The image below is an example of the things I have labeled in the house so far. Portuguese is written in blue and English is written in black ink right under each word.

Additionally,  I am also designing vocabulary flashcards, which I will post as soon as I finish.

Yesterday, he began to learn the alphabet and its sounds. Another advantage of being bilingual is the ability to recognize sounds. Although in English language most of the sounds are different from the Portuguese language, there are many sounds that are similar and helped my son to recognize sounds in letters, specially those words with the Latin root.

This idea can be applied to any language, and can be also translated to as many languages as are spoken at home. Labeling things around the house even helps your husband/wife to learn your language :).

I will keep you informed of the things we are doing. Have a great day. Thanks :).

Fabiana

Happy Halloween

HAPPY HALLOWEEN everyone!!!!

To celebrate Halloween my son began his week  by decorating a pumpkin. After a couple of days we pureed the pumpkin to make some goodies. We baked muffins and cookies. Both recipes were super delicious, but the cookies were superb. I baked it twice and it was gone in an hour. I highly recommend you to try.

I hope you have fun tonight with trick or treating :). Thanks.

Fabiana

Ninja costume

Hello my friends :)!

It's been a long time since I last posted on my blog. I missed it very much!! Being a mom is a full time job that makes me ponder at the end of the day, "where the time has gone"??!!! It goes by too fast. Hence why, I have inadvertently neglected my blog. I don't have much time to do anything!!! Although I have been busy with my, not so newborn baby, I promise I will try to post activities I have been doing with my son every week.

Nevertheless, I appreciate-- very much, your faithful support by checking my blog every day. You  rock :)!!! Thank you!!!!

As I mentioned before, my son loves dressing up. As Halloween is approaching, he wants to be "some type of super hero" every single day. Some days he is a Power Ranger, other days he is Wolwerine, and it keeps going through all the super heroes :). Lately he is very much into Ninjas, and off course he asked for a costume. As costumes can be quite expensive, specially when your kid wants to be all the super heroes he can possibly be, I decided to design one with the resources I have at home.

I decided to share my idea with those moms whom are looking for a Ninja costume without spending much money.  It is a good and quite cheap idea, and most importantly it looks very much like a Ninja costume. The only expense I had with this costumes was the kit with the mask and swords that I bought at Target for $6. The rest of the outfit was black trousers, socks and top, and I also used my baby sling to wrap around my son's chest to give that final lookalike Ninja vest. The baby sling is used to hold the swords too.

My son loved his costume...it looked better than the ones we saw available at the stores. He totally embraced the character, giving me those Ninja scary eyes when taking the picture :).

Hope this will be useful for you. Thank you :).

Fabiana

Multiplication Problem Solving

Hello everyone :), hope you are well!!!

Lately I have been teaching multiplication to my son. I designed a multiplication table and he is learning it by heart. I am not a fan of memorization activities his studies. I believe that reading and explaining the information within your own words is the best way to learn something. Most of the times information adapted with this methodology will be retained for meany years to come. Therefore, the multiplication table is a case apart, in my point of view. It is a system of repetition until you know it by heart.

The table is done up to 10.

I also created problem solving worksheets to help him develop his critical thinking skills, and practice multiplication. Below are a few examples.

This material is available for free on TPT. To download your free copy just click on the following link please: Multiplication Problem Solving - http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Multiplication-Problem-Solving-860696

I would very much appreciate your rating of this material after you have download it please :). Thanks.

Fabiana

Back to School Sale

Hello everyone :),

Hope you are enjoying the last days of your summer holidays!!! School is about to start and I would like to invite you to join me and TPT for a huge back to school sale. All my products will have 20% discount + extra 8% off, which is a total of 28% discount in all my TPT store - just type the promo code BTS13 on your checkout to obtain the additional discount.The sales start on August 18th and finish on August 19th.

To access my TPT store click on the image below please.

The following images are samples of a few materials I have available at my TPT store, just click on the image to access my store please.

Thanks and enjoy shopping :)!!!

Fabiana