Santa Hat Pizza & Gingerbread Baby Lapbook

This weekend Poppy, Yang, and I went "out of town" (a 45 minutes drive) to spend a few days at my best friend, Tamara's house. Poppy and her oldest daughter LouLou are "sisters". Yang and her youngest son, J-Bug are "boyfriend/girlfriend" (Yang is 7 years old & J-Bug is 4 years old).

J-Bug & Yang

Saturday we had J-Bug & Nut's (her middle son) birthday party at McDonald's Play Place. I am fairly certain people left the Play Place traumatized! I never knew kids could be so loud!! There where 5 kids between the 2 of us, plus our other best friend had her 2 nieces, her nephew, her son and her 3 foster girls. The kids had a blast & where wore out by the time we got home.

Yang

Sunday night we made one of the kids favorites, homemade pizza. Thanks to an idea I found from Make the Best of Everything, we put a spin on it. We cut the pepperoni's into triangles, add a circle of string cheese to the top of the triangle and a strip of the string cheese to the bottom. Unfortunately, once we cooked the pizza you couldn't see the Santa hats.

Nut

LouLou & Poppy

Since my best friend and I are both homeschool our children we decided to make bouncing polymer balls with the kids on Monday. First of all, it helps to read ALL of the directions before starting! Next time we will use smaller bowls, add more food coloring (we used 2 drops) and possibly add food coloring once we combine the two bowls as there was very little coloring to the balls. I'm not sure what we did or didn't do but our balls where not translucent like they are in the original post and they didn't really bounce either. I wouldn't say this project was a failure, nor was it a success. However, the kids enjoyed it so I suppose that is all the really matters sometimes!! :) 

Yang
Definitely having some sensory issues with this project.

J-Bug

Tuesday we read Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and then worked on our lapbook to go along with the book, from Homeschool Share. This was LouLou's first lapbook and she said it was AWESOME! J-Bug had a blast coloring the gingerbread cut-outs and even practiced some cutting. Poppy & Yang are no stranger to lapbooks and did great helping out where they could.

Poppy &LouLou

Tamara & Yang

I will have to say, I thought I had my hands full, but WHEW! I don't know how families do it with toddlers/pre-schoolers in tow. What is your best advice for homeschooling families that have Pre-K children? What has worked for you? What have you tried that hasn't worked for you, and why do you think it didn't work?