We tried Market on the Move this weekend. It's a pretty sweet deal! We paid $10 to receive all this produce! I would have liked some fruit, but for the savings I can't complain. We arrived at the site at 7:50. By 8:45 we were done. We'd paid our money, filled our box, and headed for the car. There is a membership program which is $100 annually which allows you to go to one site per weekend to pick up produce for the year...I'm pondering this idea.

When we got home, we went right to prepping the veggies. We sliced and several of the peppers. We blanched and froze the green beans. The girls even helped! They were very enthusiastic at first, but their enthusiasm dwindled after the first bowl...ha ha ha! When they were all blanched and bagged, there were two full gallon ziplocks which is great because the girls love green beans! As for the chiles, we will likely be sharing them after we freeze a few bags full.

Rice Sensory Bin

When we went to a training a few weeks ago, I was so impressed with their multi-colored rice sensory bin so we made one at home. It's much simpler to make than one would expect. You only need three ingredients: white distilled vinegar or rubbing alcohol, food coloring, and rice. You'll also need one ziplock bag for every color you want to make. First, put the vinegar and food coloring in a ziplock. It should be about 2-3 tbsp vinegar. The amount of color will depend on the intensity of color you want. Mix those well, then add the rice and shake. We originally made pastel colors, but wanted more rice so I added some naturally black rice from the pantry.


The rice is naturally appealing to the kids. They cannot wait to get their hands in it! Hello Kitty went surfing in it. Other animal toys can hide in it. I also gave the kids a funnel and some "shakers" (old spice containers) which they used to pretend they were cooking.


See how quiet they were...okay for the first 5 minutes! ; )

Cloud Dough

I found this recipe for "cloud dough" on Play Create Explore. Having never played with Moon Dough, I don't know how similar it is, but the girls certainly enjoyed playing with it. It is dry, yet builds like wet sand. It is simply made by mixing 8 parts white flour with 1 part baby oil and it smells great! I have no idea how long it will keep...I guess we will find out! I stored it in a large tupperware bin, but I have mind to make a larger batch one day for a sensory bin.

Valentine's Collage

With almost 30 kids in my girls' preschool class, they came home with a lot of Valentines! To consolidate the mess, we made a collage. We glued the valentine cards onto old school printer paper, but you could use any large paper surface (boxes, packing paper, etc). They love their new work of art and now they can enjoy their Valentines without the paper mess!

Tater Tots

Theme of the day: Potatoes!

Activity #1: Who doesn't love a good game of hot potato?!

Activity #2: Potato Stamps!


Activity #3: Growing our own potato plants in water so we can see the root system.



Activity #4: Make oven fries for dinner!

Other potato activities:

1. Potato Maze (This looks really cool! I just don't know if my kids will leave the box alone long enough for it to work!)

2. Potato Beads

3. Potato Battery

4. Visit the official home of the Idaho Potato.

Inexpensive Jello play

We played with Jello today instead of playdough. The basic qualities of Jello are a different than playdough, but the kids still enjoyed it. To do Jello play less expensively, purchase plain gelatin. It takes 4 packets to make a FULL batch (9 by 13 pan) of cubes. The cubes can be stacked, looked through, and eventually mushed up. Various themes could be ocean (blue), slime (green), etc. We used yellow today because it's the color we had left of the 4 pack of food coloring. To color it, I just put food coloring in the cold water. The basic recipe is 1 cup cold water sprinkled with 4 gelatin packets, then mix in 3 cups boiling water, pour into a container and refrigerate for a few hours. Happy playing!

Candy Cane Cookies

I'm not a fan of putting crushed up candy on cookies. I think it ruins them, but this time of year I struggle not to eat all the goodies and I don't like peppermint so I thought it might be a weight management tool ; ) And they actually did turn out cute and tasty according to the kids!

First we gathered candy canes. We had enough around that we did not need to purchase any. We sorted them by flavor (fruity vs mint), then put them in freezer ziplock bags. The thicker the bag the less chance of it puncturing. Next I showed the kids now to gently hammer the pieces through the bag. Gently is the operative word.

You could give each child their own bag to hammer, but we wanted to practice turn taking so we used only one bag at a time.


The recipe was simple. You can either make your own roll out cookies or buy the pre-made dough. After rolling out the dough and before putting the cookies in the oven, sprinkle the broken candies on them. Here they are!