Fairy Tales

This  past week our afterschooling theme was 'Storybooks & Fairy Tales':

We have been working on a fairy garden in one end of our shade garden over the last couple weeks:

The fairies get the sunny end :)

Fairy house tucked under the lilies in a 'Lily Grove'

original fairy house

reno'ed fairy house, with fairy from Grandma
(I decided the fairies would like something with a little more sparkle.
And by fairies, I mean me.) ;)

Fairy chairs.
I'd like to get around to making a fairy door, too, for one of the trees,
and put the 'original' fairy house somewhere else.

Fairies made at our crafting playdate     

 
     So to tie in the fairy garden, we read some classic stories about fairies and elves like 'Thumbelina' and 'The Elves and the Shoemaker', and we had some new friends come over to make some fairies for our garden. :) We also tried this fairies in a jar activity, but it was kind of a bust, especially since I kept Laura up until it was dark out to try it and paid for that dearly over the next few days.

L playing with the new fairies. 

     We took a trip this week to Castle Village and the Enchanted Kingdom with my Mom, who had been wanting to take the girls there. I emailed them ahead of time to see what fairy tales/stories they had incorporated into the attractions so we could familiarize ourselves with them. :) We did a lot of reading this week! We've been hitting up the toddler story time at the library on Wednesday mornings, so it's a perfect time to take out any books we need for our weekly themes.

     One of the stories we read was 'The Gingerbread Man', which Laura really latched onto, so we also made and decorated some gingerbread men (hoping they would jump up and run away on us when we opened the oven.) :) It was really fun to see how she decorated them - the one on the far right has "a really long red beard". <3

I made Laura a gingerbread puppet so we could practice our storytelling with the puppet theatre

     This week I made a new mixed CD of classic nursery rhyme songs for the girls to listen to in the car as a quick way to familiarize them. Josh and I also made a project out of recording ten classic stories and scanning the books to put them together and making a 'storybook' DVD for the girls. We played it for them on the way to Storybook Park today.

 

They had a fun splash pad 

and some fun waterslides :)

Rachel reenacting Jack & Jill ;)