Everyone's Favorite Dutch Dancer!

Here's my first attempt at uploading a video onto Blogger. It's from today when I met Katie from A Listmaker's Life in person! She's my partner at ABC & 123: A Learning Cooperative but we had never met face to face before this morning. We got to see her wonderful performance at the Tulip Festival, and I recorded the first two minutes or so on my camera. I wish you all could've been there, so to help make you feel like you had a front row seat, I now present Katie and her fabulous Dutch dancing group!

Award Season and Giveaway Winning Continues

I hope everyone is having a great weekend! I'm off at the Tulip Festival, where I have plans to meet up with Katie from A Listmaker's Life! Together we run ABC & 123: A Learning Cooperative, and while we read each other's blog, email back and forth, and talk on the phone, we've never met face to face. So we're really excited!

While I'm gone, I wanted to share good news! The prize train just keeps on a comin' my way! I won Kelli's weekly giveaway at There Is No Place Like Home. I get to pick an item from her Estsy store, and I'm having a hard time choosing! She has such pretty trims, stickers, and cards. I'll be sure to share pictures of my prize when I get it!

She has a great weekly linky party for all of us papercrafter's and gives away an item from her Etsy store Seasonal Delights each week on Wednesday. You don't even have to participate in Papercrafting Wednesday to enter, but we'd love it if you would! If you're not a papercrafter check out Friday's Show and Tell, where you can show off your treasures. Her blog is a lot of fun full of tasty sounding recipes, seasonal decorating tips, and great crafts.

I also won Katie's Sinupret giveaway! We're getting a whole load of stuff from them! ER is going to love this one! It's just too bad I didn't have it on hand before she got sick! But I'm definitely prepared for next time! In our package will be:

A copy of Dr. Bob Sears bestselling book The Healthiest Kids in the Neighborhood
A sample of Sinupret
Yellow children's binoculars
Sinupret for Kids Activity Books
Sinupret for Kids Stickers
Mini Plush Bear

I also recently received two awards from Maradith and Annie. I have both already but I wanted to give them a shout out and thank them. It really means a lot to me, that you both enjoy reading my blog!
Maradith from the Procrastinator Crafter gave me the Lemonaide Award, she said that she knew I already had it but that she loves my blog and wanted to give it me again, isn't she the sweetest? Annie from the Santiago Twin Girls gave me the Kreativ Blogger award. She thinks I have a lot of talent and creativity. That's also such a lovely thing to say!
Now for my newest award, from Sharon at Mama's a Mess! I have to say, I've um, never been given anything quite like a zombie chicken award. When I first saw it, though I let out a hoot. Thanks Sharon! Sharon is always leaving me great comments and you all know I super big ♥ comments!

The Zombie Chicken Award reads:

"The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken - excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words. As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to at least 5 other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all…"

Well we can't have that, I don't need any wrath in my life! So here we go:
1. Kim at Four Crazy Kings
2. MaryAnne at Thrifty Craft Mama
3. Branflakes at Adventures of a Flake
4. Heidi at Blue Eyed Blessings
5. Bobbi at Casa Camacho

There are of course many blogs I could pass this along to, these are just a few of my favorite places to visit. So I'd like everyone to consider themselves a winner of their very own zombie chicken. Hmm...somehow that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean! Now go forth and spread the zombie love!
Just as I was about to head of to bed Friday night, I found out I got the Splash award from Lisa at One Girlie Girl, for being "alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive and inspiring". Whoohoo, what a great way to start the weekend! I think I'll pass this one along to my fellow Splashy gals at:

1. Vickie at Vickie's Scrapbooking and Tidbits
2. Noelle at Lil Bits n' Pieces of Me
3. Hadley at Life of a Dairy Queen
4. Kelli at Outside My Kitchen Window, go check out her brand spankin' new blog makeover!
5. Alicia at Delightful & Delovely, my real life best friend's brand new blog.

Thanks ladies for the giveaway prizes and blog awards you've all made my day! Thank you to everyone who comes by Katie's Nesting Spot, especially if you leave some comment love and let me know you're out there. You're all winners in my book, so please consider yourself awarded too! If you don't have any of the four awards take it back home with you!

It means a lot that you take the time to get to know me and I have loved learning more about you too. Blogging has been such a wonderful outlet for me, now that I've started I can't imagine life without it and all of you in it too! Have a wonderful weekend and hopefully I'll have some great tulip pictures to post and one of the "other" Katie in her Dutching dancin' outfit to post soon!

Letter B Activities: B is for Bear

We're behind on our letter unit this week because we've been having so much fun doing the Itty Bitty Bookworm activities, but we did make this cute B is for Bear picture. I've been doing this activity for years, because it's easy and comes out so cute.

I have an ancient bear template that I inherited from the teacher of the classroom next door when I was teaching in CA. In kindergarten the kids would get a pattern copied onto construction paper that they'd then cut out. I'd leave my teacher model up for the kids at station time and they they'd attach all the extras to it themselves. I also used to give them a computer generated precut out saying for the bottom, on that one the letters b whenever they appear are also in blue, but since we're just making one I hand wrote it and underlined our target letter.

I cut this one out for ER and helped her place everything by pointing to where the buttons and bow could go. Then she put them on, we used glue dots because I didn't want to deal with a big glue mess! We recently started using glue sticks too, and let me tell you that's made a huge difference! They work for certain things and the big blue guy was one of them!

If your wondering why everything is blue and not brown or black it's because I think the b sound is easier to hear in the /bl/ blend than in the /br/. We could use black but we don't because I think a blue picture is much prettier to look at☺

Our letter b items for the picture are the bear, buttons, a bow that can be on the ear for a girl or at the neck for a boy -sometimes I use a piece of bow tie pasta for this, and a band-aid. When Blue's Clues was more popular I used to be able to find Blue's Clue's band-aids for this. But now I can't find them anywhere, which is a shame because ER loves that show. We used a Dora one, but I made sure her monkey sidekick named Boots was on it.

We've also been playing Balloon Ball. You make a cone out of construction paper and throw a balloon in the air and try to catch it. ER thinks it's great fun, but the hand eye coordination is not quite there yet. Actually it's pretty far away, because what normally happens is she throws both up in the air at the same time. Then she picks them up off the floor, places the balloon on the cone and announces that she caught it. Too funny!

More great activities to do with your kiddos can be found on Ramblings of a Crazy Woman's Friday Showcase. Jump on and share something you've done too!