Grinch Day!

Imagine my surprise when I announce that it's Grinch day and I'm told "I don't like the Grinch.  He's mean and scary."  Hmm... that wasn't what I had planned.  

Luckily, after a bit more conversation I discovered that Evan and Alec don't like the "real" Grinch movie with Jim Cary but they do like the cartoon version (which we have).  Of course, Ian only likes the "real" version and not the cartoon version, but that's OK since we have that version too.

Originally we were going to watch them both and compare/ contrast the two but I'm flexible and not going to force anyone to watch a movie they don't want to.

The whole point of this December movie fest is to have fun and make memories, not cause nightmares, so we'll watch them both today as planned but we'll watch them in shifts instead and compare the movies to the book instead. 

The boys were shocked to find the Elf using Daddy's DS this morning and concerned that he would be playing screens all day.  I've found the best stance to take with the Elf and all the questions he arises is just to shrug my shoulders.  After all, it's not like I'm in charge of the Elf or anything!

We are having so much fun with our movie themed days! And I was so relieved not to have to scrap our day or projects.  
 
We started by diving into art first.  After looking at the picture and breaking it down into steps I realized we were going to need lots of drying time today.

For art today we painted "Whoville" Trees.  I found a picture Pinterest and just loved it but there were no directions or anything associated with it so I made up my own.  First we mixed white, blue, pink, and purple to make a pretty background color and let that dry.  We worked on blending colors and mixing colors.  This is one art project I participated in so that I could model what to do.

They each picked different colors for their backgrounds

For math the older boys had an odd/even present coloring page to do.  While it sounds really basic I did like that this had all two and three digit numbers on it.  It is a basic review but it's a concept we haven't gone over in a long time and I wanted to see what they had retained.  They thought it was easy and only paused for a moment over the directions to color two digit even numbers one color and three digit odd numbers another color.  They needed a moment to figure out what two and three digit meant but they had no problem deciding if it was odd or even. 

Evan had a hundreds chart Grinch coloring page.  I found a few of them pictured on Pinterest and this sight but I couldn't find any to color (for free) so I found a blank 100's chart, printed it out, typed up my own color key/ code and drew bits and pieces of the Grinch face on the chart to complete the look.  It was very easy to do and only took me a few minutes (I probably should have taken a few more moments to back through it a time or two though since I did find two mistakes).

finished worksheets

Hard at work

Once the backgrounds were dry on our art project we drew a few funny looking triangles on our page, gave them some trunks, and colored them in completely with some nice dark colors.

Using a tiny brush we made a few squiggles at the top.  We painted the tree trunks too.

Then using some yellow paint we made stars at the top of our squiggles and set the painting aside to dry.  The boys have a hard time with stars so we basically drew a "t" and then an "x" and made a simple star.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that all of the boys were able to do this section with little help and little to no difficulty!  We set them aside to dry once again.

Step #2 is done

I love watching the creative ways they express themselves

We read Dr. Suess's How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is a family favorite that the boys make my husband read year round.  They love anything Suess!  Who doesn't right?

We followed our book up with some reading and writing practice.  The older boys had an adjective sheet about the Grinch.  They each filled in the dozen or so bubbles with words that described the Grinch.  I loved their creativity in coming up with words-- words like horrible, creative, hateful, and inventive!

While they worked on that Evan and I played a sight word game called Four In A Row.  It was a pretty Christmas edition and it was very easy to play.  We each took turns rolling the die and reading a word that corresponded with the number.  If we read the word right we covered it with a marker chip and the first one to get four chips in a row won.  Evan won and managed to get all of the sight words on his own!!
     

    
Our tree pictures still weren't dry so while waiting we made a Grinch ornament.  I had found some plain green ball ornaments and I had exactly three. They were that lime green of the Grinch too!

We made a very simple ornament.  

They each stuck a thumb in yellow finger paint and used two thumbprints to make the eyes.  We then used permanent marker to make the eye brows, nose and mouth.  They each chose to make a different Grinch face.  Ian went with a sad Grinch, Alec wanted an angry Grinch and Evan chose to draw a happy Grinch.  We then used a small paintbrush and some black paint to make the pupils and then we set them aside to dry.

getting messy!

Adorable! (even if you can't necessarily tell they're the Grinch)

One of the last steps to our Whoville trees was to paint various circles, lines and "decoration" on each of the trees.  When we had them the way we wanted them we used a toothbrush to flick white and black dots onto our paper for snow.  We set our paintings aside to dry one last time.

We stopped to eat lunch and decided to make our Grinch cookies while the kitchen was already a mess.  I found this recipe for Jell-O cookies and since I had blue Jell-O we added yellow food coloring to them to make them green.  We also made green lemonade (or Grinch Juice) to drink along with our cookies while watching our movies.  Though Alec doesn't like lemonade so we colored up some apple juice for him to drink instead. 

Yum. 

Working hard together to make cookies- reading recipes,
adding fractions and measuring. 

Once our cookies were all baked and cooling, we pulled out our paintings for the final step.  We came back in with a black marker and outlined our trees, trunks, and stars, and made a small ground line near the base of the trees.  Again, I modeled it first and since the boys were using permanent marker we talked about the importance of being aware of our bodies, hands and markers at all times.

It was a great day and my boys all got along so well.   They enjoyed eating their snacks and watching their movies and we had another wonderfully fun, educational, day.