Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

This is the third week of the Hispanic Heritage Month. We are participating in the Multicultural Kid Blogs Hispanic Heritage Month Blog Hop and Giveaway. You can enter the giveaway here by scrolling down as well. We are sharing something we have done to celebrate or learn about Hispanic cultures each week during the month. Today we are sharing the story of Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe. We discovered this story by reading The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe by Pat Mora. There are however many books that discuss the story and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We also have enjoyed thus far Tomie de Paolo's Our Lady of Guadalupe. Here are some other books we found at the library that share some part of the story or how the festivals are celebrated.

DIY Sesame Street Birthday Party

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My good friend's youngest son turned one last week. For his first birthday party she decided to do a Sesame Street themed party. She bought some decorations, but did much of it herself with some help from me and a few friends and her mom. She had the party at our church. She and her husband have large families, so there are a lot of people. She made some adorable tissue paper characters. They sat on the cake table. She got the idea here.

For decorations she had some Sesame Street tablecloths and bought a couple of decoration kits. Then she made favor bags. She had Cookie Monster, Elmo, Bert and Oscar. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of the Cookie Monster ones. She got the idea here.

Her mother and she made Elmo and Cookie Monster cupcakes. They were so cute!!

Then Hazel and I made a bowling game for the party. We were inspired by Sharing the Wealth: Sesame Street Birthday Party. They are very easy to make. We used empty plastic water bottles, construction paper and some printouts of the heads as well as Bert and Ernie's shirts. The heads are copyrighted, so I cannot share them, but I just googled the characters until I found what I wanted. I made them about 3.5 inches wide.

We wrapped the bottle in the paper and then glued on the heads. By the end of the party they were destroyed, but this is because several of the young boys were very hard on them and wanted to just kick and step on the bottles. We used the ball from one of Hazel's toy bowling sets.

She also bought a pin the nose on Elmo game. This would be pretty easy to make yourself. The one nice thing of the bought one is the noses were stickers.

She wanted two crafts for the kids whose ages really varied (one to preteen). The first was to decorate a hat with foam stickers.

Hazel wore her purple hat the entire time. She loved it! The second craft I found for her at Katherine Marie Photography. We decided to use paper cups instead of plastic for the ease of glue sticking.

These were the samples of Cookie Monster, Abby and Elmo that Hazel and I made. We only had pom poms and eyes. The two crafts got combined by the end and many of the older kids made character hats and used the foam on the cups. They had fun.

So that was the fun first birthday party we went to this weekend!! So many great DIY ideas!! We loved it!!

WordWorld: Kooky Spooky Halloween DVD Review and Giveaway

Disclosure: NCircle Entertainment gave me a copy of the DVD free of charge and is supplying the one for the giveaway free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the DVD on NCircle Entertainment's site for your convenience. You can also find their DVDs at local retailers!

I am so excited to share this DVD with you today. Now before I share it I want to make sure you know a couple of things:

1. I really do not like the scary part of Halloween. I like taking Hazel trick-or-treating, and seeing the young children in their cute costumes.
2. Hazel is scared easily and does not like the scary parts of Halloween.
3. Hazel is learning to read and sound out words at school this year.

Now knowing those three things, I have to say this is one of the best Halloween DVDs for her. She has been asking me to watch WordWorld. When we first saw it on television she was in the Waldorf School and we were already breaking the rule of no media and I was not about to introduce words to her as well. Then when she switched schools we could never find it on any of our PBS stations. So I jumped at the chance to review a WordWorld DVD. It being a Halloween one scared me a bit seeing how even The Wiggles: Wiggly Halloween frightened her a bit last year in parts. However the WordWorld Kooky Spooky Halloween did not frighten her at all. She loved it and so did I.

If you know nothing about WordWorld, the animal characters and many of the objects and scenery are made out of the word of what it is. As you can see on the cover, the pumpkins have the word "pumpkin" on them. The characters can make anything as long as they have the letters for it. In one of the two stories on this DVD, Sheep made her costume elements by pulling out the letters to spell "dust", "crown" and "wings". Once the letters were put together to spell the word, they magically became the object. As she spelled out the word and the magic was happening, she sounded out each word as well.

Character Flash Cards Source: NCircle Entertainment

In the other story after some of the characters heard a ghost story and were scared to walk home, but got over the fear by being told ghosts do not exist, Pig sleep walks with a sheet over him. He is looking for B's so he can make his goody bags for Halloween. He has all the -ag he needs, but is out of B's. The viewer gets to watch as he removes the B from words like "ball" and "bike" and when the B is taken the objects become just letters. The other animals are awakened and frightened to see a ghost and are wondering why the ghost is taking the B's. In the end it has a very happy ending.

More Flash Cards Source: NCircle Entertainment

Now on the NCircle Entertainment site they have two free WordWorld downloads. (It looks like they are no longer available, so I am attaching them here.) One is the flash cards which I still need to fold in half and glue as well as memory game cards (print two copies).

Memory Game Cards Source: NCircle Entertainment

I have not shown them to Hazel yet, but I know she is going to love both of them. This is such a fun video and has some fun and educational games to play with it. I highly recommend it. Now I also get to give a copy of the DVD away to one lucky winner who lives in the USA or Canada. Please follow my giveaway rules and do what the Rafflecopter says.

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