Dance, Dance, Dance, All Night Long

I've mentioned it before, but Liv is on a hip hop performance team with her dance studio.  Just this year, she has already had three performances, with another one scheduled next month, and then recitals in May.  I am so proud of her.  Not only is it a big commitment with practice at the studio and at home, but also for extra performances throughout the season.  I know she gets a little nervous before the performance, but when she is performing, she shows no fear!

Her first two performances this year were during the halftimes of two different high school basketball games (a girls game and a boys game).  They got to watch the older girls on the high school dance team perform and then those girls sat and cheered them on while they danced.  It was so cute!

We went to show our support, and Sydney said she wanted to be out on the basketball court playing basketball instead of dancing! Just love that girl!

* Olivia and her friend, Alexa, who was their rooting on her big brother's basketball team! *

Their most recent performance was before the Phoenix Suns/San Antonio Spurs game!  They performed on the court shortly before the game started!  They did awesome!  And, they had so much fun!  What a great experience for all of them!

If you want to see her whole group performance, you can see it here:

Starz in Motion Performance Team from Amanda Michelson on Vimeo.

Read Across America Bulletin Board!

This past week was Read Across America.  The date coincides with Dr. Seuss's birthday, and so we wanted to do a fun bulletin board that incorporated both.  I seriously worked with two of the most creative moms I know.  We threw around several ideas before landing on one where the kids would literally be sitting and reading across America.  

I went into the class a few days before we did the board and took pictures of the kids pretending to read a book.  After gathering pictures of kids from the other classroom in the hall from a previous project, I printed off the pictures of the kids and then cut them out.  I went on goodreads.com and printed out some popular 1st grade books onto card stock and then cut them out with enough white in front of them so I could bend them to look like an actual book.

My friend, Sheri, used her fancy shmancy Silhouette machine to cut out the states and hot air balloons, and she assembled all of the states onto foam board.  Her husband used a laser machine to cut the Dr Seuss quote out and we used spray adhesive to attach it to the background paper.  The kids loved seeing themselves on the bulletin board and were so excited to look at the different books!

Of course, Olivia is on Hawaii and she is reading Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew!

And, Nate is reading Nate the Great!

I just love how this bulletin board turned out!  It's so fun being able to do some creative and time-consuming projects for our teachers who don't have the time to do them on their own!

My Star of the Weeker, Sydney!

A few weeks ago, it was Sydney's turn to be the Star of the Week in her classroom!  Being the mom who is always on top of things, I opened up her backpack on Monday morning to take out the previous week's work {because an On Top of Things Mom would not return a folder with work still in it} and found a folded up poster with a note saying that Sydney was Star of the Week and her poster was due on Monday!  OhNoOhNoOhNo!

Fortunately for me, my mom reminded me that I had her poster from the year before, so I ran that in to school and we worked on her poster when she came home from school that day.  #momoftheyear

I posted this story on Facebook and at least 3 different people sent me this meme:

Since she was our Star of the Weeker, I thought it would be fun to share some things about my sweet Sydney girl.  

She's Super Talented!

She loves her puppy and her poppy!

She LOVES hijacking my phone and taking selfies (and other random pictures)!

She is my little sporty spice!  She is in to softball right now, and we've had fun watching her making her face when she is playing!

She is starting to get into sassy poses for pictures!

And, every once in a blue moon, she stays the entire night in her own bed!

Love this sweet girl so much!

Valentine's Day 2016

Ahhhh, Valentine's Day!  The biggest Hallmark holiday of them all.  I love it for my girls...we have so much fun working on their Valentine's cards!  Liv didn't want to do sunglasses again this year, so we did silly putty lips!  Sydney wanted to do the glasses this year, and we found some cheapies from Target!  I loved the way the pictures turned out!

The girls made bath boxes for their teachers and each of their classes gave their teacher a "heart attack!"  The kids all wrote something sweet about their teacher on a heart, and we put them on a cute poster board!  Both teachers were so excited to read what the kiddos had written!

The most popular treat given out in Sydney's class was Fun Dip!  She made out like a bandit!

Poppy played in a shoot-out and came in second place!  We sure were proud of him!

The girls got spoiled by their Nana and by me for Valentine's Day!  Can't help it...I'm a sucker for these little blondes.

Over the course of February, I added a heart with a compliment written on it to their door.  I missed a few days, but I think they got a kick out of reading them.  Liv thought this one was pretty funny!

Liv loved her heart notes so much that she made me one!  I'm keeping this one forever and a lot of more F's!

For the actual Valentine's Day morning, we tried to go somewhere new for brunch.  Welllll, that didn't quite pan out the way we thought it would.  It wasn't quite a kid friendly restaurant, and instead of celebrating Valentine's Day, they were celebrating Mardi Gras, but we all ate well, and the girls had fun looking around!

Hope you all had a fantastic Valentine's Day!