Uncharacteristic: The Best Morning Wake-Up

I'm a sucker for quick and easy activities that are both family friendly and educational, which basically can totally sum me up: I'm a Momma who loves to laugh and learn with my kids. However, in the event that said activity goes beyond the point where we all lose interest or patience or would rather bang our heads against a concrete floor than listen to each other for ONE MORE SECOND then yeeeaah, not gonna happen.

My New Years resolution in January of 2011 was to start a "Word of the Day" with the kids. A simple ten minute activity that we could all do together and create a worksheet that documents our word with artwork and application etc. 

It's been a huge hit. Well, except for that one day, The Day of the Living Dead. 

After taking a WOTD break this summer we started it up again last night. My rules are simple:

1) Each day one child picks a letter to chose from

2) I'll flip through that letter's pages in our childrens dictionary until my child tells me to stop

3) They'll point to any word on the page, cannot be a picture.

4) No matter what the word is--it's the WOTD.

We'll then learn it, apply it, write it and draw it. Let's use last night's word as an example, shall we? Bella chose the letter U. I flipped through the U's until she said stop, she pointed to the first word she saw and it was UNCHARACTERISTIC.

So we highlighted it in the book

and wrote the definition on a plain piece of paper. I talked about a few examples of how people can do things that are uncharacteristic of themselves yadda, yadda, yadda and then let the girls apply the word in a sentence.

This is where it ALWAYS gets nasty. Like Kardashian nasty. They argue over who the story is about, they argue over the names, they argue over the plot line and disagree about pretty much everything! But somehow, someway they both came up with this:

Of course Mia had a shit-fit over the fact that Bella chose "monkey bars" and went ahead and crossed through it which meant that Bella  outright refused to draw the picture leaving Mia to quickly do a pencil sketch of a playground with SWINGS--because people that's what she wanted to chose, SWINGS!!! But I think she felt bad and drew the monkey bars anyway. UUGH, it's enough to make you wanna chuck the dictionary out the window, huh? It did for me! Thankfully, it was right before bedtime so the arguing moved from the kitchen to the bedroom and before I knew it they were fast asleep.

This morning, while totally asleep laying on my side, I was tapped awake at 6:30 by Mia. Half asleep, and totally bleary eyed I leaned my head forward and kissed her good morning.

And you know what she said?

"Good thing you just kissed me mommy, it would be very uncharacter-issic if you didn't"

I would have married her right there if it would have been legal.