All You Need is Love...And Cookies: Tot School Week 3- Letter M

This week not only did we learn the letter "M," but we have all the letters of Max's name now in our arsenal. This meant that Max had a huge rite of passage this week as he successfully wrote his name several times. And like a crazy person, I naturally cried tears of pride and snapped a picture...and no, I have not erased the blackboard yet. No YOU'RE crying. And also, don't judge me.

I made an awesome game this week for Max that we played with several times. Using a hard plastic wipe container, I added paint and googly eyes to it and made it an alphabet monster. Thinking about it now, I think I'm going to add some letter stickers to it, but I digress.

Then, using recycled caps to various bottles, I cut out circles with my cricut (you could also use a large circle punch) and I wrote the upper and lowercase alphabet on the circles. I then ran them through my sticker maker and affixed them to the caps. Max then picked a piece of paper with a letter on it, found the corresponding cap and fed the monster. Truth be told, the matching of the paper was a bit much considering there are a lot of pieces. So moving on, we'll probably just match upper and lowercase letters. At any rate, he loved this tray and was super excited about it and asked for it several times during free play this week.

We also had a lot of books this week that we loved. With Halloween fast approaching, I tried to avoid the "M is for monkey" thing and tried more for "monster" stuff which he is super into. Lucky for me, there is no shortage of kids books featuring monsters. A reader also asked me if I could write a blurb about some of our book choices so I will try to do this more often.

Our Letter M Books

1. The Mitten-Jan Brett: Wonderful story. This is beautifully illustrated by Brett as well. We went back and looked at the pictures several times.

2. Maxwell Moose's Mountain Monster- Barbara deRubertis

3. Maddie's Monster Dad- Scott Gibala-Broxholm: This was a cute story about a dad who works a little too hard and Maddie creates a Dad to cope. The story is a bit long but worth the read.

4. There Was an Old Monster- Adrian & Ed Emberley

5. The Monster Show: Everything you Never knew about Monsters- Charise Mericle Harper

6. The Monster at the End of this Book-Jon Stone: This book is laugh out loud funny. It features Grover who hears that there is a monster at the end of the book and begs the reader not to turn the pages. It is very silly and fun. A great book to read together.

7. Millie Waits for the Mail- Alexander Steffensmeier

8. Max the Monster - Kate Cuthbert

9. The Mixed Up Mail Mystery- Huck Scarry

10. If you Give a Moose a Muffin- Laura Numeroff: This is along the same chain-of-events series Numeroff has become known and loved for. Max is a giant fan of her other books so he was especially happy about this one, We read this book on the first day of fall just so we could make muffins.

Which is the perfect segue to our cooking we did this week. Seeing that we read a book about muffins and that it happened to be fall, we made pumpkin cream cheese muffins. They came out amazing. Max even ran some to the neighbor the second they came out of the oven.

For this you will need:

1 can of pumpkin

8 oz. cream cheese

1/2 cup powdered sugar

2 tsp. vanilla

3 cups flour

1 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 T pumpkin pie spice

1 T cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

In bowl, Mix cream cheese, powdered sugar and vanilla until smooth. Put in fridge.

Preheat oven to 350 and line 2 muffin tins

In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, baking soda and spices, set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin, sugar, oil and eggs until well blended. Add dry mixture just until blended. Do not over mix.

Scoop a small about of muffin mix into each cupcake so that it covers the bottom. Add about a tablespoon of cream cheese mix to each. Add pumpkin batter so that cream cheese is covered.

Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.