Sunday, December 29, 2013

BzzAgent

I've always been really frugal. We don't go out to eat very often (because even fast food is expensive), I love after-holiday sales and garage sales, and I use coupons whenever I can. A month or so ago I signed up for BzzAgent, which sends you free products to test and review. The first campaign that I was offered was the Cottonelle Care Routine campaign. Here's what I got:
The Little card telling me what to do, one pack of Cottonelle FreshCare flushable wipes (which had a $1.00 off coupon on the outside and a $0.50 coupon inside), a $3.00 off coupon for Cottonelle toilet paper (because they recommend using the toilet paper and wipes together) and five $3.00 off coupons for when you buy the toilet paper and wipes together. 

I really didn't plan on blogging about this here (I already blogged about it on my other blog, where I mostly review things). The reason that I'm talking about it in both places is that I actually really ended up liking it. The toilet paper is nothing special (in my opinion, my husband really likes it so we'll be buying it from now on) but the wipes are great!  I've always used wet wipes after toilet paper for poop, both at home and at school. The only other flushable wipes I've used are the Nice! brand ones, and they sting. The first time I used them on my son he asked me if "burning his bottom" (as he put it) was making it more clean. I probably won't use them again. Cottonelle FreshCare on the other hand weren't irritating at all. When I smelled them I was a little worried (they smell great, but usually scented things aren't that gentle on sensitive skin) but apparently I didn't need to be. Even when my son had diarrhea for the weekend, there was no soreness using these wipes. He has sensitive skin, so even the "sensitive" wet wipes we buy usually make his bottom really sore when he has diarrhea.  I also love that they're flushable! Now that my son is potty trained, we don't have any reason to take the trash out daily so not having any used wet wipes in there is really nice. I like the dispenser too, it keeps the wipes moist but they're not wet at the bottom like with normal wet wipes. 



Pros: They're flushable, they're sensitive, they smell great and the container does a really good job of keeping the wipes moist.  

Cons: They're pricier than normal wet wipes. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for coupons.

Also, if you're looking for stuff like BzzAgent, there are a few other things you can join to get products to try for free. Here are a few that I'm involved in:

Influenster is a word of mouth marketing company, similar to BzzAgent. Instead of being offered campaigns, like BzzAgent, you can qualify to recieve "Vox Boxes" once your influenster score is high enough. I haven't qualified for any yet, but I pre-qualified for one so I'm hoping to get my first one soon.
PinchME - PINCHme is a free site that sends you up to three free samples every other week. PINCHme is my favorite of all of these, because there's not as much waiting. 
Smiley360 is one that I just joined, it seems pretty similar to BzzAgent and Influenster, except that I think that your social media presence has less to do with whether or not you're selected. 

Messy Fun Volume 1

 These are three of my favorite messy projects to do!


 In the classroom, we did this during our Bug Theme (worm paintings, of course) but I had a lot of fun decorating some birthday cards with spaghetti painting. Sometime soon I'll try to find pictures of the results of our classroom spaghetti painting. Some of them turned out pretty neat.


If you've ever microwaved  Ivory soap, you know it's pretty fun! Also, it only works with Ivory soap. I tried a couple of other types of soap and they either melted or smoked and emitted a really strong and terrible smell.
 When it comes straight out of the microwave, it's easy to break up into little flakes. It feels really neat but isn't moldable until you add water.
We let the kids mix it together on their own, adding water until it reaches a consistency at which it's moldable.
 This has been one of my favorite messy projects thus far. We mixed baking soda in with the paint, and painted the fence first.
Then we sprayed the paint with vinegar.
 It was pretty neat watching the paint foam up and bubble.

 We all enjoyed feeling the foam on the fence, and painting our hands and then spraying them.

When all the paint on the fence had been thoroughly sprayed, we sprayed the paintbrushes.

Our Halloween Theme

We really love holidays in our classroom. The kids get excited about it, and so do we. There are always tons of interesting holiday books, and it's fun getting our whole classroom decorated with the theme as we do projects for that holiday all month long.

I'm starting with Halloween. Here are a few of the projects we did. We have a lot of three year olds right now, so most of our projects are on the simpler side.

One of my favorite Halloween projects was our Halloween Haunted Houses. I need to find a more zoomed in picture of one of them, and once I do I'll share.  For our Haunted Houses we had the kids draw on their moons, or trees or whatever they wanted to draw in the background first. Then we had them use any of our three watercolor colors: black, purple and blue. Once the backgrounds had dried, we had squares and triangles cut out so that they could put together their houses. We also had little tiny Halloween-y confetti type pieces (in the shape of black cats, ghosts, pumpkins and spiders) for them to glue down. This was a fun one, and the kids were all really proud of their haunted houses.


I saw candy corn handprints over at It's a Preschool Party's blog and they were so cute that I just had to do it with the kids! Instead of having all of the kids do this during our learning time, I just got out everything I'd need during area time so that they could make one if they wanted to. As you can see, our candy corn handprints didn't turn out quite as perfect as the ones on the blog. I'm sure that if I'd painted their hands and stamped them onto the paper for them, we could've gotten perfect ones too, but I wanted to let the kids do it on their own.


We had fun with these witches too. I'm a big fan of using recycled materials, so when I got the crimpy black paper in my Julep box, I knew I'd have to find a use for it. We had fun putting together our witches and wearing them later (that's the really fun part).


Any time we have a theme, I try to leave some room for some free art. We ended up with some neat Halloween-themed paintings.

Our Frankenstein's Monsters


Both of these were projects that we did during center time, because they were pretty simple.

I found these mummy's on Chadwick's Picture Place  and thought they were too cute not to do. We used crepe paper instead of gauze and used smaller googly eyes (because that's what we had). One problem we had was that we used the cheap glue instead of nice glue that actually dries clear. I'd definitely recommend elmer's for this project because the mummies looked a little gross with the yellow glue under the bandages.

I do some sort of Jack-o-lanterns every year, with every age group. I wanted to do these with our Preschoolers to make sure that all of them could assemble a face with eyes, nose and a mouth in the correct spots.

I thought these were really cute. I had the kids do them all by themselves, so they all turned out different.

We did some spider webs, painting with q-tips. My mother in law has a really neat halloween hole punch that we used to punch out the spiders.


Our last halloween project was clothespin bats. We had a lot of fun with these! I cut out the bodies and wings separately and we decorated them, then assembled them, then glued them onto our clothespins. It was hard to make them hang upright unless we clipped something in them, so I made sparkly letters to spell out Happy Halloween for them to hold.

Any theme we do, we do several art projects that they take home, along with several activities that don't have any sort of product to take home. My favorite of these for the Halloween theme was our Frankenstein's monster pudding cups! We all had a lot of fun drawing our faces on, scooping the pudding in, topping it with Oreo bits and (of course) eating them.
 My favorite part of this is seeing how different everyone's pudding cups were.

So, I'm going to start blogging...?

I've been a daycare teacher for four years and a mom for three. Throughout my time as a daycare teacher there have been many projects I've wanted to share but didn't really have anywhere to share. I guess this is my chance to fix that. For a while I'll just be playing catch-up, so I'm sorry if holidays and such are posted out of order. I'm starting with the ones I can most easily find pictures of. I've been working with Preschoolers for about a year, so I'll probably share my Preschooler projects first. Before the preschool room I worked with one-year-olds though, so I'll get to those projects at some point.