What to do with those cute, monthly baby pics

So I did the Pinterest thing and took pictures of my son each month until his first birthday.

See, isn't he cute! (By the way, this is my favorite chair. It was my mom's and Chris had it recovered for me for Christmas.) I love being able to see how much he's grown each month with each of these pictures. Of course I shared them on the Facebook so all my friends and family could see how adorable my little man is, however I wanted to put them up somewhere in my home too. I searched for a picture frame that had twelve spots but I couldn't find one I really liked or didn't cost a fortune. But a friend of mine did this super cute bunting banner with pictures of her son at each month for his birthday party (crazy- she and I had our babies on the same day in the same hospital!). Well it inspired me to do something similar with my photos. Here was the end result:

Way cheaper than the frames I was looking at and cuter too! All I did was use some jute and these tiny clothespins I found at the Walmart. Easy peasy! Hooray for creative, cheap solutions!

Domino math games

This summer I did some one-on-one tutoring. During that time, I came up with lots of games, trying to make it fun and hands on since math during the summer isn't every kid's dream. I tried to incorporate lots of different manipulatives, and dominoes are a great one. They are good for practicing subtizing and can be used for plenty of math fact games. Here are a few games that involved dominoes:

Make Ten Dominoes

It's the same as the basic domino game except instead of matching the same number together, you match together numbers that make ten. For example, if I had a six I could put a four next to it. This could be done for any number that you want to work on for math facts actually.

I Found, You Found

For this one, we picked a number to work on, such as 7. Then I would find a domino that added to 7, like 6 and 1. Then she would find one, like 3 and 4. I would try to make sure we say the pairs aloud too, I found 6 and 1 which makes 7, what can you find?

Domino Parking

I used a white board but this could be drawn or typed on paper too. I made squares with numbers 3-10 (any number range that you want to be working on would do) and then we 'parked' the dominoes in the correct place. For example, if I had a domino with 2 and 2 on it, I parked it in the four square.


How do you use dominoes for math?