February 2023

 Welcome to our Valentines Themed Sibshop!

We decided to celebrate love this month since Valentine's Day is just a few short days away.

We created "Love Bugs" for our siblings with special needs. Each heart in the love bug is meant to share something we love and value about our sibling.

After our trickle in craft activity, we gathered for our welcome and introductions. We love spending a little time getting to know one another better each month. We also discuss our rules and expectations. The Sibshoppers were great to share a little bit about themselves and their siblings. It's fun to watch them make connections with one another's experiences. 

Then it was time for a more active game called "Instant Replay". Each Sibshopper tells us their name and then acts out something they enjoy doing. Then the whole group has to imitate the action as we move around the circle. Here we are "riding a horse!"

We learned that we have Sibshoppers who like to sing, ice skate, read, play with their pets and more!

Next up on the agenda was "Dear Aunt Blabby." Kids from around the world write in asking Aunt Blabby for advice. Our group of Sibshoppers was recruited to help give advice on being a sibling to a brother or sister with special needs. They are definitely experts in this area. 

Our Sibshoppers did great engaging with the questions from other sibs and sharing their advice on all sorts of topics sibling related: how to deal with playdates, how to respond to bullying, how to cope with fears and more.

We enjoyed a "romantic" lunch of spaghetti & meatballs, garlic bread and salad. That's about as fancy as we ever get! :) Then we played a few rounds of Knots. Everyone gets all caught up and works together as a team to unravel into one large circle.

Valentines Bingo was a much loved activity! A little candy, a little luck and a lot of fun.

Our final activity was all about the heart. Teams worked together to carefully pass a tissue paper heart around their circle without ripping it. Twist is, you must use a clothespin. 

Thankfully we ended up with no broken hearts.

We sure love spending time with these compassionate brothers and sisters. 

See you next month.

January 2023

 Welcome to our first Sibshop of the year 2023!

We started off the new year of Sibshops by creating facetags as our nametags. Our self portraits seemed to cover all styles of art from impressionism to cubism to realism. We always enjoy seeing what our Sibshoppers create.

We then did our traditional welcome with rules and expectations review. We spent a little time getting to know another and our sibs better. This time around we also spent a few minutes looking back on fond memories of our time together during 2022 by looking at the Sibshops blog.

We then played some fun rounds of Group Juggling and Useless Machine with loads and loads of beanbags. We stayed busy tossing and passing and catching the bean bags in a set pattern that wasn't always so easy to remember. 

The game got our hearts pounding a bit so we relaxed and did some quieter book reading and discussion after.

Stories are a great way to help our Sibshoppers relate to one another and share their experiences.

Lunch was tasty as always and so were the delicious Cinnamon Sugar Tortilla Snowflakes 

we made for dessert. 

We worked off a little bit of our after lunch energy by playing a few rounds of "All Out!" Each team wants to keep all objects out of their own square while also attempting to fill another teams square in the time they have alloted.

Our final activity of day was to play a new game called "Drop Dead." It is a fun and quick dice game that requires you practice some simple math skills as well! We've got some great mathematical minds in our midst.

We had a great workshop getting reacquainted after our holiday break. 

We are looking forward to an incredible 2023!