Workshop Weekends

My son had a great idea recently, which he named "Workshop Weekends".  Basically, he thought it would be cool if his dad spent some time on the weekend making stuff with the kids.

Now, my husband is no craftsman. He's thrown together some raised garden beds and some animal housing and so forth, but he's still learning too.  But the stuff they end up making isn't the point of the exercise, at all.

The first weekend of this produced wooden swords and shields and a little fairy house.  I can't wait to see if this continues!

taking a little break in our homeschool

In order to make holiday gifts and do some crafting!







Yet another reason I am grateful for a flexible schedule, and the ability to change our lifestyle as the seasons change.

Time for More Indoors Activities

The fall weather is really starting to turn in our neck of the woods, with lots of downright stormy days and wet mushy ground even when the rain isn't falling.

It's hard on the kids, who were used to spending at least an hour a day outdoors playing with each other every day.  It's hard on me too, since now they and their noise and their mess are more under foot in the house.

Just time to adapt again, and get used to a more indoor life.




They are on the computers more, of course, but they are also playing more board games together. A friend loaned us a board game of Dungeons and Dragons, and that has been a huge hit.  The kids also spent almost three days well occupied by creating a card game together that seems to be half a sort of pokemon game (all the boys cards) and half a fairy warrior game (all the girls cards) but the two self-created decks interact with each other.  I think it was a masterpiece of cooperation.




It also calls for more "arts and crafts".  A recent quick stop in our local bookstore produced two good finds: the Klutz petal people kit and an "instructional comic" called Welcome to Your Awesome Robot. So we are living in a sea of little fragile fairies and bits and bobs of cardboard and duct tape in our house at the moment.

How do you adjust to more indoor time for your kids? Any good rainy day activities?

  

Our week in camp

(Terrariums with plastic animals)

This week I'm teaching a half-day camp at my church, for 4-7 year olds.  It has left me scrambling to keep up with domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, dishes, and laundry, and we've completely tabled our homeschooling for the week.

Meanwhile, my son is getting to be "staff" for this camp for the first time, and learning lessons from that, and my daughter is enjoying the camp activities and her friends.  I'm enjoying teaching, testing out some crafts that have been on my pinterest boards for a while, singing songs and playing silly camp games, and watching all the kids deepen their relationships to each other and to the church.  It's a good (if a bit tiring) week.




This astronaut picture craft worked out well, but my daughter just couldn't follow directions. :)

A fun scavenger hunt idea

Yesterday the kids and I went to a fun scavenger hunt organized by a mom in our homeschool group.  Her really fun idea was to use egg cartons, and paint each well in the carton a different color.



Twelve different colors for the twelve wells in the carton.  Once the paint had dried, the kids all set out to find something that color on the beach.




For a few of the colors, my kids ended up picking up bits of trash.  A yellow straw bit for the yellow.  A bread bag tie for the white.  Others stuck with just rocks and were sifted carefully through the piles of rocks on the beach.




It really was lots of fun!  I'm going to copy this idea for a scavenger hunt at church, I think.

Gardening with and for Children

Ever since we moved, my daughter has been wanting "a magical fairy garden".  We didn't get it done last summer, so this year (our second in this new home) it was a priority.  I gave her seeds and statuary for her birthday in February, but it took our Mother's Day nursery trip to really make it all come together.



"George", the lawn gnome.

My son decided this was the place for his bunny statue he got for Easter last year, and he planted some lettuce seeds all around the rabbit.  We'll see if that works out or not, but it's a cool idea.







"Alann" the Fairy Queen (and owner of this garden).




A fun project, checked off the list.  Next up for kid's gardening plans is a "Jurassic Park" garden my son wants.  He already bought one plant for it, the "Dinosaur Plant" Gunnera Manicata.

Our Weekend in a Parade

Our community does a really cool parade each year for Earth Day, with real grassroots community involvement and a theme of "Procession of the Species".  This year my daughter wanted to participate, and chose Pink Flamingoes as our species to be.  I bought the supplies, but they each put together their own costumes and I made myself a flamingo head staff that I was pretty proud of.  My husband was a good sport and along for the walk in the pink shirt, visor, and boa I bought for him.  It was a very fun project, and although the route was a bit long and tiring, we all had a good time.

Other cool things from the Procession:

Peep, Peep!

We left our bantams sitting on their eggs, because we really didn't need all the eggs we're getting, and the hen was broody, and we thought, why not?

Peep!  Peep!  Five of the eggs hatched, and even after one little chick died we have four little adorable fluff balls running around in the tractor with their parents.  The adults are being very protective, so I actually didn't want to open the wire door up to take the picture - the rooster tried to peck the camera lens the first time I tried that.



The kids are in love with the little chicks, and go out to check on them and watch them a couple times a day.  We've decided not to take them away from their mom, so they have a lower chance of survival, but the family all together sure is sweet.

And it's the time of year for those other little Peeps:


It's Peep Diorama Time!



This is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Carbon.




And this is Fantastic Mr. Fox by Hypatia.

Sparking creative play

I pulled off a great parenting feat today: my kids voluntarily played happily together "unplugged" from their electronic devices for over an hour without any fighting.  It was creative, original, messy play.

How did I do it?  I gave them a box of trash to play with.

In fact, I keep a largish stash of bits that could have gone into the recycling but that seemed to have potential for creative constructive play, and these items can get pulled out when the kids want to make stuff.  Today I added a box of newly cut scraps of foam board ... and Voila!

I love how the box can be more fun that what came in it, and this is the same idea. :)

Happy Halloween

(He's a Mars Rover)

They don't care

Blogging, pinterest, and other social media are full of amazing pictures of perfect holiday crafts and photogenic meals.  It can be inspiring, but it can also raise expectations.  I've read about how the invention of the vacuum cleaner actually made housekeeping harder, because it raised expectations and made people think it was a good idea to have more carpets and rugs in their homes.  In the same way, "Mommy Blogging", which seems like a great way to fight the obscurity and isolation of modern-stay-at-home-momdom, has perhaps made the job harder by raising expectations.

Guess what? I don't need to be perfect.  My kids don't care about how photogenic their craft projects or meals are.  This weekend I tried to make a gluten-free haunted gingerbread house with the kids, but the gingerbread was far, far, too soft to make into a house.

I was a bit bummed, but the kids didn't care.  They were happy to just decorate the pieces as big cookies, and the gingerbread tasted great.

Good Enough really is Enough.  Let's all cut ourselves some slack.  

Another camp activity

Today we made necklaces in Chalice Camp, and had each of the kids pick a word that helps them remember to act by our principles.  It is somewhat similar to the 7 Principles Bracelet Kit, which I picked up at GA this year.

First, we made clay beads with oven-bake clay, then we had alphabet beads and asked each of the kids to pick their word.  Then, they made their necklaces with their alphabet beads, clay beads, and an assortment of other plastic beads.  The words in the bracelet kit are:

Care
Share
Grow
Learn
Hear
Hope
Love

The words the kids picked today:

Rainbow (3 kids picked that)
Love (2 kids)
Friends
Hope (2 kids)
Their own name
Apple
and my favorite, "word"

Color Fun

We are doing camp at church this week, for the 4-7 year old crowd, with a theme of "Rainbow Camp".  The Rainbow is a way to remember the UU 7 Principles, but doing a rainbow theme is also a great excuse for a bunch of fun activities with color!



And this idea, which I got from the blog Salt and Chocolate, was a huge hit.  Baking soda in trays, with  small containers of vinegar colored with food coloring.  I mixed it up a bit and did some water and some vinegar and didn't tell the kids which was which, so they got the surprise of not knowing if it was going to fizz or not.  Some pipettes so they can drop it on the baking soda, and they would have happily just kept going with this activity.

Being Elmo

We just watched the fabulous documentary Being Elmo, and it inspired some sewing and puppet making around here right away.  I love The Muppets and have a great deal of nostalgia for Sesame Street, but the beauty of this film is the picture it paints of the people behind the puppets.  I recommend this to everyone!

A moment from Sunday

Panpipes and Chinese Dragons.

May the Fourth Be With You

Tomorrow is Star Wars Day, which my kids have chosen to make an "official family holiday".  Tomorrow we'll have a small party, but today we did some prep crafts.  The Star Wars Craft Book was more of an inspiration than a guide, but we still had fun with it.




May the Fourth Be With You!

give a boy a bunny ...

and you may not get a charming Beatrix Potter garden accessory as the result.  :)



He was inspired by Bunnicula, so now we have this fun fellow in our flower bed.

(this was a kit from Hearthsong.  If you click through you will see how they show it being painted)

dying

I got a Ukrainian egg kit for my birthday this year, and we finally got to try it out. Of course, these dyes aren't edible - and that's kind of a bummer. But they are also really pretty! We had my husband's family over tonight, and everyone got to dye some eggs. A fun family tradition.

My Peeps

I've been wanting to do this with kids, and what better time than the April Fool's Sunday before Easter Sunday?