The girls enjoy creating little table centerpieces for dinner each night.  They are so proud of their lovely creations!  After a few days of trying to meet their requests for vases, fabric, bowls, etc. during dinner prep, I decided to put a bunch of goodies in basket.  I went around the house and gathered up all kinds of miscellaneous things, and of course, they add in bits from nature, plastic animals, and whatever else strikes their fancy!

In our basket right now, we have:

• small fabric pieces
• place mats – we have some the girls decorated with fabric markers
• vases and bowls, including a couple of the girls’ homemade tissue paper jar vases
• sculpey nature print “stones” – we followed the instructions for making these at The Artful Parent
• polished rocks
• shells
• a variety of other nature “treasures”, including walnuts, branches, and cattails

They often work together to create the centerpiece and I love the way this gives them something meaningful to contribute to our family meal time.

We’re busy making a bunch of place cards to add to the basket – we’ll show you them when we’re done!

Have a great Monday!

P.S.  Montessori Mama has a lovely post about helping your child create a Center-PEACE, with lots of great ideas too. 

Remember all those painting tools we played with yesterday?  Now we have turkeys!  The girls basically did these themselves – I did cut out paper turkey bodies and felt beaks and waddles at their request.  Here’s their instructions, more or less….

First step – cut up all your artwork into small pieces and throw them all over the floor.  This will be called the paper market.  Using a feather tracer-stencil-thing, trace and cut-out all your pretty feathers.

Next step – Arrange your feathers till they look their best and start gluing them behind your turkey body.  We glued down just the bottom of our turkey body until all the feathers were done, then glued it down the rest of way.

Last step – add eyes, beak, waddle, and feet and you’re done!

Gobble, gobble!

(A note from mom – You could use any paintings you have laying around, magazines, wrapping paper, etc.  Have fun!)

Happy playing!

Today’s All-You-Can-Create Menu:

• Various paint brushes
• Paper (we used finger painting paper)
• Toothbrushes
• Bubble wrap (wrapped around a wooden block)
• Washable tempera paint
• A large palette (we used a lid from a plastic storage container)

From the Let’s Explore Shop:

• Paint scrapers
• Paint bellows
• Floppy foam brushes
• Paint & Clay Explorers

Other:

• Textured Foam Paint Rollers – Discount School Supply

Coming tomorrow: We’re cutting-up all of today’s artwork to make some groovy turkey feathers!

Today, I am thankful for these two precious girls – for reminding me that we should play as hard as we work.

Have a playful weekend – see you back here on Monday!

That’s why I like them – but, my girls like them because you never know when little animals will need a zoo, or Polly Pocket and her friends need a new apartment building, or the train cars need garages to park in.  I love seeing what they come up with!

Here’s a little peek at some of the things they have made recently:

The Dado Cubes are a set of 10 cubes, scaled from 1-inch to 5-inches:

The Dado Squares set includes 35 3-inch squares in five colors.  Both are loads of fun!

Happy Building!

Begin removing animals from the board by following two simple rules: color follows color and species follows species. So, if your first animal off the board is a yellow hippo, you can choose something yellow or another hippo to follow. The animals have to stay in their rows, and you cannot jump over another animal to get off the board.

AnimaLogic can be played by one person, but a little teamwork is fun too! My girls really dig logic games like this, plus I have seen the little animals being played with outside the game. A very fun way to build critical thinking skills! You can get more info about AnimaLogic at the Let’s Explore Shop:

Have a great Friday!

We started with making a list of all the things we are thankful for.  The girls each circled the things they are most thankful for, so we could save those ideas for the end of the poem.  We plugged their words into a simple poem structure:

I’m thankful for _______ and ________ and _______.

I’m really thankful for ___________.

I’m thankful for __________.

(repeat above line as many times as you like!)

But most of all, I’m thankful for ___________.

I printed their poems on watercolor paper.  We covered the poem with a leaf-shape cut from clear contact paper (just like we made our initials a while back).

The girls painted the whole page, let it dry, and then peeled off the contact paper leaf.  Beautiful!

If you have a fun way you are helping your kids focus on gratitude, I would love to hear about it!

So cute, right?  She was immensely pleased with how this turned out!  We basically followed the instructions at Deep Space Sparkle, first drawing the hills, sun, and clouds with oil pastels.  Delaney spent a long time carefully painting her farmland with watercolors.  While the background dried, we worked on cutting and assembling the scarecrow.  I did make her some little tracing templates for the shirt, pants, and hat.  She rummaged through our box of scrapbooking paper scraps to choose just the right outfit for the scarecrow.  Last step was adding buttons and taping the whole scarecrow to a craft stick.  We used a generous amount of white glue to attach the scarecrow to the background.

While we waited for the glue to dry, we read one of my favorite fall books, Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant.

The illustrations in the book are gorgeous, and I enjoy the simple, poetic descriptions of life from a scarecrow’s perspective.

Hope you are enjoying some beautiful autumn days in your neck of the woods!

Happy playing!