Our Punny Valentine

We like to make a punny valentine to send to the grands and since we like to keep it a surprise, I won't share this year's now, but here is our valentine from last year, it is one of my favorites :)

We Three...Unique Individuals

The biggest bigs have moved past needing my help with crafts.  Sometimes they even help Natalie make a craft.  She usually still needs a little help, but her personality still shines through into her work.

As I mentioned previously, we have been doing a craft to go along with our Bible lessons - sometimes this is a very simple, quick craft and sometimes this is more involved!  This is one of those involved ones :)  We sometimes use the devotional website truthforkids.com and September takes us through Matthew.  So immediately we were hitting Christmas stories.  Although a part of me felt strange making wise men in September, another part thought it was more fun to make a Christmas craft when it isn't even close to Christmas!

First up:  Caleb, who has become quite a die-hard OSU fan

 Natalie and I made this wise man together:

 Annalise's wise man - she has a thing for drawing what she calls "cute eyes" - they are always oversized and looking to the side.  Since we used googly eyes, she immediately claimed the largest set .  These particular eyes, I have saved from multiple projects that eventually get thrown away.

 TP Trio

 Follow the star...

After everyone had dried, they did a puppet show over the back of the couch (Annalise inspired, I did not suggest it - she likes to make videos of all sorts)  The video did not turn out that well (mostly because **one** of the wise men liked to go in the opposite direction), but it was pretty cute and creative :)

Water from a Rock

Mostly for Natalie's benefit, we've been doing a simple craft to go along with our Bible lesson each morning.  And most of them have come from a last minute pinterest seach.  This one included - super simple:  fold a small piece of paper to make it stand, draw Moses on it with a staff, crumple a triangle of blue construction paper, place a rock over the tip, position Moses next to rock.  Voila.

Natalie's - I love her sunshine :)

Caleb's - naturally, a staff is really a cane and why not a candy cane...

Annalise's - I have no words.

Homemade Valentines

These are some of our homemade valentines from this year.  They look complicated, but they were easy to make.  We used shaving cream and food coloring to make a design and pressed the paper on top.  When you removed the paper, you use a ruler to scrape all the shaving cream away.  The design is stained on the paper.  It really is that simple!

To make the design, squirt a bunch of shaving cream onto a cookie tray and spread it out smooth.  Drop dots of food coloring on top - an inch or two apart all over.  Swirl the coloring with a toothpick until you like the design.  You can repress the same design and it will look different, or you can smooth it out and drop food coloring again - in that case the background will be tinted.

We used watercolor paper (98lb).  Lighter paper works, but is more likely to rip when you scrape it.  After it was completely dry, we cut it into hearts.  The girls taped candy to theirs and Caleb added googly eyes and a mouth.

Homemade Nativities Rock!

We saw some rock nativities on Pinterest and got inspired.  It turned out to be fun to sort though rocks looking for Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, and a manger.  You could buy river rocks; we just went for a rock hunt.  Most natural rocks here are coral rock, but people landscape with all sorts of rocks...which is not to say we took these from a neighbor's yard!  We took them from places that looked neglected.

Sample nativity painted by Mommy

Caleb - I suggested he give one of the adults a beard so that we could tell which one is Joseph, but he decided not to.

Natalie's - very little help from Mom.

Annalise - I love it that Mary has bows!

We set these up lining our front walk and that same day, the landscapers came with their weed eaters and leaf blowers.  The leaf blower guy blew the rocks right off the sidewalk!  Fortunately we found the little Lord Jesus asleep in the grass.

Melted Snowman....heads

In honor of all my readers who have already had their first snow of the season, I am posting a very easy homemade ornament:  Melted Snowman Heads.

We saw them all over Pinterest, but after the second link was a bum link, I lost patience with the internet and decided we would figure it out on our own.  The head is simply a blob of hot glue,  We used fusible beads for the eyes and mouth and a piece of orange pipe cleaner for the nose.  It didn't matter if we made the face and hot glued over it or stuck the face in last (which was easier - use a toothpick), they all turned out about the same.

Some of them looked a little more puddle-like than others, but a good time was had by all.  The kids are very excited about making ornaments, so expect more ideas from us soon!

Hermit the Frog, Benny the Pooh, and Who has time to blog anymore?

I know I have repeatedly said that having big kids is a big help,and it is, but the bottom line is that life is extremely full right now.  Too full to blog frequently.  So I am going to take advantage of having time tonight and post a bunch of mostly unrelated thoughts and pictures.

Such as...

This is the drain in the downstairs bathroom.  The items you see in the drain are:  a piece of soap, a pencil, a blue crayon, and the piece of mesh that fell out of the faucet.  The thing poking out of the wall of the pipe is the part that lifts the plug up and down.  The plug is MIA.

C and A are such different learners that I hardly know where to start with Natalie.  Will she be a deep thinker like Caleb, but struggle with reading?  Will she zip through the basics like Annalise?  Will she show me another completely different learning style?  She likes to have some worksheets to do, but she also likes to play.  I've decided to add a planner form for her to my weekly plan.  I'm planning 3 days of work and allowing 4 days to complete it.  One project she and I are working on is a "thing alphabet" -  B is for Buttons, etc.

Caleb and I made one of these when he was 2!  I would swear I posted it on this blog, but I can't find it.

Natalie is the one who says Hermit the Frog and Benny the Pooh.  And she's not being funny!  Although she often does try to be funny on purpose (and succeeds!)

Irene slept 9 hours each of the last two nights.  Maybe she is just an awesome sleeper, or maybe it is easier for a baby to get the picture in a house full of kids.  I can tell she differentiates between day and night.  If I turn on a light at night, she looks around for where the light came from.  Of course our house is much much quieter at night and in the daytime too!  I think there is a difference in me too -  it felt very natural to quickly establish a bedtime routine.  I don't mean to compare her to Mako, but it is kind of like how it is with a dog - there is so much said through body language that people who rely on speech don't notice.

One of Natalie's art projects this week was a giant paper doll.  I planned this activity without having a piece of cardboard big enough to carry it out.  Fortunately, my neighbor was throwing out a huge box on Monday.  We took the lid in, traced Natalie onto it, then I cut it out with a knife so that the outline was left on the box lid.  Then we took the lid back to my neighbor's house secretly and put it back where it had been.  We meant it as a big joke, but since we didn't tell anyone we did it, we don't know if anyone else thought it was funny!

I've done a lot more reading than I expected to at this time.  One book I read was The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.  It's about the French Revolution and a mysterious hero who saves some of the people slated for execution.  It's a very quick read and lots of fun.  About 4 chapters from the end I had figured out the ending and I still loved it when I was right!  I also read Dracula by Bram Stoker.  Horror is not a genre that I ever read, but I liked Dracula - it was extremely intense and scary.  I cannot stomach the Halloween decorations including Dracula this year because of it!  An interesting thing about Dracula is the way the story is told - it is presented as a collection of journal entries, personal letters, and newspaper clippings from several different characters.  The sensation is that you feel you are collecting information instead of being told a story.

I got tired of reading Dragon books to the kids and am reading them Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell.  They are loving it!   It's about a girl who gets left behind on her island home and has to survive on her own.  I think a good follow up book would be Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth Speare, but they are looking forward to reading How to Twist a Dragon's Tale by Cressida Cowell.

Annalise was here:

Too cool to drool.

The kids' bedroom:

We occasionally run into families where multiple kids share a bedroom, but not often.  When I talk to the moms, I find that there are lots of benefits to having our kids all in one room.  It is hard when it comes to storage (all of the time) or if someone wants to play alone (much less of the time).  However, the kids get along best after the lights are out.  They talk and laugh - sometimes too loudly.  We want to build another room in our house and that will spread the kids out some, but in their own imaginations, they would all sleep in one room and keep all their toys on another!  We may be getting too old for that to be reality, but I'm glad they are so attached to each other.

Watermelon Basket

I made this for a pool party we attended earlier this week.  Definitely something I want to do again - this was every bit as easy as the lady on YouTube made it look.  It had a big "wow" factor for something that took so little skill.

Valentine Boxes

We made Valentine Boxes today. Natalie was spending the day with Grandma and Grandpa, so we made one for her.

To stir our creative juices, we looked at Valentine boxes on Pinterest - all of which Caleb declared "too girly" (note the complete lack of hearts on his box!)  Annalise was very impressed :)  She asked me to put our boxes on Pinterest too - I don't have a Pinterest account, at least not yet.  I didn't like Pinterest at first, but it is growing on me.  I thought it had an overwhelming amount of ideas on each page, but I've found that it is a much safer place to search for ideas with kids than a standard image search.  If we want a craft about bunnies, for example, we find cute rabbits and only that - instead of the cute rabbits mixed occasionally with strippers named "Bunny".

Annalise, by Annalise

I really love self portraits!  Annalise doesn't talk much about her scar, but evidently she thinks about it.  It is not nearly as noticeable as this picture makes it seem.  Her bangs usually cover it too. I thought she did a really nice job on her features :)  It has always been important to her to draw a realistic nose.

A Day of Dioramas

This week was too busy to do our normal school load, so on our one free day (Monday) I decided we'd use the extra time to do some neglected art projects. Both of the bigs wanted to make dioramas. 

Annalise's

Annalise drew out her design, which was to have a wintery house with Santa halfway down the chimney.  The red under his head is the chimney and the red streaks on the roof are his boots (she never explained why he had to take them off.)  Note the snow angel on the front lawn!

Caleb's

Caleb picked up a new Titanic book at a garage sale last weekend.  Although the wreck of the Titanic has not been a recent interest, it has been a recurrent one.  He loves to make paper boats and he made several tiny paper boats before he was happy with the size of the lifeboat.  Mercifully, he did not want to make little people!  You can see the tip of the iceberg in the back.

You can see the underwater part of the iceberg in this picture:

Natalie expressed interest in making a diorama (of an American Flag), but she got distracted by something and didn't press me for it! I was kind of diorama'd out, so I didn't remind her.   Another time, another time...

Somebunny Loves You

Bread Crowns

Annalise brought home a Sunday School paper that had an extension activity to make crowns out of bread dough.  (The lesson was about King David.)  It sounded like fun and qualified as our weekly art project and a hot lunch all in one.


I made regular roll dough (which is a half batch to begin with) and divided it into four portions that I patted into rectangles.  I snipped them twice to make points.  It turned out that the two side pieces sort of leaned out and looked pointy on their own, but I had to shape the middle point.  After the proofing, I brushed them with an egg wash and the kids and I decorated them with bits of cheese, raisins, poppy seeds, and caraway seeds.

Ready for the oven.

Caleb's Crown

Queen Annalise

Yours truly :)

They were royally delicious!

Snowmen

Caleb's

Annalise's

Natalie's

Mako the Red Nosed Rein-dog

Meredith inspired these pieces of art! She used her kids though :)

A's

C's

N's (with Mommy's help)

Family Portraits Craft

Since we finished the Shing Lee book, I've been kind of aimless when it come to crafting. I liked those books not only because they had great projects, but also because they taught some art concepts along the way. We have another art book called Look What You Can Make with Dozens of Household Items! Now that's a title! It has some good crafts, but not much of it can be put on the wall, which is what I like to do (instead of moving it six times on the counter before hiding it under a coffee filter and a banana peel in the trash can). This craft came from that book, and you can actually hang it on the wall. We liked it very much

This craft required a lot of adult help, but the result looks kid designed.  So it was fun to do together.  Because of that working together, I didn't get any action pictures!  It's easy though - take two plates and have the kid draw on plate 1 enough shapes to make picture holes for everyone in their family.  The adult can use an exacto knife to cut out the shapes.  The kids picked which pictures to put where and I taped them in place - mostly to make sure they didn't shift.  Glue the 2nd plate on the back, pop two holes in the top and run a string through it.  Annalise wanted to write names on hers.

Caleb didn't want to write names, but he did want to make Natalie's shape into a chicken (!) and he likes to draw stars (a lot), so that gave his something extra.  That mark on Natalie's forehead is a smiley face.

Colorful Leaves

Nearing the end of our Shinglee Kindergarten Art books...this was a very nice project and one that had a real art lesson in it. Before we began, we gathered different kinds of leaves from our street.


Trace around each leaf with oil pastels.  Use lots of different colors.




Voila!



Here is the actual concept - paint the inside of the leaf a contrasting color .  Obviously this our our Spanish color wheel...and we are getting slightly bilingual around here!  Very slightly.

...eh...

So anyway, you really have to stick with it and paint every leaf.  Then you paint the background a color that you didn't use for the leaves.

This is Annalise's, she did all the tracing and some of the painting.

Caleb's - no help required.

Mine - I just wanted to do one this time :)