Monday Meanderings - Father's Day

Father's Day is this weekend so here are some great ideas to make the Dads in your life happy.

First from Martha Stewart we have several great ideas. I love the decorated paper cube!

Next is, Me and My Pink Mixer, with one of my favorite photo props. We have done this before for several holidays. You can buy the wooden letters like Me & My Pink Mixer, or make them out of paper, or even make paper signs.

I Can Teach My Child made this adorable shadowbox using old ties. I love it and think it would look great on any Dad's wall!

Lastly, we have I Heart Crafty Things, with another cute photo prop. I must admit that the reason I love this one so much is that I do it with my son each year and have done it each year since he could stand. I just use the same frame each year and change out the picture. It is a great way to see the growth each year.

Do something nice for the Dads in your life!

Monday Meanderings - Frugal Summer Fun Pt. 2

Time for some more activities for your family to do this Summer, without breaking the bank.

The Art Girl Jackie has a great tutorial on Sharpie Tie Dye. I love how she finished it off with an iron on.

Here is another great spin on the Melted Crayon Art that I see all over the Internet. This one is by Come Together Kids and I love the heart in the middle of the canvas.

Alphamom has a great tutorial on Sandpaper Printed Shirts. I love this idea and I am thinking of doing Super Hero logos for my son this summer.

Lastly,Create With Your Hands made a great sidewalk chalk neighborhood. My son would be so excited yo get all of his cars out there and go to town!

Let your creative side flourish this week with some frugal ideas!

Monday Meanderings - April Showers

Well, April has finally arrived and with the coming of April, we welcome in flowers and sunshine. Do you garden at your home? I have found numerous projects that you can do with your kids to get them out in nature. In order to appreciate nature, a child has to be involved in nature. Here are some projects to get you started.

First up is Burgh Baby with an absolutely adorable Fairy Garden. I spent a summer working in a garden center and the owner made lots of fairy gardens and even offered classes for kids. It is pretty easy. You can find a container, or just a section of your yard. Then you can build your houses, or buy small birdhouses. I have even made fairy houses out of the small single serving milk containers. Decorate any way you want, and then go to the garden center and buy small plants. I love the way Burgh Baby glued pennies on the roof of her fairy home, for good luck. I also love her fairy swing in the tree! This is a great activity for kids to scour your yard for fairy goodies like pieces of bark, twigs, twine, seashells and so much more.

Do your kids love to water the plants? My son does, but sometimes he drowns delicate plants with the force of the water hose. Need a solution? Try out the Thumb Waterer from Fun in the Making. This can be made from recycled containers (be sure to clean them well first). You can even offer up a history lesson!

Seasonal Gnome made a beautiful garden loom. This is not only great for getting outside with nature but can really encourage fine motor skill with the weaving of items into the loom. It is also inexpensive since you scavenge the wood and then you just need twine.

My favorite is this post from Artful Adventures. Have you heard of Land Art? It is amazing. You go outside, round up some of your favorite items like leaves, blossoms, stems, rocks, etc. and then you arrange them into art. I love this fish scene. I have been on hikes before and you suddenly stumble upon a Land Art project that someone created and left. It is shocking and beautiful. Get outside and create some Land Art with your kids!

Get outside and enjoy the weather with your family! Our next Monday Meanderings will again involve getting outside with your kids.

Monday Meanderings - Affordable Gifts

Well, January is almost over and if you are like me, you have already been to a few kid's birthday parties. With your kids being invited to so many parties, it can get expensive to supply gifts to everyone. I have scoured the Internet to come up with affordable gift ideas that you can use.

First up is Teaching Good Eaters. She put together several activities but I especially love the monster kits. How fun to "build" your own monsters.

Next we have Poopscape Projects with a great homemade Shrinky Dink project. You could put together a kit that includes the pre-cut and roughed plastic and some colored pencils, along with directions on putting together pieces.

The Artful Parent has a tutorial for dying play silks using kool aid. I just love the colors and the process seems simple to follow. You can also go to Tried and True to print out a graph of mixing kool aid packages to get certain colors. Very handy and affordable.

Creative with Kids is making me flash back to my own childhood. How cute to make the Paint with Water Pages. You could make several of the pages and also give the child a couple of paintbrushes and a small lidded container to carry water in.

Well, there are a few ideas to get you started. Each birthday party that your child gets an invitation to, does not have to cause you to panic. Put together a gift that you can afford and your child will be happy to give and make for their friend.

Doodle 4 Google

It is that time! The Doodle 4 Google contest is up and running. If you use Google, then you know that they frequently change their logo with a great doodle. They are holding a contest that is open to all K-12 students in the US. You can click the link for the full rules and the registration form.

The best news, you can win a $30,000 college scholarship and your school can win a $50,000 grant! All entries must be postmarked by 3/20/12 and received in the Google office by 3/23/12 to be eligible. In addition to the amazing cash prizes, the winner's doodle will appear on the Google page and it will also be featured on a Crayola 64 box!

The theme for the doodle contest is: If I could travel in time, I'd visit... Get your markers, crayons, pens and pencils and get doodling!! Best of luck to everyone!

Monday Meanderings - Martin Luther King Jr

Happy Martin Luther King Day! Here are some activities to do to celebrate the life and legacy of the great Dr. King!

First is First Grade in One Year with an activity showing a child's dream on the inside of the booklet and their hand print art on the outside to signify diversity.

Next we have Learning & Laughing in First Grade with a great experiment between brown eggs and white eggs. The children graphed what is different and what is the same with the eggs and then wrote out what they learned.

This is not a project that I think you can do at your home, but this is a mosaic created in 2010 by artist Pete Fecteau and is entitled "Dream Big". Can you guess what it is made of? It is 4,242 Rubik's Cubes. It took over a year of planning and weighed in at about 1,000 pounds at completion. It is amazing!

I will leave you with two of my favorite quotes:

Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Darkness can not drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate can not drive out hate; only love can do that. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Monday Meanderings: Talk Like A Pirate Day

I love a chance to be a kid so Talk Like a Pirate Day is just what I need today.
Here are some great pirate activities for you and your family to enjoy!

Handprint and Footprint Art has a great pirate handprint craft. I love handprint and footprint crafts. It gives me something cute to see the change in my child's size.

Great Resource Childcare did several pirate activities but I really love the paper plate pirates that they made. There are no directions but they look pretty easy to make.

Here are some great Pirate Printables from 2 Teaching Mommies.  It includes Roll and Graph, Size Sequencing, Letter Match and so much more.

The Imagination Tree give a great lesson on making a treasure map and putting a realistic look of age on the paper.

The Fickle Pickle put together the cutest Pirate Birthday Party. I love the pirates games: Walk the Plank, Roll the Cannonballs and Swab the Deck.

Arrrgh Matey!

Smelly Flowers

I have seen examples all over blogland where people have used the bottom of a water bottle as a stamp for painting. We decided to do this but we took it a little further.

This week when we went to visit some family there was a neighbor that had planted some sunflowers that are now over 10 feet tall! Needless to say, my son was quite impressed with these giant plants.

So we decided to create some smelly sunflower paintings.

Supplies:
Empty water bottle
paint
paper
glue
coffee grounds

We stamped several sunflowers with the bottle and yellow paint. Next we went back and used our finger dipped in green paint to make the flower stems and leaves.

Lastly, we put a bit of glue in the middle of the sunflower and sprinkled coffee grounds on the glue.

Tape Resist

We worked on a tape resist project this week using watercolors. It was easy and quite pretty.

Supplies:
Watercolor paper
Blue painter's tape
watercolor paints
water

We started by using the blue painter's tape to make an initial on the piece of paper. Typically I would just tear this tape but since I wanted straight edges I cut the tape for this project.

We put the tape down on the paper and started filling in around the initial with our watercolors. Our paper was quite large and my son began losing interest in the project so I painted a blue border around ours and he just filled in to the border.

This is an easy and fun project. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that the only white you want on the paper is underneath the tape so be sure to fill in all of the other areas with paint. Do not leave any little spots of white. I did not do a great job of getting the tape sealed well so some of our paint bled under the tape, but we still love the picture!

Paint Movement

How do you move paint? With your fingers? With a paintbrush? What else can you use to move around some paint?

We used old hotel room keys and some "pre-approved credit cards" that came in the mail!

We put a few blobs of paint on a canvas and then I gave my son the cards to use instead of paintbrushes and he loved it!

He liked how the paint piled up on the card and the noise it made as you scraped it across the canvas. I am sure we will be trying this activity over and over again.

Art? Yes, Yes it is!

I had a great plan for an artistic endeavor. I thought it was genius and foolproof! I thought my son would love my idea! He had other plans for the art project and he had way more fun!

Supplies:
Gessoed Art Board (any size, we used 16x20)
craft paints
tray
paper towels

We picked out some paints and decided we were going to make some drip paintings. I thought it would be so much fun to watch the colors combine. We put squirts of about 6-7 different colors on the board and then tilted the board to watch the paint roll down. The plan was that we would watch those roll down and then turn the board and do some more paint colors. Turn the board again and repeat until we were happy. Once we may the first turn and added the second colors, I could see the wheels turning in my son's head!

He wanted his hands in the paint so bad it was physically impossible to sit still. I let him mix the colors all up. I suggest doing this activity outside, we had paint everywhere! We also had an amazing amount of fun!

Once he had run his fingers all through the paint and mixed it all well, we went back to watching new paints run down the board. We would pick which color we thought would be the fastest and the slowest. He really enjoyed the race and he loves to see his art on his chest in his bedroom!

Because the paint was so thick, it did take over 24 hours to dry but it was worth it. Be sure to keep the board on top of the tray or another surface that it is okay to get pools of paint on.

Art is different to everyone but it should always be fun!

Monday Meanderings - Sidewalk Chalk Art

On the Family Fun Calendar for July we suggested going outside today and doing some sidewalk chalk art. I thought to myself, wonder what kind of art is out there using sidewalk chalk? So I went to my trusty friend Google and look at what I found.

This is pavement art by Julian Beever. I found it on the blog Having Lemonade.

This picture is from Incredible Art. They had a sidewalk chalk festival after turning in their AP Art folder. What a great way to relax.

This is a rendering of Leaf Cutter Ants also created by Julian Beever. I think everyone should check out his website. It is amazing what he can do! These are just chalk drawings on flat sidewalks. Shocking!

Some kid created chalk art:

Frugal Family Fun created this great butterfly garden on the sidewalk in front of their home.

This picture is from Drawing on Earth. They went to Hearst Elementary School in CA and drew this 80x80 butterfly with the 700+ kids working on it for three days!

Let your inner Picasso roam free tonight and every day. Get out to the sidewalk and be free!

Homemade Watercolor Pictures

Colored but not "Painted"

When traveling you need to be sure to have something that is fairly mess free for the kids to do in the back seat and this fits the bill. The only think you need are the pictures, a paintbrush for each kid and a small bit of water.

I searched online for some coloring pages and printed a few out. The fish came from Craft Elf. I printed out the image on card stock since we would be adding water to the picture later and I did not want the paper to rip. When I first started this I did not want anything to detail oriented, just a basic image. I then used watercolor crayons to color the pictures. It is not necessary to completely fill in the pictures as the colors will blend in.

On the picture I colored in I tried two different ways to "paint" the picture. On the back half of the water and the fins of the fish, I used a wet paintbrush to blend in the colors. It worked pretty well as long as I had quite a bit of crayon on the page. On the fish body and the front half of the water I put my finger in a baby wipe and used that to blend the colors. I think it looks a little better but I did run into a problem of the ink from printing the picture bleeding with the baby wipe. This may not be a problem if you are patient and wait a few minutes before you try to color. I have very little patience though and was eager to try it out and complete a few pictures before picking up my son.

Tuesday Teachings - Summer Learning

Picture Source

Most schools are out or getting ready to let out here in the United States and kids can not wait for summer vacation. As a child, I remember the excitement and thrill I felt when it was time to finally put away the textbooks and pencils; it was time to run, play and be free! Kids need that time to just be kids but summer vacation is also no time to just forget everything they learned in the past school year.

You can give your child numerous opportunities to continue learning over summer vacation without them even realizing it.

Cook together - Let your child pick out a new recipe to try and then take them to the store to purchase all of the ingredients. This gives them opportunities to work on reading (recipes and food labels), writing (grocery list), math (measuring ingredients and timing meal) and is a great activity to do together. Research shows that when kids are involved in selecting and preparing food they take ownership of the meal and are more likely to not only try the food but to also enjoy the food.

Garden together - Go to a local garden center and give your child a set amount of money. They can then select several plants to grow in your yard or in pots. This works on math skills (spending money and spacing plants), nurturing skills (caring for the plants)and then recipes and cooking skills.

Scavenger Hunts - See our blog post of 6/4/10 for a great scavenger hunt in the grocery store and we are hoping to give another scavenger hunt sheet for the great outdoors in the next week or so. This is a great skill for kids to teach them to focus, pay attention, search and read.

Photo Source

Public Libraries - Our local library kicks off their summer reading program on 6/1/11. The theme this summer is One World, Many Stories. We have participated in the summer reading program every year. It is cheap, challenging entertainment that encourages literacy making it a win-win for everyone!

Art Camp - No need to pay expensive camp fees. Get together with some of your friends and organize a camp for the kids. Each day the kids can rotate the house they go to and each parent would be responsible for one day of camp. If you need some great art ideas check out Pink and Green Mama's blog for some great ideas and e-books on outdoor arts.

Make homemade art supplies - see our blog posts for Cinnamon Applesauce Ornaments, play dough, Chalk Paint, and Surprise Soap.

In addition the the activities listed above, also remember that "Playing is Learning"! Have a great summer!