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.

Monday Meanderings - Explore the Land

I was recently looking around on the Internet and was impressed to find so many activities discussing landforms.

It was amazing to see how detailed and beautiful some of the activities were. When I was in school, you just looked at a topographical map, but that is no longer the case.

Look at some of these great projects.

The Kennedy Korral Blog made these amazing edible landforms. Looks like Jello and a cake?

Here is another edible landforms project from Moments with Maisie. This is amazing! It has brownies, marshmallow supreme mountains, chocolate chip cookie island and so much more!

I found this salt dough landforms project on Secular Homeschool and think it is a great alternative if you want to keep your work around a bit longer.

Take your studies to the next level! Make learning fun and engaging and kids will absorb more knowledge!

Monday Meanderings - Johnny Appleseed Day

In honor of Johnny Appleseed Day, here are some great apple projects to do with the kids.

I would definetly start off with the "Apple", Oreo Truffles. They are adorable and I love Oreo Truffles. These were made by Raising Memories.

Ramblings of a Crazy Woman has a great apple craft. I woudl let the children also tear up the paper to work on thie rmotor skills prior to gluing.

Lilly Cakes made an adorable apple tree with a paper towel tube and some cardboard. Love recycled crafts.

Next we have No Time For Flash Cards with thier adorable apple print wreath. I love this and I love the lesson of not pressuring the kids to finish a project on our time schedule.

Lastly, I am sure we will once again make our Apple Pie Play Dough. We had lots of fun with it last time and have had several friends request some of the yummy smelling dough already this year.

Remember - An Apple a Day, Keeps the Doctor Away!

Tuesday Teachings - Summer Learning

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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.

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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!

Farm Study

In preschool they have been talking about farms and my parents have a farm. My son loves to go to his grandparent's house and ride the tractor and check on the cows so this is a fun unit for him. We decided to extend this study a bit with a project at home.

I made play dough for us in green and blue. I used my standard recipe of:
1 cup All Purpose Flour
1 cup Water
1 tbsp Cream of Tarter
1 tbsp Vegetable Oil
1/4 cup Salt
Food Coloring

Add all ingredients except food coloring to a pan and heat over medium heat until the dough forms a ball. Once it forms a ball, remove to a wax paper lined counter and knead until consistency feels correct. Seperate into the number of colors you want and add each color seperately. Knead well.

Once we had the blue and green dough we took one of our art trays and covered the tray with predominantly green dough for the grass and then added blue on for a pond and stream. Once the farm was ready, we added on our farm animals and played farmer.

Monday Meanderings - Earth Day

Earth Day 2011 is the 41st anniversary of Earth day. Way back in 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin watched closely at the state of the coast in Santa Barbara California due to the massive oil spill in 1969. As he watched the damage caused by this oil spill he was inspired to take action. At the time, no one was really concerned with the environment and green was just a color, not a movement. He used the students that were protesting the war to mobilize 20 million people to take to the streets, parks and auditoriums. 20 million people came together to form coast to coast rallies to raise awareness of the detiorating environment of the planet. With the rallies, political parties worked together to form the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air, Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

In 1990, environmental leaders appealed to Denis Hayes (Earth Day 1970's National Coordinator) to organize another large event. This time there was a global initiative bringing together 200 million people in 141 countries to bring light to the environment. This is when green became much more than just a color. Recycling took off with all lines of people and the ground work was set to begin the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio De Janiero in 1992. President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Senator Nelson in 1995 for his act in founding Earth Day.

First we have The STEM Blog with a great listing of activities for classrooms to do in celebration of Earth Day.

NASA has a great form that talks about scale models of the Earth and Moon using play dough. All you need is a 3 lb. tub of play dough and an inquisitive nature.

No Time for Flash Cards has a great activity that they did with kids using blue and green play doh to make a model of the planet Earth.

Almost Unschoolers did a great experiment to find out about oil spills and how they use dish washing liquid to clean off the birds and other animals affected by the oil.

Be sure to get out there and do something with the kids to show them that Green is important.

Cinnamon Applesauce Ornaments

Well, I finally did it. I had read about these ornaments for some time and my son was "rambunctious" this past weekend so we decided to make this craft. I was going to make it a Valentine's Day activity but could not find the heart cookie cutters so we improvised and made ornaments with other cutters.

To make the dough, everything I read said to use equal parts cinnamon to applesauce but I found that dough too sticky. I started off using 1 cup powdered cinnamon to one cup of applesauce, I ended up using at least another half cup of applesauce in order to be able to flatten the dough without it sticking.

We had tiny bear and elephant cutters, large butterflies, dragonflies and inchworm cutters. My son also decided that we needed to make a snowman and a snake. I free handed two hearts.

Once we cut out the shapes, I put them on a SILPAT on my cookie sheet and we baked the ornaments at 200F for 30 minutes and then flipped the ornaments. This was repeated 4 times. All in all, it was fun, the dough smells fabulous and I would probably do this again.

Apple Pie Play Dough

Recently my son's class at daycare has been studying an Apple Theme. Since they started that he is obsessed with Apple Pie. I do not mean he wants to eat apple pie, he just likes to say apple pie. When he is leaving the room he even looks at me and says "Bye-bye, Apple Pie." It is adorable.

I tried to serve him some apple pie for dessert but he wanted nothing to do with it. I then decided that we would make a "pretend apple pie" with apple pie scented play dough.

 Dough recipe:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp cream of tarter
1 cup water
apple pie seasoning (I just shook it in until I liked the smell)
Red food coloring

Stir the ingredients well and then cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the dough forms a ball. Put the dough on the counter and fill your pan with water to soak. Now go back to your dough and you will knead it out until it is smooth and feels "right". Store it in a plastic bag that is zipped closed.

When I pulled out the dough, I also pulled out some rolling pins and some disposable "pot pie" pans. We rolled out a section of the dough and used it as the bottom crust. After we put that in the pan, we tore off small pieces of the dough and rolled them in our hands and dropped them into the crust. Once the pan was full, we rolled out another section to use as the top crust. I cut out a design on this to "vent" the pie.

My son loved this experience and we have played with the apple pie dough several more times since this first experience. I think I will be making pumpkin pie dough soon!