Greening Sam and Avery

keep it simple

When you have two sick kids, a very sick momma and are trying to settle back in from a long weekend away the best thing to do is to keep life simple! Which we did today. But I was determined to also NOT plant the kids in front of movies. 

I went back through my bag of tricks and we headed out for a simple color walk. 

Have I told you all that Sam broke her arm while we were backpacking? Well, it isn't a full break just a small fracture right below her wrist but there was a thin line that went all the way across her wrist that made the radiologist nervous and forced Sam into a cast! 

So the idea behind the color walk is to take a color wheel (mine is made out of paint color samples from the Home Depot paint department) and have the kids match up as many colors to things in nature as they can. If you wanted to make color wheels for a whole class I wouldn't suggest taking paint color samples but you could make the same thing out of card stock or construction paper. 

Can you tell which girl was DONE and ready to go home at the end? 

Our little walk lasted almost an hour, we got out of the house and used up a big chunk of our morning with this fun activity. And we didn't see anybody else which means we kept these awful germs to oursleves and didn't infect anyone else! 

So, I want to share with you all some news in our life. We are MOVING! Chris has gotten an amazing job offer with a new insurance company in Illinois and will be starting the new job in the middle of August. The girls and I will stay in our home until it sells and then begin the process of moving and finding a new home. We won't be WI residents anymore. 

This makes me a little sad. We have found a great home, church, community and friends outside of Madison and will be sad to say goodbye. But we will be so much closer to family in our new town and that, plus the great career move for Chris, will make it worth all the stress in the end. 

Anyone in Madison looking to buy a house?!!!! HA!

fall fun - felt board fall tree

I have made my first attempt at homemade felt board fun!

I made the felt board probably the most simple (and potentially not very long lasting) way possible. I took white felt stretched it over a piece of white foam board and then hot glued it down in the back. I didn't want to spend a lot of time or money on a felt board until I knew for sure that the kids (and I) would enjoy this type of activity.

Once the board was made I started getting creative with some other felt colors for the girls.

I cut out a big brown tree, grass, some flowers and lots of leaves.

Avery played with these uninterupted and uncoached for almost 45 minutes! I was blown away. So I knew I had to make some more and come up with some other ideas for Sam.

I put together this activity for Sam. (Thanks Aunt Jojo for the suggestions!)

I cut out green, red, yellow and orange leaves to go with the big brown tree trunk. Then I drew four different trees on the notecards. Each tree with different colors of leaves and numbers of leaves. Sam's job was to try and match the felt tree to each of the tree pictures.

As indepently as Avery played with the felt board, Sam needed coaching and assistance. I think this had more to do with the fact that she was tired and cranky than her actual comfort or interest in the activity. But I sat with her and we created the trees, pretended it was a windy day and talked about where the trees go in the Fall.  She wanted more pieces and more options to make pictures (not sure I will be able to make the squirrel and owl she requested!).

I am super excited about all the felt creations that are for sure in our future!

Have a felt creation tutorial you would care to share? What is your child's favorite felt board activity? I am new to this and would love any suggestions that you have!!

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The Nitty Gritty!

I didn't get pictures of the girls playing together but I actually have two boards made with matching sets for each girl. I didn't make the notecards for Avery, she is still a bit young for that, but she has all the other pieces now to play with.

I think to go along with this tree set I will also make pieces to create the other seasons; small flowers to go on the tree for spring along with small green leaf buds, then for winter I will make some winter snowflakes and snowmen for her to put in the picture.

Already this set has lead to work on counting, colors, matching and nature related discussions. Loving me some felt play!!

homemade crayons

Crazy crayons got me motivated to try recycling our own crayons and making some new crayons.

Just the other day Sam was coloring and purposely broke a crayon in half, then handed it to me and said "this one is broken, I need new crayons". This ended her coloring session for the day and we had to have a long talk about why we need to be more careful with our things. But sometimes crayons do break on their own. We have a lot of little broken crayons that I insist to Sam are still usable but she refuses to color with.

Today I grabbed all those little pieces and tried out making our own crayons. I actually have a tree mold from making christmas candy, so I made tree crayons today!

Super simple stocking stuffer made entirely from stuff I already had! LOVE THAT!! 

Have a homemade Christmas (yes, I am now using the name. who are we kidding...Christmas will be here before we know it!) post up already that you would like to share? Please leave the link in the comment section, I would love to see what you are making and share some green christmas ideas on my facebook page as well.

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The Nitty Gritty!

This is a project that Sam could have helped with and if it weren't a stocking stuffer for her too I would have let her help. She would have loved peeling all the paper off the crayons and breaking them into even smaller pieces. I would have had to do the oven part of it but she could have helped me pop them out of the molds.

I can see this being a fun kid project that we will do again in the future!

what else is in the sky

I saw this cute rainbow activity on Rockabye Butterfly and I thought it would be a perfect fit for our rainy week.

We looked up some pictures of rainbows online so that Sam and Avery could see the real thing. While we were looking at pictures I talked to the girls about how rainbows were made, when to look for them and where to look.

And of course the girls instantly wanted to check outside to see if they could find a rainbow.

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The Nitty Gritty!

Super simple activity. We were out of green construction paper, we typically run out of that one first, so we used green tissue paper. This activity was great for color recognition and counting. Plus it was good cutting practice for Sam too!

Day 140: paint extravaganza

Tomorrow is Friday which means the Circa Toys giveaway ends at 9:00pm!  ONE MORE DAY to tweet or blog or facebook about the giveaway if you haven't already.  AND for my special readers that might be coming back to check I am going to give you ONE more way to enter.  You can EITHER "Like" the Greening Sam and Avery facebook page OR (if you have already "Liked" it), you can write something on the wall of the page just to let me know that you stopped by.  Then come back here (for either one that you did) and on the original giveaway post leave me a comment about which one you did!  Go head over to Facebook and get busy!

On to paint!

I realized that we had still never done the acorn painting that was the catalyst for having Mamma Rae send me a huge box of acorns!  So today we got out some of those acorns and lots of paint and got busy. 

 
This is Sam in action rolling the acorns back and forth across the paper.  I just put blobs of paint on the paper to start with and threw the acorns in the pan. 

She loved this and went crazy for a few minutes.  The she turned and looked at me and said "Mommy we did this at school.  What else can we do?"  This preschool is KILLING ME!  Stealing all my ideas and acorn painting excitement? How rude! (okay obviously part of me is thrilled that they are doing fun and interesting activities with natural items) So we moved on.

We headed outside and collected a bunch of interesting items and brought them back inside.

 
Then I told Sam that she could try out all of these items as paint brushes! She was curious for a while and carefully tested out each item to see what it would look like. Then her experimenting turned into this.

 
How many items can I fit into the egg carton with the paint?  Still very creative and interesting. 

Finally we wanted to attempt some paint mixing like I had seen over at Let the Children Play . They are doing some really fun things with paint and water right now.  This one is mixing a couple kinds of paint and flour (we added water because I put WAY too much flour in the bowl).  After mixing she then got to finger paint with the concoction.

 
 
Then the natural items came back out, and all the projects started to blend together.  All in all a good day of painting.

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The Nitty Gritty!

The collecting was good outside time for us today, and Sam sat painting happily for over an hour.

Still can't find the link for the acorn painting.  I would love to give credit where credit is due, so if you have seen it out there before please let me know.

Let the children play has a tutorial for the flower mixing and a lot of other "potion making" kind of painting.

Day 100: indoor fishing

Woohoo!  Day 100!  It feels like I have been doing this a lot longer than 100 days but either way.  It's a milestone and I made it!  Only 265 more days and then I can celebrate one year! 

So since today was a big day I busted out a BIG project. Me made indoor fishing.

Check the Nitty Gritty if you are interested in all the details but here are pictures to show what we did.

This last one is not a great picture but Sam really wanted to hold up her fish and show it off for the camera.

Let's just say that indoor fishing is a HUGE hit and Sam is very ready to try out the real thing.  Probably won't happen yet this year but I think a fishing set under the Christmas tree is a definite must. 

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The Nitty Gritty!

First the fishing pole -

A quick visit to the hardware store for a dowel rod, thin rope and a heavy duty magnet. 

The magnet conveniently had a hole in it that I could tie the rope through.

I nailed the rope (through a knot that I tied) to the pole.  I was worried about the rope slipping off.  But I didn't pay attention to how long the nail was (please don't stop reading my blog because I am a complete fishing rod making moron!) and it poked out the other end. So I had to wrap it with tape.  Next time I will just skip the nail. 

Then there's the fish.  I found some fish coloring pages online to use as templates and then just cut out construction paper fish.  I thought I was going to have to use washers or something heavy to attract to the magnet but plastic coaded paper clips worked perfectly.  I put one on each end so that they were easier to grab for Sam. 

We had Sam sit on her "boat" and the fish were on the floor.  We also tried having her fish "blind" by sitting on another couch with the fish on the other side (behind the back of the couch).  She didn't really understand this method and just kept standing up to see where the fish were.  I think this would be fun with older kids.  We also put the fish inside a hulla hoop and told Sam she had to stay outside the hulla hoop to catch them all. She could walk all the way around the hoop to get to the fish but still had the challenge of trying to hook the ones that she wanted.

We used this fishing activity to practice colors, counting and following directions.  She had a blast seeing how many fish she could catch with one "cast" (dragging the magnet through all the fish). With older kids the idea of what magnets are and experimenting with what will make it possbile to catch the fish would be a great way to expand this activity; you could put a wooden clothespin on the fish, paperclips, plastic bag clips, etc. to talk about what can be picked up by a magnet and what can't.

This takes a little bit of supplies and prep work but I think it is a set that we will keep and use a lot this Fall/Winter.

 

Day 99: leaves and toilet paper tubes

Do you know "No Time for Flash Cards" ?  It is a great blog!  And yesterday (or maybe the day before) I saw a great activity there.  And then my friend Holly emailed me about the same activity.  It must be a good one if other people are emailing me about it! So for a really great tutorial go here or stick around and see our version!

We have done leaf rubbbing before but the tips that she gave were great and made it go MUCH better this time.

First improvement, taping down the leaves. It's a bad picture but we taped down the stems (vein side UP!) and then on the rolled up a piece of tape to put on the backs of the bigger ones.

This made it so the leaves wouldn't move around, much easier to rub over them.  

Then we took another piece of paper and layed that on top and taped it to the table.  Let the rubbing begin!

 

 
 

Okay, now the next steps are when it gets crazy!  We painted three toilet paper rolls green to be tree trunks.  Yes, I know tree trunks are brown but Sam thought we needed a more fun color. While the paint dried we went on about our day.

 
And while Sam worked on other projects (doesn't every kid love stickers?  even if they are just square school stickers from the Target dollar section!) I cut out each leaf.

The leaves were then taped to the green toilet paper roll stems!  I even taped two toilet paper rolls together to make a tall one and a short one.   
 
 

Sitting in one of our windowsills now and they are adorable. 

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The Nitty Gritty!

This activity combined my two favorite things; toilet paper tubes and a reason to collect fall leaves.  So fun.

It was a bit of a challenge to teach Sam how to hold the crayon and make it work laying on its side.  We have some triangle shaped crayola crayons that were much easier for her to use.  The rolling it like playdough method that she kept trying to convince me would work just didn't cut it.  Eventually she gave up on that idea and watched how I was doing it.  The younger the child the more help or instruction they might need on this.  With older kids they can do the cutting out of the leaves and help a bit more with the taping.  Sam loved collecting the leaves and the rubbing!

Day 89: leafy tree art

This is a cute one and I am super excited to share!!

We collect a lot of leaves mostly because we go for lots of walks and bike rides and Sam seems to always want to bring them home.  The leaves either end up in the plant press (if I remember and am willing to sit with her after a walk and do that) or they sneakily end up in our front yard..."sorry sweety I must have dropped them".  But I thought of a fun way to start using and displaying some of the ones that do make it into the plant press.

First I painted this on a big piece of paper -

Then before bedtime tonight I got out some of the leaves from our plant press.  Sam used the glue stick and placed the leaves on the tree.

And this is the final project...for now!

Such a fun way to display the leaves that she likes best.  The plant press helps to preserve the color so that we can create a fall tree.  Sam loved walking past her tree and admiring all the leaves. 

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The Nitty Gritty!

No I am not making the tree biologically correct.  There are several different species of trees represented as well as several flowers and bushes.  I am okay with that. 

Instead of the names and types of plants (I don't want to rush her into memorizing names just yet) we focused on where she might find the leaves (on the braches, falling to the ground and on the ground), what color the leaves are and the size of the leaves. We also glued on that maple seed and talked about what a seeds are.

With multiple kids I would make multiple trees so that each could have their own to decorate.  If you have older children you could work on matching like kind of leaves to put in certain areas of the tree, using the leaves to learn the names of the plants or learning about different features of the leaves (stem, veins, lobes, etc.) while you decorate with them.  Tree identification books will typically have great explanations of plant parts. 

I think you could also use leaves that have not been pressed.  They wouldn't last forever (not entirely sure exactly how long they would last), eventually they will become brittle, turn brown and crumble.  But if you don't plan on keeping the poster or are only going to decorate it once I think fresh leaves would be fine.

Day 83: leaf crown

Oh yeah we did make a crown out of leaves and it is just as cute as it sounds!  I am in love with this activity.  And Sam had a good time too! 

We gathered leaves.  Sam decided to stick to the color red.  First poke a hole in the middle of the leaf.  The stem of another leaf is then inserted into the hole and you keep doing this to make a chain.  Then the stem of the first leaf is stuck through the hole in the last leaf to complete the ring.

The instructions said you might want to use tape and we absolutely did. 

I think it turned out adorable.  Sam liked wearing it but it was tough to make it a good fit for her head so it didn't stay on very long. 

The perfect half an hour activity while we waited for daddy to pull in the driveway. 

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The Nitty Gritty!

I got this activity from an environmental education curriculum book, "Project Seasons" by Deborah Parrella.  

A few more hints about doing this.  We used toothpicks to poke the hole to try and keep the holes smaller.  We also used tape on every leaf even though the instructions said you didn't have to.  With the very non-delicate touch of a two year old I knew that just leaves would not hold up.  I would suggest the tape!

The leaves do need to be pretty fresh in order to be flexible and hold up even with the holes being punched.  Look for leaves that have just recently fallen.  Maple leaves worked really well for us and had great color!

Let me know if you try this out.  I would love to hear what other kids think of it!!

Day 81: learning camouflage

Today was a hit.  I remembered an activity that I created a long time ago (not taking complete credit for this because I am sure years ago I read it or saw it some where) for a family program.  I thought I could simplify it a bit and use it with Sam. 

Super simple.  Cut out some rabbits (or really any other animal that is small and easy to cut out) in a variety of colors.  Then hide them in places where rabbits would naturally live. 

Then let the children go to find the rabbits. 

Sam loved "hunting" for the rabbits and I did hide some a bit hard so that she had to keep walking back up and down the path to find all ten that I had hidden.  We talked about which ones were the hardest to find and she called them out by color each time she found one.  We did this activity over and over again (Sam would go play on her swings while I hid them!). 

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The Nitty Gritty!

I just used a rabbit that I found online, printed it out, cut it out and then traced it onto construction paper.  Since Sam liked this so much I will probably laminate the rabbits just to make them hold up a bit better and be heavier so that I can be sure they won't blow away after I have hidden them. 

This is a GREAT activity if you have several kids of different ages.  With rabbits hidden at different levels of difficulty there will be challenges for each kid.  You could also tell each child they are looking only for rabbits of specific colors to guide their hunting.  Although with the little ones they might be so excited to find one they will point it out no matter what color it is.

With older kids the idea of camouflage can be explained in much more detail.  This time of year the hardest rabbit to find is the green one, so why aren't rabbits green?  Would it help them if they were green?  How does being grey/brown/slightly multi-color help rabbits to survive?  There are lots of different examples of animals that use camouflage that can be described and talked about. 

This is also a great activity to have packed when you go camping or hiking.  It can be motivation on a trail (just send one parent up ahead while you are on a break to hide the rabbits) or a good at camp activity.