Greening Sam and Avery

horse birthday party

My niece loves horses. Stuffed horses, horse figurines, horses her dolls can ride and of course real horses. We recently got to be at her 5th birthday party and Jodie, my sister, pulled out all the stops at making this a great horse party and a super fun outdoor play birthday party!

The kids had several different swings to play on.

And Jodie handmade these adorable sock riding horses for each kid to play with and take home. I loved that instead of filling a little goodie bag with candy, trinkets or other things that would most likely get lost or end up in the trash Jodie made something super unique and fun that each kid can play with for a long time. And she didn't spend much more than what she would have on the bag of junk!

But the best part of the party was the LIVE horses! They were these two adorable little miniature horses.

The kids got to take the ropes and lead the horses around the yard. This was a HUGE hit.

Even Avery got a turn to try!

And the kids got to brush the horses, learn how to pet them and where to stand around a horse.

Parker was one happy little birthday girl!

The trampoline was a big hit too. I even got in on the action with some "Ring-Around-the-Rosie".

The whole two hour party was outside! They played outside the whole time. Ate lunch as a picnic on blankets in the backyard and even did cake and presents outside. It was great to see so many kids totally happy and content to be outside on a cooler day.

This is how to do a birthday party! 

preparing for the ocean

We leave in just a few days for the beach! Woohoo!!!

So I have been doing a few things to get the girls ready for our trip and to help them be more comfortable with the ocean. 

We have been reading some of the books that we have that deal with the ocean and beach.

 

We have also been playing with and crafting with the seashells that we have. Sam and I have also been talking about walking the beach to find more shells.

The craft we did was super simple. I made some shapes on paper board, then gave Sam glue, shells and beans. I encouraged her to make her own shapes but she just really wanted to keep glueing on the shapes that I drew.

The shells that we used were a part of a necklace that broke and when we ran out of shells we just switched to beans.

And then we looked at some of the other shells that we have.
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They liked hearing about the shark's teeth too!

The girls have had some serious hesitations about the ocean in the past. I am hoping that talking about it, getting them excited for playing on the beach and knowing that there are other things we can do there besides just swimming will make them more willing to spend time on the beach. I will keep you posted on how it goes!

Back to packing...

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!

outdoor play link up - pumpkin week - pumpkin ball

SUPER EXCITED! The Outdoor Play Link Up is BACK!!!!

Thanks goes out to Mama Pea Pod for getting this awesome link up back up and running. We have added another host that I am honored to be working with. If you are not familiar with Learning for Life you have to check it out.

Okay, so what were we up to this week for outdoor play? Pumpkin Ball! I actually made these for our carving party on Tuesday night but the kids were just more interested in their own play ideas then the ones I had come up with. What's a mom to do?! But the girls and I have just loved playing with these in the backyard this week.

I simply took washed out milk jugs, cut the bottoms off and then painted them. I used black electricians tape to cover the slightly sharp edge and used a black permanent marker to draw on the face. I covered the whole thing in modge podge to seal the paint. They worked pretty well with the bigger ball. The small ball was fun because it was a pumpkin but hard to know which direction the ball would go when you threw it using the jug.

Super simple, upcycling and tons of fun!

Now, let's get this linky started! If you have never been a part of a link before please be sure to check out the other ideas, leave comments, and let them know you are stopping by from the Outdoor Play Link Up. It is just more fun if we are all out there checking out the ideas and chatting about what we are finding at the Link Up!

How did your kids play outdoors this week?
 
Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us! Here’s just a few guidelines for sharing.

• Any kind of children's outdoor play is welcome. If it happened outside, then please link it up!
• Please do not share any competitions, promotions, or posts that are not related to Outdoor Play.
• Please remember to link back to this post and help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play!
• Each week we will feature an activity from the previous week. By contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished.

 

pumpkin week - pumpkin art

Sam slept today! She actually took a nap. This is groundbreaking news in my life! But since we were headed to the gym when she woke up for some family pool time and workout time her long nap meant no time today for crafting. What is a mom (and blogger!) suppose to do?

Have the 21 month old do the project!

You can kind of see the toilet paper tube and the small balloon in the picture. Those were our painting instruments. And a big bowl of orange paint! Her job was to use the two tools to paint a pumpkin patch.

I talked to her about what the pumpkin patch looked like when we saw it, just like I would have talked to Sam. But she had way more fun doing things her own way then sticking with just making the circle, "pumpkin" shapes.

Like watching the paint drip off the balloon.

And smearing the paint all over with the balloon. Plus switching back and forth from tool to tool was really fun too!

 

When Sam finally woke up from her nap she was intrigued by the painting that her sister had created and I had to promise her that tomorrow she could try out the project too.

Really fun to let Avery experiment with new tools and just have fun with paint! And great to see her doing it on her own and not just following Sam's lead all the time.

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The Nitty Gritty!

So there are tons of different ways you can create with the image of the pumpkin and pumpkin patches. The web and blog world is just FULL of them. But some of my fellow preschool and kid-friendly bloggers passed along their great ideas to me and I think theses are just so cute and clever that I had to share them.

Child Central Station - painting a pumpkin patch with plungers and my inspiration for one of today's tools came from pumpkin patch painting with balloons; they also sewed pumpkins with kids as young as 2 which I think is an awesome idea!

Mama Pea Pod - suncatcher jack o'lanterns; these are SO cute and I think could be age appropriate for a lot of kids.

Red Ted Art's Blog - jar jack o'lanterns; and it is a vlog so that is super fun!

Kreative Resources - paper mache pumpkin; an awesome big paper mache pumpkin!

Like I said there are tons more I could have shared but these are just a few that I really liked. Enjoy and happy crafting!

pumpkin week - pumpkin seeds

When you have two families over to carve pumpkins, plus your own giant pumpkin, you end up with LOTS of pumpkin seeds. What do you do with them?

Well, we will be digging holes in our backyard (the VERY back of our backyard) and burying most of them to try and grow another pumpkin patch next year. We did this last year too and we did actually get a vine but it ended up not being in a great spot and was trying to climb all over our air conditioner (not cool!) so we had to pull it out. Luckily our compost pile produced a massive pumpkin patch for us anyway. We are hoping to grow pumpkins again next year and it would be great if they would grow from the seeds from this year. It is a great life-cycle kind of lesson for the girls to see.

But before we do that I thought it would be fun to try out a crafting project with them. My inspiration came from a picture that I saw on Pinterest but the link would not work so I had no idea how they accomplished it.

We started out by drying out the seeds in the oven just a bit (low temp and only a few minutes). Then I mixed some food coloring with vinegar, just like dyeing eggs, and dropped some seeds into each color.

You can see that some seeds are much brighter in color than others. The mixture of vinegar and color was not working out so great so for some of them I did just food coloring and mixed the seeds straight in the food coloring. Those turned out much brighter.

Then we grabbed some cardstock type paper (old cracker boxes) that would be stiff enough to old a seed mosaic.

We used regular white glue and started creating.

Our final products.

Sam's

And mine

Sam had a really fun time with this craft project! And I think the final product turned out super cute!

What do you do with your pumpkin seeds?

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The Nitty Gritty!

Of course I would suggest cooking some of your seeds too but I have yet to find a recipe/way to cook them that I really like. I did buy some roasted ones for the kids at the carving party to try. My girls seem to like them okay, so if you have a recipe that you use and enjoy I would love hearing it.

I found out later that the craft I saw on Pinterest was also listed on Hands On: as we Grow's Pumpkin Activities post. You can see the Autumn tree pumpkin seed craft here.  On the hands on:as we grow post you can also see other pumpkin seed crafts, ways to explore the pumpkin guts and even pumpkin seed math! Love these ideas. 

Lots more pumpkin fun coming!

pumpkin week - carving party

The end result is fabulous!

But getting there was another story.

It started out great, with helpful and happy kids.

But the lure of toys and playtime with friends quickly grew too powerful. Before the pumpkin were even all cleaned out the kids disappeared and left the adults to tackle the pumpkins.

It didn't seem to bother any of the adults too much. We all kind of got into the carving and creativity behind carving pumpkins. I tried out the cookie cutter and rubber mallet method. Awesome way to carve a pumpkin but my pumpkin was too thick so the cookie cutters could not cut all the way through. But they still provided a great starting point to do my carving from. I made a polka-dotted pumpkin!

With an E for "Enlund" too!

And Chris did a great job on my super big pumpkin!

I think the kid's favorite part was the cookies!

(Our friend Taylor!)

So, pumpkin carving was not much of a kid friendly activity tonight but they thought the end result was pretty cool.

What are you doing with your pumpkins this year?

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The Nitty Gritty!

Need some ideas on what to do with pumpkins that is truly kid friendly?  Check out all of these awesome idesa!

Critters and Crayons - pumpkin as vase

Toddler Approved - buttons and ribbons on pumpkins

Nurture Store - looking for a funkier pumpkin? check out this one with glitter, paint and push-pins

The Imagination Tree - beautiful drip-art pumpkins

The Outlaw Mom - no carve pumpkin decorating ideas

And lastly, if you are doing the old fashioned carving thing, like we did, might be a good idea to brush up on the How-To of pumpkin carving!

Quirky Momma - real instructions for carving a pumpkin. I could have used these tonight!

Wow. That is a lot of great idea, with TONS more out there to be found. Thanks to all the great ladies that passed along these fun ideas for me to check out and post for my readers. I hope you will click around and check out what other folks are up to this year with their pumpkins.

 

pumpkin week - upcycle pumpkin craft

Starting a week on pumpkins! And get ready for some awesome ideas! No, probably not the things that we will be doing that are MY ideas, but the TONS of links I am going to pass along this week of all the amazing pumpkin themed stuff that other incredible preschool and parent bloggers are doing out there. I can't wait to share with you all the stuff that I have found.

But first, here is what we did today.

And of course I had to make one too!

I was really impressed with how well Sam took to this project. She loved finding the orange and green pages in the magazines and then cutting the small pieces. She also worked really hard to make sure that the whole thing was covered. And I think the pumpkins are super cute too!

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The Nitty Gritty!
So, I want to start this week of pumpkins and sharing ideas off with sharing some of our favorite pumpkin ideas from the past.

Just recently we made some really cute 3D pumpkins that are still hanging up in my kitchen.

A great toddler pumpkin book and activity - Five Little Pumpkins.

Something fun to do when all the halloween fun is over and your pumpkins are a pile of rotting mush! Plant them!

And of course we have carved them!

Now you can see why we need to have a pumpkin themed week, we clearly have not done enough stuff with these things.

Stay tuned this week for LOTS of great ideas from around the web. And if you have an idea that you would like to share or have blogged about please leave a link in the comments so I can check it out and share it with my readers (if you have already told me on Facebook you do not have to share the link again!).

 

a feather painting flop

I had this great idea. And in my head it was going to be so fun and so sweet. But then when we actually tried it out...it didn't work out AT ALL!

The idea

Have Sam use an awesome feather that we found to write a "letter" to her St. Louis cousins. We would then put the letter and the feather in an envelope and mail it to them with instructions that they had to use the feather to write letters back to us! So cute. So fun to write with paint and a feather!

What Actually Happened

The paint kind of went in and up the sides of the feather but didn't really end up on the paper at all. Sam got super frustrated and gave up before she even finished her "S". I was bummed but knew I couldn't force her to keep going. And if she wasn't having fun with it neither would her cousins.

So, this idea didn't work out so well. Not all my ideas can be great ones!! 

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The Nitty Gritty!

I am not totally giving up on this idea yet. I am thinking that maybe thinner paint, more like watercolors, might work better with the tip of the feather. So we may try it again sometime soon.

If you have ever painted or written with natural feathers and preschoolers I would love to know how you did it. Thanks!