Fruit Art Palette

I'm sorry for this very poor picture, but I was in a hurry and didn't take time to see if I got a good shot!  As we were working on one of our art pieces, I served the children this fruit art palette.  I originally thought I would serve mini-cupcakes with different colored icing but a healthy snack and ease won out!

P.S.  I promise the palette was clean!

Sunflowers

In the children's garden we have a most magnificent sunflower!  It stretches toward the sky and is heaven for about 5 bumblebees at any given time.

After reading, Camille and the Sunflowers, A story about Vincent van Gogh by Laurence Anholt we  spent an afternoon painting our sunflower.  I set the easel up in the garden, gave each child a canvas and some paints and told them to paint the sunflower however they saw fit.

I think that the results were darling- including the bees.

P.S.  I want to note that I have found that the children respond the most favorably to creating when they have quality art supplies.  I don't really buy "children's" paints anymore. Rather, I've found that it's not too much more expensive to buy artists paint at Michael's (especially if I use a coupon).  The results are worth it!

Bat Day

The week before Halloween we had a mini theme day all about bats. It was a mini theme day since I fit it in on a day after school because I ran out of weekend days to do it!

Our family actually has a bit of history with bats. When we started the renovations to finish our attic we soon discovered that we had an entire family of bats roosting in our attic. It was a lot of bats. They proved rather difficult to get rid of and at least three different times they made their way into our living space. Grace woke up in the middle of the night once with a bat circling her room! The rabies shot series was not fun. The upside? We had very few mosquitoes.

I sent Grace to school with a fun bat themed lunch and Harris had the same thing at home. I loved the egg as the moon! Cute right?

This little bat was made using a peppermint patty and tootsie rolls!

When the children got home we had a snack and read some books about bats including, Bats by Gail Gibbons. The snack was a moon cupcake and a brownie cut out with a cookie cutter.

We then made some very simple bat costumes out of felt. Of course, Grace's American Girl Doll and Bunny had to have costumes too. I got the mask pattern here.

For dinner we feasted on bat wings! These delighted the children and were very tasty!

After dinner we put together a bat house to put in our backyard. We want bats to be in their own home not ours!

The children were inspired to create some bat drawings!

Frog Day Crafts

We have finally finished up our two crafts from Frog Day!

Our first project was making paper mache frog bowls. We followed the instructions from the craft book, Make It! by Jane bull. They were easy and fun for the children to make, but I would warn you that the homemade paste cannot be put away to be used for later. I found this out the hard (and smelly!) way! Therefore, our second layer was put on using Modge Podge.

Our second project was making potato print t-shirts. These were super easy and a very fun family project to do together. I followed the instructions for the t-shirts in the craft book, Best Ever Craft Book for Kids.

And just for fun...

Frog Day

Yesterday, we had our 2nd theme day and it was so much fun! I decided that since the frog is our family mascot we should celebrate frogs! Here are the highlights...

We started the day with frog pancakes and milky pond water.

Next we began a paper mache craft project. This is a multi-day project and I will share the finished product when they are completed!

We took a break from the craft project to have a refreshing frog egg popsicle. The children loved them! I got the recipe here.

We read several books about frogs. Frogs by Gail Gibbons was exceptionally informative and taught us all about the different stages of frog growth and development.

For lunch we took a simple picnic (I used a cookie cutter to cut out the sandwiches) and hiked to a nearby creek.

After lunch we explored the creek looking for eggs, tadpoles and frogs. We were very fortunate in that we got to see tadpoles at all different stages and we even caught a frog!

Late in the afternoon the children and I gathered all of our froggy friends and had a teaparty! We enjoyed frog juice, chocolate frogs, gummi frogs, frog legs (sugar snap peas) and fly pie (this idea came from the creative Katherine Marie).

After dinner, the whole family participated in making t-shirts. These are not yet finished either but I will tell you that potatoes, celery and carrots were involved!

Chocolate Day

(This summer I am going to try to do "theme days" where we focus on something specific for the day. I am borrowing this idea from Katherine whose blog I have been following for a while now. Her theme weeks are absolutely amazing and her beautiful photography is the icing on the cake. She's inspiring, really.)

Our first theme day was Chocolate Day! Since we are soon going to Hershey Park it was an appropriate and anticipation building theme for us to celebrate.

We started a few weeks ago by reading the novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Every night the children looked forward to the next chapter and it was fun reading it as a family!

We kicked off the day this morning with chocolate pancakes and chocolate milk for breakfast. Bryce even added chocolate syrup to his!

We made chocolate playdough- which of course led the children to pretending to be Oompa Loompas making candy for Willy Wonka.

Chocolate milkshakes (with a cherry!) were a much needed cool treat that resulted in some very handsome mustaches. As we enjoyed our milkshakes we learned a bit about where chocolate comes from and how it is made.

We conducted a taste test to determine what our favorite flavors of chocolate were. We stayed pretty basic with milk chocolate, dark chocolate, extra dark and semi-sweet. We made notes about each piece that we tried and then determined what our favorites were. It was discovered that we all prefer dark chocolate! Though if you really look at Harris' notes I think the straight mouth (#3 was the regular dark) indicates that he thought it was just ok. I'm pretty sure he changed his mind at the last minute.

We ended the day with a nice, relaxing soak in... chocolate! I mixed together powdered milk, cocoa, cornstarch and a touch of cinnamon to make a bath powder. The smell in the bathroom was delicious!