Fabric Crafts

The girls spent several days making arm warmers, wrist warmers, finger warmers, and collages with scraps of fabric.  They mostly did it with a hot glue gun, though there was also some sewing. They learned how to put a strip of elastic in a seam and did some measuring.  

Friend's face blocked out since I don't know if her parents are ok with her photo being on a public blog.

Clay and Embroidery

The girls have been making lots of things with home made play dough and clay lately.  They have a lot of fun making the play dough, for which I use this recipe for cooked playdough.
These are the most recent creations made with clay:

E made a doll complete with a dress, a hat, hair, and jewelry.  It's hard to see what L made, because it's blurry (D's phone has a terrible lag time when taking pictures), but it is a turtle.    


L asked to learn to sew a few months ago, and we've made doll clothes and pillows.  Then she wanted to make a teddy bear, and we're about 70% done with that.  I don't know much about sewing, so I'm learning as I go so I can help them. The other day, I pulled out the very limited embroidery supplies that I have.  E made a person, L made a window, and Z got the hang of going in and out without tangling up the thread.

Welcome Home D!

We threw a little party for D last fall to welcome him home from his firefighting season.

This is the sign the girls and I made.  We were all so happy to see him!  The summers get long without him. 

Loomed their own hats, won first prize at the fair!

The girls finished making hats for themselves on their round looms today!*

Then they entered the hats in the County Fair and won first place in Fiber Arts.  Unfortunately, the fair messed up and put L's name on both hats, but we know which was which.   


*wrote on message board April 5

Testing a Hypothesis

Yesterday E was playing with this slime we made, and she said that she was doing a test.  I asked her what she was testing, and she said that if she held the slime up and hit it with the knife, she wanted to see if it would go to the left or the right.  "Like on Mythbusters!  They test things."

I said that she was right.  They do experiments.  She said, "No they test things."  So I explained that is what an experiment is- testing a hypothesis.  I gave her some examples.

Then she said "My hypothesis is that if I hold the slime up, it will be easy to cut."  Then she did it and said, "And it's true!"

She did a few other tests to see of the slime would fall one way or the other, and if it was easier to cut with a steak knife or a butter knife. 

August Learning Inspiration

Here is a list of some things we'll be doing this month, subject to changing interests. These are things I came up with by writing down the interests they express during our conversations, as well as things that I think they will enjoy that they haven't seen before. I'm putting the list here in case anyone else needs some inspiration, and please feel free to comment with the things you're doing this month too, because we all can always use more inspiration!

Places to Go:

Music in the Park
Hot Air Balloon Races
Go to community college to see the Geology class's rock collection and have the teacher identify our rocks (I haven't set this one up yet, but I'm hoping he'll go for it. The anatomy teacher did.)


Crafts:

Homemade fingerpaints
Make Flubber
Bees



Projects:

Make a movie (We have shot the raw footage for movies about bees and Princess Diana and E has ideas for Spiderman and Rapunzel movies, now we just need to learn how to edit them. E also told me today that she wants to make a movie with clay characters like in Chicken Run).

Making wine (hehe, ok not really wine, but last week or so E and I got on the topic of making grape juice and I showed her videos of people crushing the grapes with their feet like they did back in the days before the machinery that does it now. I think it will be fun for them to get a bunch of grapes and crush them in a bowl with their feet! Then we will drink some juice and maybe try making some kind of Traditional Foods fermented drink).





Books/videos/things to look up:

Yom Kippur is coming up next month, so we will get some books and have some discussions about that in advance. We may also discuss the 9th of Av, if I can find a way to present the reality without going into too many horrible details.


Pirates have been a common play theme around here lately, so we'll get some books about real pirates. Today we found out about Ching Shih. She was a Chinese pirate who commanded 1800 ships and 80,000 pirates.



Games to play:

E has been enjoying this 3D Logic Game the last few days. She got to level 8 with only two little hints from me.

Some kind of addition and subtraction game that uses jumping or throwing or some other activity to play (let me know if you know of a good game!) I think there are some ideas on her flash cards, but I need to read them again.




Things to do:

I'm going to start taking them outside every night to see the moon and whether it is waxing or waning or full.

Use a piece of butcher paper to trace their bodies. Then we'll make drawings of life sized organs, bones and other body parts to glue to their paper "body." We'll make "blood" with food coloring and marsh mellows for blood cells. (I got this idea from a fellow homeschooling mom, and I might set it up to do as a group project with some friends).

Day 7-9

Good thing daily blogging isn't my job- I'd so be fired!

Day 7-9

I've been surprised to find by doing this challenge how much I actually do say Yes to. So much of it is just default now! Where I still struggle is when my kids want me to do something *with* them, to connect with them, play with them etc. DOING things is easy for me. Saying yes to a mess and then cleaning it up isn't such a big deal. Arbitrary restrictions are pretty much gone and yes is the default answer.

Taking a bath for the 3rd time today which means water all over the floor I will need to clean up and an extra load of laundry? Sure!

"Mom come watch me in the bath." Not so easy.

Connecting is always the struggle.


A few things we have been doing the last few days....

I bought the girls binoculars and magnifying glasses at the dollar store. Of course one of the binoculars broke 2 minutes after we walked out the door! The magnifying glasses have been fun though. They have been looking for little bugs and solving mysteries.

We saw a craft on Sprout where they painted rocks like ladybugs, so we did that. Then the girls wanted to paint crab apples. I tried to get them to stick with the rocks since they will last and the apples are going to go bad, but the apples are so much fun for them to gather that they didn't think much of my suggestion. Oh well! They are having blast painting something almost every day.

I picked up a couple of books at the library that have stories, but all the pictures are made out of photographs of fruits and vegetables. One of them is a story about a seahorse. The seahorse is made from chioggia beets, the ocean plant life is different kinds of kale, lettuce and mushrooms, the crab is a shitake mushroom and tamarinds. This got us talking about all these different kinds of foods, most of which we have never tried. So next time I am at the store I'm going to try to find a few of these things. E said she wanted asian eggplant, celery root and horned melon.

A few weeks ago E got a book at the library about cobras. She looked at it a few times and then it has just been sitting around since then. She watched an episode of the Aladin tv show and Jasmine turns into a snake. I brought her the book, thinking that Jasmine was a cobra. She pointed out the differences and that Jasmine was not in fact a cobra, but some other snake that we are pretty sure is not a real one just something they invented for the cartoon.