Thursday, April 28, 2011
How i love rainy day projects | aka The Tibetan Mandala Puzzle Project
Saturday, April 23, 2011
More rainbow dying...
It seemed a waste to just tip all of our glasses of beautiful egg-colouring away!
They sat on my bench for a day until Hug & I got inspired to use them in a different way. I gave him a length of white fabric, showed him how to dip the red & left him to it. Minutes later we had a beautiful rainbow cloth drying in the wind.
There was some serious mixing of colours after that! Scientific experiments & all sorts of concoctions made until we were left with a big bucket of murky black water sitting on the back deck. Lol.
Rainbow Easter Egg Surprise!
Feeling inspired by lots of lovely easter crafts I've seen online I decided that we would try & make our own version of these beautiful eggs featured on the very groovy Not Martha blog :) Rainbow eggs with a suprise!
First I set up glasses of liquid food colours in a rainbow selection. I had blown & sterilised the egg shells earlier in the week so we were ready 2 get dying.
Dip! Dip! We drew on some of the egg shells with a wax crayon before we dipped. And stuck removable stickers on others.
Voila! Ready to dry...
Now, the 'plan' is that this afternoon I will fill the dried eggs with mini easter eggs and seal the open end by gently gluing a mini patty-pan onto the shell... Wish me luck!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Yay! 100 "google" followers :)
Awww, someone - Kara from Rockin' Granola in fact ;) - just became my 100th follower. That's a nice little surprise before bed! Thanks Kara.
On that note - a huge thank you to all of my lovely blog followers... U rock.
Wishing everyone a good night. & sweet dreams. xoxo
p.s. by the way... i just wanted to mention how happy the front of my fridge makes me :)
Anyone else wanna share theirs with the world too? Maybe we could even have Fridge Fridays...?! x
On that note - a huge thank you to all of my lovely blog followers... U rock.
Wishing everyone a good night. & sweet dreams. xoxo
p.s. by the way... i just wanted to mention how happy the front of my fridge makes me :)
Anyone else wanna share theirs with the world too? Maybe we could even have Fridge Fridays...?! x
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Art, History, Geography in Action.
In preparation for creating our own Family Flag we did some research and reading about flags, emblems & symbols.
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| Lovely's Australian flag. I LOVE his freehand Union Jack and stars! |
I used 2 books from our home-library: Flags and Emblems of Australia from Kangaroo Press and Signs and Symbols from Pepin Press.
Our discussion about the Australian Coast of Arms led to a bout of spontaneous coin-rubbing (The Oz 50 cent coin features it) using various methods: I suggested crayons then Hug decided Lyra pencil was more effective.
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| Coin Rubbings featuring The Australian Coat of Arms |
We learnt (and yes! I admit that I didn't know these specifics :) that the Australian Flag has 1 large 7-point star and the Southern Cross is portrayed with 4 smaller 7-point stars and one 5-point star. Of course it also has a large Union Jack symbolising our historical place in the British Commonwealth.
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| Hug's Union Jack. He chose to use a ruler to outline the shape before he painted. |
I guess what this particular session showed me - and may i note that it was our first formal lesson in a long time - was how much fun it is to involve art in the learning process! That hadn't been the initial plan as the actual art element was meant to just be the Family Flag (which we did get to later that afternoon!) but it quickly became obvious that through art I could really gather the boys attention. Not only learning concepts that touched on history, geography & culture but also strengthening their artistic skills.
Now THAT is a really cool concept that I'm eager to embrace!
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| Our Aboriginal Flags. They asked me to paint too! Mama must remember to get messy ;) |
How do you use art in your daily learning?
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Upper and Lowercase letters | Memory game
I'm back in2 my lovely curriculum guides from New Child Montessori and 1 of the activities this week called for making a set of Upper and Lower Case Letter cards. I was a bit excited as I think it's a great activity for Lovely to sink his teeth into - this kiddo LOVES memory games - and the perfect reinforcement activity for Hug who is a very strong reader now but can still confuse the direction of letters when he's writing.
I pulled out some metallic card stock (that just happened to be sitting around in my art supplies for the past 10+ years waiting to be used - what's with that??!) and got to making the cardboard tiles. These are 4cm x 4cm. And a little rough - Hug and I cut them out together ;)
I'm trying to get back into using my sewing machine a bit more - and I'm particularly interested in sewing on paper - so I fashioned a simple pocketed sheet to keep them in by stitching smaller pieces of card against a backing card. And then busted out the label maker (I've dreamt of this baby for years. So happy to actually have one! Lol)
My first prototype featured my own handwriting which I later decided to cover with printed letters in a traditional Montessori script (please let me know if you would like me to email you a copy of this pdf. I downloaded it years ago & can't find the source to credit so I won't upload it here) which not only is a nice middle ground between print and cursive but which also highlights all of the vowels by making them a different colour than the regular letters.
The cards are organised and introduced in these Montessori-defined groupings:
SMAT FBOX HNDE CPUR WIGJL ZKQYV
So, the idea is that you introduce 1 set of letters at a time, using the 3 Period Lesson. Layout as matching cards and then extend to a game of memory. As each set is mastered another can be introduced.
I shall upload some pix of the activity in action next week :)
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Hellooooo! :)
