Homeschool Art Show

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Amy

Recently, I heard about an opportunity in our homeschooling group for the kids to have their artwork displayed at a local downtown store during our town’s Gallery Walk, which occurs the first Saturday of every month.

My girls love to paint, so I jumped at the chance for them to participate. I told the girls about it and bought them some special canvases on which to create their pieces. Neither of them really understood what the heck I was talking about when I said their art would be on display in a store downtown. They didn’t really care about anything other than having the chance to paint. And paint they did.

They each did a painting for the Gallery Walk and then did several more.

Miss did paintings of her sisters and then created this Self Portrait.

I thought about taking Miss’s self portrait for the Gallery Walk, but she didn’t want me to take that or the painting she did of her sisters anywhere.

So we sent these:

The one on the left is Lass’s, Miss’s on the right.

I didn’t ask either of them what they had painted or to give a name for their paintings. Both of them did so on their own though. In case you can’t see the cards on them, Lass’s is “Rapunzel’s Magical Hair” and Miss’s is “Picture of Wisconsin.”

Tonight was the Gallery Walk. I told the girls we were all going on a date to have dinner and ice cream and go see their paintings on display. I didn’t think they would really get the concept of having their artwork displayed for others to see unless we actually went and saw it and saw others seeing it. So we did.

We started out with dinner at a small cafe downtown.

I realized recently that we don’t take the girls out for dinner enough (um, ever). When we visited my parents we took them out to a local buffet and they thought it was the coolest thing ever. Neither of them had done that before. When it occurred to me that they don’t ever get to do that, I decided to remedy the situation and begin taking them out to eat more often.

So tonight we had a girl’s night out “date night” (Daddy wasn’t home). They had mac and cheese for dinner and chocolate ice cream for dessert.

After dinner we went over the the store where their art was displayed. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was really fun to see them see their art and accept compliments on it. There were several other homeschooling families there and they were very kind in their comments to my girls about their paintings.

It was also a great experience for them to see the artwork done by the other kids in the group. There were really great pieces, including photography, fused glass, paintings, textural drawings, cut paper art, colored pencil drawings, and even a castle sculpture made from marshmallows and toothpicks. The girls really got into looking at the different types of art.

When I first signed them up to participate in this I wondered if I was being kind of dumb since they are so young. I thought maybe I would seem silly since they aren’t technically of “homeschooling age.” I thought they might not even understand the idea of being in an “art show.”

They probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t taken them to see it. And Lass probably still didn’t really quite get it.

But I don’t feel silly about having them participate in the experience anymore. They had fun. They got to paint, which they always love. They got to have a special night out with Mom. They got to see their artwork on display with other pieces by older kids. They got to explore and enjoy the other art and receive compliments on theirs. They thanked the mother who organized the show.

And now we have our next craft project already planned out. I happen to have mini marshmallows and toothpicks in my cupboards. Sculptural art lesson, here we come!

Making Snowmen – Sometimes You Need to Improvise

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Amy

The girls got their wish to play in the snow today.

They had so much fun tromping through the snow, making tracks and exploring.

Lass was a bit unsteady at first and had a hard time getting up when she fell down.

After a bit she was more stable and keeping up with her sister fairly well.

Daddy made them a little snow fort.

I think they could’ve stayed out there all day. After an hour and a half or so I coaxed them inside with hot chocolate and lunch.

We read the book “The Snowy Day” at nap time, and Miss realized that they had “forgotten” to build a snowman while they were outside. She was disappointed about this (and that she hadn’t gotten a stick with which to whack a snow-covered tree).

They had been having so much fun, they really did forget, though my husband and I didn’t. I was excited to see them build a snowman and outfit it with some fun accessories, but the snow would not pack well enough to do so today.

But, their Advent calendar activity for the day was to “Make a Snowman,” so I improvised. While they were napping I remembered this ornament craft that my Mom mentioned to me the other day and that I’ve glimpsed on Pinterest. I grabbed three vintage blue ornaments off my tree, some white finger paint, and some paint pens, and we made it happen.

I painted their hands, placed the ornaments in their hands and had them press their fingers on them, and then added the rest with paint pens. Snowmen made.

Miss agreed that tomorrow we need to read “The Snowy Day” before they go outside, so she won’t forget again to do any important snow activities.

Egg Shell Artwork

Posted on December 1, 2012December 1, 2012 by Amy

This past week we talked about the letter E.

E for Elf.

I slacked off a bit on some of our school time so we could have a much needed play date with out BFsF. My girls had been missing their friends after not seeing them for a while because of school and holiday stuff and we were all so happy to spend some QT with them.

Another morning we went to open gym at their gymnastics place.

And we did some other, um, stuff.

We did do some school stuff this week, but E ended up getting neglected a little bit.

That’s the great thing about homeschooling. You can do it on Saturday if you want to “play hooky” to do something else during the other days of the week. We don’t do formal school stuff every day at this point anyway, other than our calendar. Mostly we play and we read and I try to mention our letter of the week as much as I can. But I wanted to do a few more E-focused activities.

So today we did. Dot to dot elf and elephant (Miss is really into dot to dot pictures now). Brainstorming for E words on our category worksheet. And my favorite, playing with egg shells I’ve washed out and saved this week.

The girls love cracking the egg shells when they cook with me, so I figured they would have fun with them and have an interesting sensory experience. I put the shells (about 10 eggs’ worth) on the table along with some markers and they went to town.

They examined the eggs and asked questions about the thin membrane inside them.

They colored on the shells.

And as expected they quickly moved into crushing the shells and playing with the pieces.

Miss commented that she thought the pieces felt and sounded like glass when they clinked against each other.

She really got into it and pulverized her shells.

Lass liked breaking her shells up and then watching them drop from her hands over and over.

Egg shells were a big hit. I will be washing them and saving them from now on.

Sewing Past and Present

Posted on October 27, 2012January 11, 2023 by Amy

Miss has really been into sewing for the past couple of weeks. A few days before we left to come to my parent’s house, she said she wanted to get a “Princess Starglow” (yellow star-shaped princess character from a Care Bear movie) and asked if she could use her allowance that she has been saving to buy one. I told her I wasn’t sure if we could buy a Princess Starglow, and looked on the computer with her to see if anyone sold one. No one does. So she asked, “Can we make one?” Well. Okay.

I told her we could. She initially asked to make one with yarn. I told her it might work better to sew one. We made a special trip to Hobby Lobby to get some shiny material. I drew a pattern and traced it on the fabric. I was all set to get it ready to sew, and excited for her to have her first experience with my sewing machine. She looked at it and said, “No Mommy, I want a small Princess Starglow.” Apparently the pattern I made was too big. My girls seem to have a strong affinity for pocket-sized toys and dolls. I should have known.

When she protested the Princess Starglow I had started making it was just a day or two before we left for this trip. So I put the Princess Starglow makings out of sight and put the project on hold until we get home.

She’s been fine with that, but has still had “sewing” on her mind. Today, my mom got the girls to “sew” on some leaf-shaped lacing cards. Miss saw some light blue yarn and asked me to sew a Cinderella Dress out of it. I told her I couldn’t really do that with the yarn. She didn’t understand, since we hadn’t actually gotten to the sewing step in the Princess Starglow project, so she said, “But you could try, Mommy.” Oh boy. I can’t say no to that. I agreed that I could.

Before I got a chance to test my Fairy Godmother skills, my mom brought out something that took my back to the very beginning of my own sewing journey.

I started making this quilt when I was about five years old (that’s over 30 years ago, folks). My mom cut the squares from scraps and traced hearts on each of them for me to quilt.

I worked on it off and on for many (roughly 20) years. Some of the stitches are huge and very wobbly.

Funnily, I was just wondering about this quilt this morning when Miss was asking me about sewing. I haven’t seen it in at least a decade. It was awesome to see it again.

I have finished 19 of 35 squares.

Today I talked to my girls about us finishing the rest of it together. They were really into the idea. Lass repeatedly said, “Yes! We do it togevah (together)!” I think it must have been meant-to-be that I didn’t finish this as a girl. It will be so much better for me to finish it with them.

So, back to the Cinderella dress. I had no fabric. Just blue yarn. I cut the bottom off of a paper towel roll. Shaped it into sleeves. Wrapped the yarn around.

Miss was really excited about it. She loved it. She showed it to my husband. He said, “Oh cool, it’s Toodee!”

Toodee?!

C’mon! Really?

You can see it, right?

All that really matters I guess is that Miss loves it. Now she wants me to “sew” her a Cinderella to go in the dress. I’ve created a monster… .

Leaves

Posted on October 21, 2012October 21, 2012 by Amy

At home, we are well past the peak of fall color. Things are starting to look a bit brown. It’s getting cold and I can feel winter coming.

But this week we’re visiting my parents. They live 10 hours south of us, and still have lots of wonderful color and nearly-80-degree weather to enjoy.

It’s warm and beautiful. And we’re taking full advantage.

There’s lots of room to run at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. And I just can’t resist taking pictures of my gorgeous girls in these gorgeous leaves.

Of course, my girls love playing in the leaves. I got them searching for big, different, colorful leaves.

We collected a bunch of leaves and then the girls went to town playing in them.

I was really excited to have the girls do some leaf rubbings after their naps.

I helped each of them do a maple leaf, but they were much more interested in just coloring. I tried to talk to them about the differences in the leaves and the types of trees from which they came. We had collected maple, oak, dogwood, and something else. Hickory, I think. I was really excited to get into the leaves. I thought I was going to have one of those super-fun-and-totally-educational-awesome-mom experiences with them.

They just wanted to color. Oh well.

It was a fun afternoon. And we’re at Grandma and Grandpa’s. My girls are laughing like crazy and getting tons of love from my parents. Can’t beat that.

Weekend Family Fest

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Amy

It was cold and rainy here all weekend. But our house was full of warmth and sunshine.

We took full advantage of being home together for a full weekend. We played, and made music, and colored Halloween cookies.

Yes, that’s a tear on her cheek. She had been very upset about something just before climbing in her seat to color her cookies. Probably that I made her take off her sister’s Snow White dress for the activity…

I had shown her how I bit off my ghost’s arms. She laughed and showed me her ghost, “Mama, I bit off his butt!”

We hunkered down for some much needed home time. Lists and agendas went out the window as we spent time just enjoying each other. It. was. awesome.

We did puzzles and played games and watched football. The girls knew the appropriate teams to cheer for (mostly “GO BLUE!” of course, but a little bit of “Yay Hawkeyes!” in there as well so their Daddy wouldn’t feel bad).

We got out paints and went to town. My girls love to paint. I love seeing how they each have their own way of doing it.

Miss decided that finger painting was in order. When I told her I wasn’t going to get out the finger paints (not my fave activity), she improvised. Tricky girl.

So, they made some great handprint art. It was messy. I don’t love messy, but I went with it. It was fun and I survived and they loved it.

It was a lazy jammy weekend. The only reason any of us got dressed all weekend (other than hubby and me when we went on a date Saturday), was that the girls got paint all over their jammies from the finger painting.

Of course we couldn’t get through this weekend family fest without carving our pumpkins. The older girls each had a pumpkin to draw a face on.

Daddy carved them while the girls looked on excitedly.

I forgot to buy one of those little pumpkin carving sets, so he was working hard and having a bit of trouble with my relatively large knives. Then he got smart.

The girls chose to do Mad (Miss’s), Scared (Lass’s), and Sad (Miss’s choice for Sis) faces on their pumpkins. I love how they turned out. It was a fun ending to a wonderful weekend.

A New Book To Love

Posted on September 27, 2012January 11, 2023 by Amy

My mom is a children’s librarian. When she comes to visit, she usually brings cool books or book-related activities for the girls to do. This is great, because I’m not always so great at coming up with stuff like this for them (says the mom who is planning to homeschool her kids when they begin kindergarten … yikes). During my parents’ recent visit she brought a fun project to go with the new book “The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse” by Eric Carle.

We love Eric Carle books. We have a ton of them. With this new book the publisher is doing some sort of marketing thing where they encourage kids to “paint” their own horse picture, using the printable you can find here, and mail it to Mr. Carle. So, we did.

Love.

We mailed them off the other day. Miss was excited about sending them to Mr. Carle, though she didn’t really understand what he would do with them (nor do I). As a nice side note, the activity prompted lots of discussion about authors and artists and the mail and addresses and how all that works.

After reading this book and talking about how books get made, Miss asked to make a book to give to my husband when he came home from his trip. She titled it “Wee Willy Winky” and had me write that on each page that she illustrated with her art work. I’m thinking I might print out some other pics like this horse and let the girls color and put together their own books.

They are quite into being “artists” after reading this. Awesome.

Braving the Pool

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Amy

I took the girls to the pool this afternoon for the first time this summer. It’s pretty hot here, so I figured it would be a good way to get some outside time after naps (or non-nap in the case of Miss). My husband had a meeting, so I braved the pool on my own. Through having the girls in the water at my sister-in-law’s in the past few weeks, we have learned that Lass is fearless when it comes to the water, so I was a bit nervous. I figured we’d be okay though since the pool has zero-entry and I put a floatie on her. At first it was super easy, and I wondered what I had even been nervous about. Sis sat in her car

seat in the shade and Miss and Lass splashed around harmlessly in less that one foot of water, pretty much right by my feet. Then a friend, who is about two months older than Miss showed up. It was great for the girls to be able to play with her, but her arrival disrupted our little peaceful, safe, easy playing. She and Miss immediately headed for deeper water (“deeper” in this case meaning one to two feet) and of course Lass went right along with them. They were playing “horsey” on some of those pool noodles. That, in addition to the slightly deeper water, was enough to throw Lass off her balance a bit, and twice I went running though the water and hauled her up after she lost her footing and went face first into the water. With the noodle under her she couldn’t quite get her feet back under herself. After the second time, I had to call it quits for Lass for today. I think I’m going to get a more substantial life jacket and maybe we’ll try it again in a few days. That girl freaks me out. She’s my little dare devil.

I really would love to have some photos of our pool time to post, since it was mostly lots of fun and the girls were, naturally, oh so cute splashing around. But between hawk-watching Miss and Lass, trying to keep the sun off Sis (she was perfectly shaded in her car seat, but then got fussy, so I put her in the Ergo), and making life-saving dives for my middle child, the camera never made it out of my bag. So instead, I’ll share with you a few of the photos from last week at the farm.

Of course my husband did tons of fishing and the girls were very excited to see some of the larger fish he caught. No filleting this time, though.

Foos-ball-room for the princesses to dance in.

We had a very big and somewhat scary storm the last night we were at the Farm. It blew up right around snack time, so we took our stuff to the basement for a picnic. The girls seemed unfazed in spite of all the thunder and lightning, the 40-50 MPH winds, sideways-falling rain and hail.

Of course we celebrated Father’s Day morning at the Farm before heading home. During the week prior to our trip, I had the girls make Father’s Day paintings. They painted canvases for their Daddy.

Then Miss did paintings on paper for my Grandpa, my Dad, and my Father-in-law (Lass lost interest after her canvas was done). At the end as she was finishing up the painting for my Father-in-law, her Papa, she decided it would be funny to stick her face in the still-wet paint.

She seems to be our little budding artist. She really loves to paint anything. She got really into painting some gourds with my Mother-in-law when we were at the farm. She seems to understand the power of art to make people smile too. When she created her painting for my Grandpa she said, “I think this will make Great-grandpa happy.” Yes, I think so too.

Speaking of Messes…

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Amy

I went to a doctor’s appointment this morning. As soon as I got home, right after running to me with a yell of “Mama!” and a big hug (which never gets old, by the way), Miss asked if she could paint. What a coincidence. I had planned to paint with the girls on Thursday morning, but I figured, “What the heck?” and said, “Sure, we can paint.” What I should have said was “Not this morning, Honey, we have to go to gymnastics.” But I completely forgot about Miss’s gymnastics class this morning. So. We painted.

This was Lass’s first time painting at the easel.

She seemed to like it okay, but didn’t stick with it for very long. She didn’t seem to like the paint on her hands and feet.

Apparently mud is cool, but paint, not so much. She was done after making two paintings.

Miss on the other hand was all into the painting and probably would have continued for hours if I hadn’t had her get cleaned up to get ready for lunch.

We had fun, and I have lots of great paintings as a result of their efforts. I even found some great, cheap frames at Target this afternoon that are just the right size for this paper. They will work really well for framing the masterpieces of my little artists.

And the mess wasn’t even that bad…

Christmas-ing

Posted on December 23, 2011December 31, 2013 by Amy

Oh, we are a-Christmas-ing at our house this week. Lots of carols and shopping and wrapping. We even did a bit of crafting, making ornaments out of bread. We started by using cookie cutters to cut shapes out of the bread.

Lass mostly just wanted to eat it.

After we got them cut out I used a straw to make holes in them for hanging and we left them to dry out/get stale over night.

Then we painted and glittered them (I mixed some glue into the paint). Yes, I hate glitter. But it is a necessary part of holiday crafting with little girls, in my opinion. So, we braved the glitter. Lass hasn’t done painting with a brush yet (unless you count her painting/eating endeavor with the pumpkins at Halloween), so I was just going to let her go to town with crayons and a piece of poster board.

But she saw Big Sister with the paint and was not about to settle for boring old crayons.

She did a great job. She did immediately try to put the brush in her mouth, but refrained when I told her no. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t long before she got tired of painting and wanted to get down.

This girl, on the other hand, was all about focus. She painted and glittered ornaments for her babysitters, her two teachers, and her Daddy, carefully choosing the shape, paint color, glitter color, and hanging ribbon color for each recipient.

There are only a few left that haven’t yet been given out or put on our tree. I think they turned out pretty cute, though I’m not sure how well they’ll hold up. The one Miss gave to her Daddy is already in the trash after Lass tried to eat it and broke off the top of the ornament where the string hole was cut. They are made from bread, after all…

Today was Miss’s holiday party at her school. She got to play a game where she tossed a big jingle bell into a bucket to win a present. This is her shy smile after achieving her objective.

She decorated cookies to set out for Santa.

And she filled a bag with reindeer food (which looked like a mixture of oatmeal, glitter, and maybe some flour, with a few jingle bells and cinnamon sticks thrown in). We will be taking this to the Farm tomorrow night.

The girls had lots of fun playing with the Christmas tree tonight. You might have noticed that Lass has a new hairdo by the way.

The barrette just wasn’t always working that well, even when she did keep it in her hair.

So we’re all about the spouting pony look these days. It works much better and is so stinking cute. You wouldn’t believe the number of comments this thing gets when we go out in public.

I did a little experimenting with my fun new-ish camera lens to try to achieve a new photography effect I have recently learned about. It’s called “bokeh” and is basically “the aesthetic quality of the blur,” or something like that. Look at how the Christmas lights are twinkly and out of focus behind the girls. That’s what I was going for.

I love Holiday bokeh!

Miss has been in one or the other of her two tights/leotard combinations since we got back from Kentucky for almost every moment of the day. It is like pulling teeth to get her to put clothes on to go to the store or to school. She had on that adorable Matilda Jane top at her school party today, and asked to change back into this as soon as we arrived home. She got back on the ballerina kick when my Auntie got her a magnetic wooden “paper doll” ballerina for Christmas. The first night we got home from Kentucky she asked to put on her ballerina costume. I let her put on the shoes and tutu, since it was almost time for bed (thinking these would be easier to get into and out of when it was time for jammies). She ended up sleeping in those anyway, and has slept in some sort of ballerina get up every night since. And she dances the part too. It’s awesome.

Tomorrow will bring lots more Christmas-ing, with tons of shopping, wrapping, caroling and then packing and traveling to the Farm, where the Christmas-ing will continue through the weekend. So I’d better get some sleep!

Motherhood and Miscellany

Arts and Crafts