Child-Sized: in the garden

I think one of the best ways to teach your kids about the earth is to let them play in it!

We took a trip to the local nursery in the spring and the kids got to pick out their own flowers, then we came home and planted them! It was a lot of fun, and the kids had a great time watching them grow.

Children like to work – to them, it is play. If we can capitalize on that, then we can help them grow to love work even as adults. Most work for me is play because my mother let work be my play, and now my favorite thing to do is go out and work in the yard, or build something, or write something, or solve a problem.

The best way to keep children happy “at work” is to provide child-sized tools for them to use in their work. When we bought our home, we had to go out and buy yard tools (shovels, rakes, etc). In our car on the way home were child-sized versions of the adult-sized tools we had just purchased. It is imporant that their tools are as high quality and of the same material we would buy. The yard tools we bought for the kids are made out of metal, not plastic. But you can expect them to work with a plastic shovel. You would never think of it. Having “real” tools requires a lot more adult supervision than most people like to give their children – for us it just happens, because we are always supervising our children.

What life-like, child-sized tools do you provide your children? Do they have child-sized kitchen utensils? Shop tools? Cleaning tools? How are you capitalizing on your child’s play?

Muffin Cup Daffodils

I wish that I could link you to my friend’s blog – it’s really very cute, and her kids do such fun stuff! But alas, it is a private blog, and so I will simply show you the idea we got from her blog (thanks, Anna!)

This is the door to the craft room (notice the marker lines on the wall? Thank you, Baby). Yesterday was very rainy, so instead of doing a kid-swap with my neighbor friend like we usually do so we can both run, we stayed inside and made muffin-cup daffodils!

The one on top is mine, then Little E’s, then Baby’s (I helped her with the one that actually resembles a flower, and then I just let her go with the glue and paper and cotton balls.

E was more interested in playing “dragons” with the scrap paper that was left over from cutting out the petals. But he did manage to put down a few petals, the cup, and a stem – oh, and he drew “dirt” at the bottom.

They are really easy. Basically you either draw or glue petals, and then glue down a mini muffin cup. We actually used some little candy cups, too (the cake section at the craft store will probably have some of those, that’s where I got mine). I did a flower with each. The one on the left is with the candy cups, and the one on the right was with the mini muffin cups.

We also decided to add the letter “F” for “flower” since that is our theme this month. I was going to do the alphabet in order, B, C, D, F – but we’ll just skip right to F for this week, and start back at C next week.

What springtime crafts have you been doing? Are you kids more interested in playing with the scrap paper than actually doing the craft? How to you keep them focused? Or do you just let them play?

May Flowers

“April Showers Bring
May Flowers”

This little saying was the inspiration for our theme this month – which is plants/flowers. Because where we live right now, the earth is coming alive with all kinds of plants and flowers. We have been working outside in the yard (when it hasn’t been snowing or raining – yes, there is still snow in April… and May, even sometimes) and Little E and Baby E have been “helping.”

I have posted our “lesson plans” for the month on a new page, which is linked to at the right. Each month I’ll update those. Also, I posted the form I use for our “lesson plans” over on the “How We Learn” page. Feel free to print it out for your personal use.

To kick off our theme this month, we cut out flowers for The Front Window.

And remember those reusable strips from Scotch? Apparently they really are reusable, and what was once holding up our rainbows now hold up our flowers. I’m actually really glad I found them, because they are clear, so you can’t really see them on the flowers from the outside. The sticky putty stuff would have left a big white blob in the middle of our flowers. So, needless to say, I am very happy with my investment, and highly recommend the little strips.

Well, there are the flowers that will hang out on our window for May. Any ideas for something to stick up there in June? Suns maybe? I can’t think of anything else that reminds me of June. The summer is so sunny here. In July we’ll probably do an American Flag, and then we’ve got August before I can do fall leaves (September) and ghosts or jack-o-lanterns (Oct) and then all the holidays make for good window themes.