Kindergarten Art: Playdough Bugs!

[This project was inspired by these Play Dough Bug Sculptures.]

We were learning about bugs a couple weeks ago--you know, head, thorax, abdomen, that kind of thing--so I thought we ought to do something buggy for our art project at the end of the week. Thanks to Pinterest, I found something SUPER easy and open-ended.

Here are our materials:

You can use whatever you've got around the house.

And here's one of my first bugs. As we all know, I'm really good at lots of intricate details and stuff.

Not. But at least he's cute, right?

The Boy spent most of his time on this Dangerous Bug:

I would die if I ever saw a bug like this in real life.

We also made some ladybugs, a caterpillar, tons of made-up bugs...we tried a butterfly, too, but it just looked lopsided and weird. Oh, well. I guess that's why God makes bugs, and we don't.

Anyway, we didn't do anything scientific or overly realistic with this. Just fun with odds and ends. It was a good wrap-up for our buggy week.

Easter Art: Do-A-Dot Bunnies

Look, I squeezed in an Easter art project! Be proud of me. 

I saw this on Pinterest a few days ago (originally Kids Activities Blog's Cute Bingo Dauber Easter Craft), and since The Boy loooooves his Do-A-Dot markers, I knew it was a must-do.

Also? It's the easiest art project ever. Just do a bunch of dots, wait a minute for the dots to dry, and draw little bunny faces on the dots with a marker.

The Boy and I each made one. I was surprised that he had the patience to draw a face on each of the bajillion dots he made. Shows what I know. Homeschooling: surprising parents who underestimate their children, one day at a time.

Shamrock Art FAIL

When I saw this cute shamrock art project on Pinterest, I thought it would be super fun and easy. Bell pepper + green paint = St. Patrick's Day awesomeness.

Unfortunately, I can't cut a straight line to save my life our kitchen knives are really dull. We ended up with this:

{A couple of okay shamrocks, but mostly...not.}

The Boy was pretty disappointed. Soooo, we took a page from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. (The Boy hates it when I sing the "When Something Seems Bad" song, but I do it anyway.)


And this is what The Boy came up with as a solution:

Painting his own shamrocks! He was pretty happy with that. Crisis averted.

Kid Craft: Footprint Penguin

I got this idea from Pinterest, and it originally came from Little Family Fun. Click through there to see the tutorial.

Although, really...you can probably figure it out from the photo. In which the penguin should look black, not gray. But whatever.

The Boy finished putting his penguin together in about twenty minutes, so this is a good, quick project for a boring winter afternoon. He only needed help with tracing his foot. (Word of advice on the foot tracing: if your kiddo is ticklish, make sure you have a good grip on that foot while you're trying to trace it!)

And on a related note: what the heck is going on with construction paper these days? I got a big pack of Crayola construction paper from Amazon, and it's super flimsy and the colors are faded. I thought it'd be better quality, being Crayola and all.

So, what brand of construction paper should I get next time? Anyone have a suggestion? Because I'm not buying this stuff again.

Kid Craft: Embroidered Valentine Card

Sounds fancy, right? It's really not hard, though.

This photo's been floating around Pinterest lately:

[photo by Red Bird Crafts]

Click on the photo credit link to go through to the tutorial. When I saw it, I thought, "Hey, The Boy could do that. Probably." The only way to know is to try, so we did.

The Boy caught on pretty quickly, and it didn't take very long to finish. The card turned out just like the ones in the tutorial. (Different colors, though.) I'd definitely recommend it, as long as your kid can handle one of those blunt needles. I think it would also be cute as a Valentine's Day decoration.

Handwriting

So Andrea was talking about what she did for Handwriting. I thought I'd share what we do. We are using Handwriting Without Tears.. 

But. That's not what this post is about. We also do what I call "journals." Each day they have to draw a picture in their book about something that happened, or anything else they want to draw a picture about. Then they have to write a sentence trying to spell each word themselves. Then I write it the correct way. And then they re-write it correctly. It's helped my girls become a lot more cautious about their writing, and they try a lot harder to get it right the first time and make it neat. If they get it right the first time, they don't need to re-write it.  Here are some examples from our first few entries:

                                (Appletree is a place.. she wasn't talking about apple trees)

Valentine's Day is in TWO WEEKS.

Okay, it's a little more than two weeks away. Close enough.

We don't do as many arts and crafts around here as I would like to do. The Boy enjoys them when he's doing them, but he doesn't ask to do them very often--he's usually busy building something. And I honestly forget.

(That's one reason that I recruited Melissa for this blog--she's waaaay better at kids' arts and crafts than I am.)

Anyway, I do make an effort to do art projects when a holiday is coming up. Even then, we keep things simple. This photo is from last year. It's just a printable color-by-number, which The Boy wanted to paint instead of color. (I don't remember where that color-by-number came from, but Education.com has one here.)

Now that Valentine's Day is so close--it ALWAYS sneaks up on me--I've got to get in gear! We'll probably do some of the stuff I have pinned, and I know we'll be doing more coloring sheets. 

I also like Melissa's idea in her last post, where her kids had to earn their art supplies to make Valentine's decorations. Do you readers have any good Valentine's art/craft ideas? Go ahead and share them!

So, you homeschool?

Usually that question is followed by the comment, "I could never."

Homeschooling has it's ups and downs. I don't know one parent who homeschool who has had everyday be a good day. It take a lot of patience and a lot of redoing things.

Yesterday we had a bad day. I really bad day.

 So, it was time to try something new. I decided that we would do a craft to decorate for Valentine's Day. In order to do the craft my kids had to earn each item they needed by doing their different subjects. They each need to earn scissors, glue, each color of glitter, and paper. Once they earned the items we made some decorations. This also meant we were done all our school work. It worked amazingly!

We will be making decorations until Valentine's day. I'm thinking of also making Valentine cookies, Valentine cards to send, pretty much anything I can think of as a craft for Valentine's day... Yes, it worked that well.. Once it stops working, I will have to come up with another plan, but for now, I'm going to go play blocks with my kiddos because our schooling is already done!

Tues-day, Sew-day.

First of all. It's been a while.. and a lot has changed.

In a last minute moment, my husband applied to a different University. He got accepted, and so we moved. It's been a stressful, very eventful, and we're hoping things will start calming down.

What's your favorite part of homeschooling? One of my favorite parts is seeing where my children interests are. I've focused a lot on my Scientist's interest. I figured it was educational so I should really encourage it. However I felt like I wasn't really reaching my Fashionista.. For Christmas she wanted a sewing machine. What 6 year old do you know that wants a sewing machine and fabric??? My awesome mom found a smaller sewing machine, bought different kinds of fabric, and gave it to her for Christmas. On Christmas day we sewed a pillowcase together. She was SO happy.

We decided that Tuesdays would be our sew days. Sadly last week, she misbehaved and lost it. Today is going to be our first official sew day. I'm excited. We're going to use some old clothing and make baby doll blankets out of them.

I love that I am able to help my children develop the talents that they are interested in. That is why I home-school. To strengthen my kids in areas that they have talents. (yes along with to strengthen their struggle areas too) I've learned that each kid is SO different. I don't know how public school could even work. I think children learn so much through experiences. Each kid needs to learn through their own experiences, the ones that they are interested in. Home-schooling lets me plan accordingly!

Dinosaur Bones!

I got this idea from...the internet somewhere.

We learned about dinosaurs a couple weeks ago, and for one of the activities Little Boy and Isaac made "fossils."

We smashed some playdough onto the table to represent mud. The idea was to stick dry pasta--representing dinosaur bones--into the playdough to make a dinosaur shape.

Little Boy started out that way--you can see a head, neck, and arms...and maybe legs...in the photo there. But then he apparently decided that wasn't 3-D enough for him. Oh, well. We weren't really going for accuracy.

Pipecleaners + a Colander =

the best new toy ever, apparently.

Note: Do not try to use as a hat. The poky pipecleaner ends will getcha.

Likes & Dislikes

Whoa! It's been almost three weeks since I last posted on this blog. I know that I only have a handful of readers here, so thanks for sticking around even when I don't put much effort into this blog.

So. I've been a little lost lately about what to teach Little Boy. Too many options, I guess. I looked up a few kindergarten-readiness lists for some ideas, and I put together my own list from that. (He's almost at first grade in a couple of areas. Help!) The list that I put together is mostly social/emotional stuff, and it has a few science-y topics thrown in, too. We're still doing our regular routine with reading and math.

Anyway, I think this falls under the social/emotional category. Little Boy definitely knows what he likes and what he doesn't like, but I wanted to talk through that a little more with him. So I got out some papers that I had laying around (I think they're left over from teaching Primary...?) that have a big heart drawn in the middle. I asked Little Boy to think of something that he liked, and then he drew a picture of it in the heart and I wrote down a little sentence at the bottom that he dictated to me. (i.e., "Little Boy likes giraffes.")

(Why, yes, there's a banana sticking out of Little Boy's head. Why do you ask?)

Anyway, in this picture he decided that he liked his ball and his square blocks. I'm pretty sure he picked those because he knew he could draw them. He doesn't draw much. Another time, he said he liked pancakes and noodles. I don't have a picture of that one, but trust me, it's cute.

Arts & Crafts: Puzzle!

This one was fun. We made a little puzzle out of one of Little Boy's drawings.

I gave him some cardstock, markers, and stickers, and told him to draw whatever he wanted. So he drew...a ball. I suggested that maybe he'd like to, y'know, color it in. A bunch of white space = not a fun puzzle.

Anyway, then he stuck stickers all over the paper, and I cut it into biggish puzzle pieces. He was really excited about putting it together.

After trying it once, though, he said that it was "too tricky" to get the pieces to fit together. Meaning, the pieces slid around too much. We'll try it again another time, I guess.

Art: Painting in the Rain

Okay, so this one was a little bit of an "oops" on my part.

The idea of this project is to draw a picture with washable markers on heavy paper or cardstock. Then stick it out in the rain for a few minutes, and the colors will run--if you do it right, it turns out really cool.

So I gave Little Boy a piece of cardstock and some markers and told him to draw whatever he wanted.

And now, I want to make a little side note. The picture above is cropped because Little Boy had written his name on the original paper. I don't put Little Boy's real name on my blog, and here's a decent (and scary) explanation of why.

Anyway, I put Little Boy's picture in the rain and...I forgot about it. I only left it out there for twenty minutes or so, but that was way too long.

Oops. Little Boy still thought it was pretty cool, so I guess it wasn't a total bust.

Play-Doh Balls

We don't play with Play-Doh very often. I kind of forget that we have it. So when we do get it out, it's a big occasion.

Little Boy tends to get into a Play-Doh rut. He'll learn how to do something new with it, and then do it over and over again. I don't really mind that, but sometimes we need to shake things up a little.

This time, I tried to teach Little Boy to roll Play-Doh into a ball. See those little wormy-shaped things? Those are the "balls" Little Boy made.

And then we stacked them up, just for the heck of it. Turns out that the wormy-shaped Play-Doh balls were good for sticking into the little spaces in the Play-Doh pile.

Yarn Art

I got this activity out of some kind of math-for-kids book. Little Boy liked it more than I thought he would.

First, he had to sort a bunch of strands of yarn by length--long, medium and short. He was supposed to put the yarn in the envelopes, but that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. So he just piled the yarn on top of the envelopes.



And then I gave him a sheet of paper and a bottle of glue and let him go crazy. I didn't give any direction for the gluing--just glue the yarn wherever.

Oh! And this was the first time he's managed to squeeze a bottle of glue and move it around where he wanted it--without having a meltdown because it wasn't working like he wanted it to. So that was a small victory.



It totally looks like modern art. We could sell that for a squillion dollars, I bet.

The Rest of Our Homeschool Day

So...I forgot to finish the little series I was doing about our daily homeschool schedule.

Oops.

Anyway, here's how the rest of our homeschool day goes. After we do some reading, we do...everything else. That is, whatever other activities I have planned. The subject and format of the activities changes every day, based on what I have prepared and what I feel like doing.

(Because, y'know, this whole homeschool thing is all about me and what I feel like.)

Anyway. The "other" activities are sometimes games we play on the floor:



Here he's trying to pick up beads with a clothespin. I think we were pretending that the clothespins were bird beaks and the beads were birdseed.




Tracing used to be a regular part of the routine--he was obsessed, kinda--until about a week ago. He won't trace at all now. So we'll start that again when he feels like it.




Or we do an art project or a little science experiment at the table. That's a glittery snowman, with enormous snowflakes falling around it.

Most days, we do two of the above. When we're really lucky, we do all three. Sometimes we also do a little video or game from The Head of the Class. I'm planning on doing a later blog post on The Head of the Class, because it's been a pretty good supplement to the other stuff we're doing.

Unless I totally forget to post about it, like I did with this one.

Marshmallows and Toothpicks

I don't think I stole this idea from anywhere in particular, but I didn't come up with it on my own, either. It's a pretty common project.

And all you need is toothpicks and mini marshmallows. How's that for cheap?

{Had a little too much fun with the photo editing. Heh.}

Anyway, the gist is that you stick the toothpicks into the marshmallows. If your kid is pretty little, you can just leave it at that. As your kids get older, you can have them make shapes and little sculptures.

Little Boy loved it, but he insisted on copying whatever I made. He's really into this building stuff, but creativity isn't one of his strengths right now. Oh, well. I finally stopped building and made him think up some shapes on his own.

I don't have a photo of all the stuff we made, but we used up a whole lotta toothpicks and marshmallows. Not ALL the marshmallows, though. We had to save some for snacking on afterward.

Winter Art Project: Snow Drawing

Here's another idea that I stole from The Mailbox:



It's super-easy. Have your kid draw a picture of a snow scene (you can't tell from the photo, but Little Boy drew a snowman with a bunch of snowflakes falling around it). Then go over the lines with a glue stick and dab a cotton ball over the glue-sticked areas. Bits of cotton from the cotton ball will stick to the picture.

Ta-da!

Little Boy's New Obsession

Little Boy loves tracing...everything. I thought he was going to color the worksheet in the photo, but he traced it instead. We have a book full of trace-able shapes and letters, and it's almost his favorite activity ever. His very favorite is the "cutting book," which deserves its own post. Later.



(In case you couldn't tell, the blobby thing he was tracing is a stegosaurus. It just didn't have any spiny-thingies on its back yet.)