Archive for April 2011
I have been meaning to make recycled paper with my son for ages. Finally after finding way too much scrap paper in my art closet when I cleaned it out I knew there was no time like the present ,especially with Earth Day only days away. This was not a hard craft but it does require adult participation. I have done it in a class without the use of a blender by soaking the paper for days.
- Gather your materials. You will need scrap paper, newspaper,a bowl , a blender, water , towels and a window screen. I also used a plastic cutting board to dry the paper on.
- Start by ripping your scrap paper and newspaper into small pieces. The smaller the better.
- Add water . We used a bottle from our recycling bin to help ease the mess.
- Squish, let soften for as long as your child will wait. We didn’t wait too long but the blending is easier the squishier you get the “pulp”.
- ADULT ONLY – using a blender blend the water and paper pulp.
- Put towels ( old ones from when your husband went to Mexico on Spring break in college) under your screen.
- Pop the pulp on it.
- Press the water out. We just used a dish cloth ( smooth cotton not fluffy).
- Flip onto a cutting board and let dry.
- We popped ours in our laundry room and let dry for 2 days.
- Then cut them out into hearts and added some ribbon and gave them to some dear friends.
Earth Day Books
The EARTH Book
Love Your World
Gabby and Grandma Go Green
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That post you wrote that rocked, the tutorial for that super awesome craft you made, the post you thought would take an hour to write but it took 4? Those are the posts we want to see. Link up your best from this past week because they deserve to be seen! If you are new here or have never linked up , don’t be shy. Although the majority of links are early learning, homeschooling and crafts links don’t have to fit these genres they just have to be rad. Have a great week.
For some reason I thought it would be fun to compile this list of our favorite picture books from A-Z ! I am nuts. Do you know how many books we’ve reviewed? Yeah , I haven’t kept count either. Also for some reason there are a huge amount of great books that start with A? I had a terrible time deciding which to choose. Since I didn’t have a suggestion for X I was a little loose with the rules. I hope you like this list because if you don’t I’ll cry. By clicking the title you will be taken to the original review .
Brown Bear , Brown Bear What Do You See ?
Edwardo The Most Horriblest Boy in the Whole Wide World
How To Bake and Apple Pie and See The World
This post was supposed to be about monogrammed eggs. We were going to use a white crayon to make our initials on the egg and then paint. Totally didn’t work.
The painted wood eggs we got simply were too smooth for the crayon wax to stick well, I should have grabbed the unfinished ones. So we’ll try that again next year, instead this post evolved from our failure. As I told my son to just paint them however he wanted he said ” Look I am making swirls like Van Gogh!” So we grabbed one of the few art books that is not already in storage while we sell the house and looked at some of his art. After talking about the colors and how ” Gloppy” 
his paint was on the canvas we added more paint to the eggs and made a few more swirls. This was so much fun to do and you could easily adapt it to various artists. Paint small dots for George Seurat, splatter paint them for Jackson Pollack, do large color blocks for Mark Rothko or even cut some collage paper and modge podge it on for Matisse! The variations are endless. I think I am going to make this a Easter tradition grabbing a few eggs every year and choosing an artist to use as inspiration. After a few years we will have our own collection of masterpiece eggs.
For this project we used pre painted white wood eggs from Micheal’s , acrylic paint and paint brushes. Ignore the crayons that was a big old flop!
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This post is about a learning activity I did with my son, Charlie, but it’s also about working with special needs kids in general and how sometimes you might have to look at something differently to get the desired result. I wanted to share this activity with you all because it involved some problem solving, but in the end it was completely worth it. Working and teaching a special needs child can have it’s challenges, but when you can it right, you’re on top of the world.
For this activity we used:
- A piece of poster board or card stock
- markers
- colored dot stickers (Available on the stationery aisle almost anywhere)
For this activity, I wanted to do something with a rainbow and colors. After spotting some “dot stickers” on the stationery aisle, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
I drew a rainbow with a black marker on half a sheet of poster board. I then used those markers to color it myself–my son hates markers. Did spend a lot of time on it–just enough to make it very clear where each color should be.
We then took out the stickers and began places the stickers in the matching section of rainbow.
We started off guiding Charlie through the motions, waiting for him to start initiating some himself, but we weren’t getting a whole lot out of him. Then my husband remembered that Charlie has gotten very interested in other people’s hands–he likes to touch them, move them around, etc. So we switched things up. My husband held the sticker and asked Charlie where he should put it. Charlie immediately grabbed my husband’s hand and moved it to the correct place.
He did this nine times in a row–until it was clear to both of us that he had no trouble understanding matching. We were so excited to see that he not only understood the activity, but that he was pretty good at it too!
Working with a special needs child sometimes forces you to think outside of your comfort zone–consider different ways. Would it be great if my son could do this activity with no help from his parents? Of course, but in the mean time I want to keep stimulating his brain until his body catches up.
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Katy is a mom of one who loves art, mystery novels, and anything involving peanut butter–she blogs about raising her little miracle at Bird on the Street.
