Everyday Learning – Page 17 – The Creative Salad

Poppy Flower Inspired Tissue Paper Art

After shaking the poppy seed pods and planting their seeds in our garden, we felt inspired to do some poppy flower inspired art. We whipped up some collages with tissue paper, glue, and dried black beans.

First we cut petals of red and orange tissue paper, then we adhered them to drawing paper with a glue stick.

We created some three-dimensional poppies made by pulling up and twisting the tissue paper petals around the end of a pencil.

We added some dried black beans with glue to serve as seeds.

A fun, simple, nature-inspired project with fantastic results.

An easy, creative activity to make with kids of all ages.

Saying Farewell, a Sad Nest Update

I’ve been putting off writing this post because I wasn’t sure how to share this gently. In the end I’ve decided to just put it all out there and share the story, as well as my feelings and thoughts on the experience. Here goes…

Remember this nest? Those perfect house finch eggs?

The eggs hatched and baby birds filled the nest. After a few days, however, we noticed that the mama bird had disappeared. Neither David nor I had seen her. By the time we checked on the babies, we were too late. They had, in fact, died. What to do? We decided to bury them in the field in front of our house.

I felt sad about their passing. As a mama myself, I couldn’t help but relate to the situation: a mama bird, because of forces presumably outside her reach, left her babies abandoned, unable to survive without her. This is nature. This is life. As a biologist, I know this. To witness it firsthand on our porch turned out to be challenging.

Our three year old accepted their passing with such grace and acceptance. “They died, Mama. It’s okay. There will be new baby birds.” And she’s right. We talk about life cycles every day. Everything that’s born will die.

As soon as we placed the birds in the field, I started to feel better. After all, haven’t burial rituals evolved to give us comfort? I knew the birds were gone, that there was nothing more we could do. Accept and move on… after all, there will be new baby birds. There will always be new baby birds.

Leaf Exploration With Stencils

We’re finally feeling the heat here in Sonoma County and I can’t help but look towards fall for cooler weather, the typical season for leaf exploration.

But why wait until autumn to learn leaf shapes? The more we practice now, the better we’ll be prepared for identifying the plethora of fallen leaves this November. In true Spritzer-Leyba fashion, we feel the need to transform everyday activities into learning experiences.

We stumbled upon this fantastic, incredibly inexpensive book of leaf stencils at our local art supply store. The stencil book contains six different leaves: aspen, holly, maple, sweet gum, white oak, and yellow poplar, all common to North America.

The book contains perforated pages, so you can remove the stencils from the book to trace them more easily. We decided to punch a hole in the top of each stencil and use a binder ring to keep them together.

I love watching our daughter learn without realizing it. She’s having fun, stenciling away, while learning the names of leaf shapes.

I watch, with a smile on my face, as she decides that we need to clearly label each leaf.

She’s our daughter for sure.

I can’t help but hope that she’ll grow up to be a scientist too.

Alphab’art: Find the letters hidden in the paintings

Our family tends to collect art appreciation books written for kids.

Our latest discovery is Alphab’art, a book about finding letters hidden in paintings.

This wonderful book presents a wide variety of art styles and subject matter with paintings by some of the masters of western art including Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh, Matisse, Giotto, Chagall, Mondrian, and Klee. Many of the paintings in the book came from French museums and private collections (the book was originally published in France) and were unfamiliar to me.

We found that looking for letters in the paintings jump started our conversation about the many other interesting things hidden away in the works of art.

Our daughter felt proud that she spotted three letter O’s in this painting by Henri Matisse. I love the idea that we can find shapes and letters all around us, in pictures, photos, bookshelves, toy bins, doorways, if we really look. We’re surrounded by beautiful, interesting and educational things.

The book has inspired us to go on an alphabet adventure! I feel a photography project coming on…

Curious about other art appreciation books for kids that we love?
Read all of our previous posts on the subject here.

Swapping the Sand Out of the Sand and Water Table

Our daughter loves playing in the sand and water table that we set up on our back porch.

She plays on the porch for hours, excavating shells, driving matchbox cars on ramps and over bridges, playing in the water, building castles with sticks.

Unfortunately the play area has gotten to be a bit of a mess.

Actually that’s a bit of an understatement.

With sand in both sections of the table (the side that drains should contain just water) and sand all over the floor, our back porch had morphed into a big wet sandy mess.

We decided to swap out the sand for inexpensive colored aquarium gravel.

So far, so good.

Hey, it looks pretty too.