Everyday Learning – Page 19 – The Creative Salad

Father’s Day Picture Pencil Holder

Father’s Day has been renamed Daddy’s Day in our house. Every time I talk about Father’s Day, our daughter is quick to remind me, “No, Mom! It’s Daddy’s Day and it’s in June.” In this day and age, who is this Father person anyhow?! Our daughter calls David, “Daddy,” and there’s an end to it. Now if only I could remember that.

Well, June is upon us and it’s time for us to share our Daddy’s Day present for David.

And, in case, you’re wondering, I already blew this surprise for David. Last night I left it out in plain sight drying in the living room. Evidently he didn’t notice it on his own, it took me apologizing for leaving it out for him to notice. Whoops! Mama’s bad. I’m banking on him putting on a good show for our daughter come Sunday, June 18th.

This simple project took several days to complete, because of the drying time of each layer, so please plan ahead! (i.e. start now because Father’s Day is less than two weeks away!)

We gathered favorite father-daughter photos, resized each of them using Photoshop to between 1 and 2 inches tall, copied and pasted them all into a new document, and then printed that document on a single piece of plain printer paper.

After cutting them out, we marked each photo with the year it was taken, and then adhered them to heavy card-stock cut to fit around an (empty and clean) aluminum can.

We also wrote out some loving messages for Daddy, which I then resized using our color copier-printer so that they’d fit in the remaining spaces on the card-stock.

We then mod podged the card-stock to the can and used clothespins to hold the paper to the can while it dried.

Then we mod podged over the card-stock to seal the photos and add a glossy sheen.

Happy Father’s Day, David! Your girls love you.

Writing Caddy

We’ve been working on organizing our arts and craft supplies.

I planned on making a writing caddy for our daughter, but we instead found this blue wire caddy at Joann’s on clearance and the little miss insisted we bring it home. Luckily it’s my style too, so I was thrilled to set it up at her play table in the living room. Inside it we keep:

– Letters and Numbers For Me activity book (published by Handwriting Without Tears)
– The complete set of Jan Brett’s free traditional coloring alphabet tracers stapled together with a this free downloadable Handwriting Without Tears Capital Letters Formation Chart
– Lined and blank paper

– Soft pencils and erasers
– Shape and alphabet stencils
– Protractor
– Maria the Scientist Paper Dolls
– Calculator (used primarily as a pretend cell phone)
– A set of butterfly play bank checks that you can download for free!

We keep the writing caddy on the child sized table by the window overlooking our garden. Adjacent to our birding materials (in the baskets/bags on the floor), we’re all set for everyday learning!

A Photographic Periodic Table of the Elements

Last week at the California Academy of Sciences we picked up these fantastic ~~posters~~ placements (evidently!) that we’re planning on hanging (one will go in our homeschool area and one will head into work with David for his cubicle).

The whole family has been pouring over the posters. I love how these pictures (and interesting factoids written up on the reverse side) have been jump starting family conversations about chemistry and physics.

What a great use of photography to illustrate the composition of our elements. The sample items are almost as interesting as the elements themselves!

The authors website, The Photographic Periodic Table of the Elements, contains a wealth of information and many more photos for each of the elements. There are two companion books, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe and Theo Gray’s Mad Science: Experiments You Can do At Home – But Probably Shouldn’t, also available. I’m looking forward to checking them out from the library.

More Great Art History Books for Kids

Art is important in our family. We come from artistic families and greatly value making and supporting the arts. In that vein, our family loves picture books designed to develop and inspire an appreciation for the arts in young children.

We greatly enjoy these colorful board books for the babies and toddlers alike:

We adore this more advanced series focusing on exploring the alphabet and numbers through works of art published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

We’ve recently discovered another fantastic art appreciation series written for children to add to our family library:

Published once again by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these Can You Find It? books focus on identifying details within works of art. Think of Where’s Waldo but with an educational, historical twist.

Our daughter adores these books and has spent hours pouring over them.

These particular books were written in 2005 and are no longer widely available in stores (we bought our copies at a local used bookstore). Nevertheless, a quick search online turned up many affordable copies in used form, as well as some other books in this series, plus the Metropolitan Museum of Art sells copies online from their store.

What better way to promote art appreciation than by supporting the museum itself?! If you intend to buy this item, please hop on over there and order your copy today.

A Peak in the Nest

Remember this darling nest in the wind chime on our front porch?

A birds nest by our front door in the sugar bowl of our wind chime sounds so idyllic. Beautiful, bitty eggs and the opportunity for an incredible learning experience for our daughter. Behold, a rarely seen stage in the bird life cycle!

Well, the eggs have hatched and it’s not a pretty sight.

We’ve discovered that the, well, obvious downside to a birds nest is the tremendous amount of poop that accomulates outside the nest… i.e. on my windchime!

THANKS VERY MUCH BIRDS! I’m gonna send you a cleaning bill when you vacate the premises.

Plus, those cute baby birds? They’re loud. That’s not really a downside though. We all get really excited when we hear them chirping! Our daughter announces, they’re feeding!

Oh boy are they feeding and getting big fast. At four days old, they are now so large that they are starting to no longer fit inside the nest (that mama bird sure didn’t plan ahead in her nest site selection!). I love that they’re too big for the nest though because now they are popping up out of it, so we are starting to be able to see them. I love that cute feather fluff.

They are pretty darn cute.

If only their poop didn’t ruin my photo.