Everyday Learning – Page 5 – The Creative Salad

Meet Simone

Our daughter loves role playing. Whenever she reads a new book (usually with an awesome female protagonist) we then, at her insistence, become the book characters for a week or two weeks or a month. For our kid, this game NEVER gets old. To David and I, it is the ultimate act of reading comprehension.

Recently our five year old has been devouring the Cam Jansen series by David A. Adler. Cam Jansen and the Mystery of Flight 54 has become a particular favorite thanks to a young French girl named Simone Green who travels to the US by herself. Oh, to be able to fly on your own! This greatly appeals to our independent girl (who lamented on her fifth birthday that she didn’t want to be five: “I just want to be a grown up already!”).

And so Simone’s bags are packed,

plane tickets have been procured (for Simone and Cam’s aunt Molly who’s also on the flight),

passports have been made (never mind that they are for US citizens),

and it’s time to travel.

Bon Voyage!

Our New Evening Routine

We have a new mother-daughter routine. Each night at dusk we watch the barn owls hunt in the field across from our house.

Sometimes we watch from our living room window, other nights we bundle up and sit out in our lawn chairs to take in the view.

I truly feel that this “nature observation activity” is everyday learning at its finest.

Simple, magical, thought-provoking, and so very exciting.

Knitting Fiend

When our daughter decides she wants to learn something, she tends to approach it with enthusiasm. Assembling 100 piece puzzles at two years old, potty training in a weekend, teaching herself to read at three, learning to swim in one summer. She picks a topic, then excels at it, usually in a short period of time.

If only we all could be so lucky.

This fall our daughter decided she wanted to learn to knit.

So we found sturdy, kid-friendly supplies: a wooden knitting fork and bamboo knitting needles.

She watched a couple videos on YouTube of other kids knitting and I taught her the Waldorf School rhyme that has morphed in our family to:

“In through the front door
Run around back,
Peek through the window
And off jumps jack.”

She now has a knitting project in every room of the house.

She’s even been known to take her knitting in the car with her. You just never know when you’re gonna have a down moment and can fit in a few more rows before the next activity.

Picture Bottle Cap Magnets Redux

We recently did a redux of our picture bottle cap magnets, one of our most popular craft posts here on the blog. We were excited to improve upon this previous project, making several changes, while using new family photos from the past year.

Here’s what we did differently this time around:

We bought bottle caps. After saving exactly six caps over the past year we wanted to make more than half a dozen magnets. So we picked up inexpensive bottle caps from our local art supplies store.

We mixed silver paint in with our base color to paint the caps. On top of this we painted with homemade glitter glue to add extra sparkle to the bottle cap area framing the photos.

We used stronger magnets (adhered with this non-toxic super strong glue) so they could be more useful holding papers on the fridge.

We used Golden’s Self Leveling Clear Gel, the artist version of Mod Podge Dimensional Magic, to create a smooth, glossy film over some of the magnets. (No more brush strokes obscuring our beautiful daughter’s face!)

We found this product took so long to dry that it changed the color of the pictures. Next time we might seal the photos first before applying the gel on top (or let the pictures dry longer after coming off the printer before coating them with gel), although we were pleased with the more artsy result using this product (shown on the right).

The rest of the magnets we used the same mod podge technique as last time:

All in all, a little bit better, yet still super cute!

3-D Puzzleball Fun

Our daughter has always loved puzzles and games. This past year we’ve discovered a new, 3-D puzzle challenge: Puzzleballs by Ravensburger!

You can assemble the pieces either in numerical order:

Or put the puzzle together based on piece shape/color like regular puzzles for a greater challenge:

The plastic pieces clip into each other so the balls hold their shape:

Mama has it on good authority that there will be more puzzleballs under the Christmas tree this year. Little miss is going to be over the moon. Let’s put together some puzzleballs!