The Creative Salad – Page 3 – Crafty fun and homeschool adventures in Sonoma County, California.

Psst! I’m Posting More Over There

I’ve found that quick status updates take a moment, while blog posts take me a while. (Especially recently with my laptop’s hard drive on the fritz.) As a result I’ve been posting more on Facebook and less here on my site, particularly since we started “officially” homeschooling. That makes me a little sad. I’m going to work harder on finding a better balance between the two in the new year.

In the meantime, here’s a brief snippet of some of the things I’ve shared recently via social media.

Via The Creative Salad Facebook page:

And a couple photos from Instagram…

Left: Thanksgiving storytime with daddy! (The baby kept interrupting the story to give David kisses — so sweet!)
Right: Family piano playing… They weren’t noisy at all.

Left: Oh, that baby face. (From a trip to the beach with my folks in October. Thanks to my mom for this sweet photo!)
Right: Caught in the act: big sister’s not home, so the baby headed straight for her room. (I originally thought he wanted to play with her stuff, but she thinks he was looking for her and I think she’s right! Oh, that sibling love…)

p.s. You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Handmade Holidays

I feel like I can finally take a deep breath: the baby and our Christmas Tree have peacefully coexisted for over two weeks now. I just wasn’t sure how that was going to go down.

To make the tree baby safe, we only placed ornaments on the top two thirds. True, our tree does look a little ~~wonky~~ top heavy, but it’s still standing and only one ornament has been pulled off. The baby reports that the red, hand-blown glass ball ornament tasted delicious. (Mama is truly relieved it’s still in one piece.)

Each year we decorate our tree with handmade ornaments, some made by us (like these felt stars, tree, and birds), others made by artisans and friends. Several are heirloom ornaments from my mother-in-law’s childhood. We treasure each one.

We also like to throw on a home-strung popcorn garland and dehydrated citrus slices reminiscent of stained glass windows. Both of those projects are still in-progress.

I think the whole thing looks rather lovely and simple this year. I love perfectly imperfect things.

The gifts haven’t been quite as organized or handmade. We’re running late with everything. No cards have been sent out. Holiday presents are halfway made and scattered. (While homeschooling activities are piled high across the kitchen table.)

It’s just one of those years where I need to be gentle and forgiving with myself because reality may fall short of my (evidently extremely unrealistic) expectations.

Right now I choose to spend my energy and time with my kids, reading holiday books together on the couch, baking almost healthy treats, spending as much time as we can outside before the rains of winter (hopefully) come. We’re making memories that will last a lifetime.

Breathe in, breathe out. Hello, holidays. It’s almost Christmas.

Everyday Learning 5 / Leaves and Seeds (Part 2)

This autumn we studied ‘leaves and seeds.’ With colorful leaves and dried seedpods littering walkways across Sonoma County, we gathered specimens everywhere we went. We may not have correctly identified all of them, but we had such fun spending time outdoors, learning together.

We made bark and leaf rubbings…

Separated seeds from their pods…

Labeled and compared our saved seeds…

(including, clockwise from top left: apple, delicata squash, and amaranth seeds)

Set up our fall nature table…

And learned about leaf characteristics, wrote our own tree field guide, and played endless rounds of leaf bingo. (See my previous post for pictures and more info about those activities.)

We all enjoyed celebrating the fruits of autumn!

Everyday Learning 4 / Math Art and Activities

We started off the school year with a typical math textbook. We figured we’d try it. After all, repetition can be a way to learn (i.e. memorize) arithmatic. As the year has progressed we’ve been doing less workbook and more hands on math activities. The difference in our daughter’s interest, passion, and comprehensive in math since we started doing more projects and less workbook has been striking. (Not much of a surprise there!)

Some recent math activities we’ve been enjoying include:

Making Fraction Flags…

Operating a Fraction Pie Shop (with this game and this cash register; although this newer wooden one with an actual calculator may be even better)…

Coloring quilt squares to practice fractions…

Creating Fraction Flowers…

Playing Math War to practice addition and subtraction…

I feel thankful for fantastic math resources like MathART Projects and Activitiesand Math Art: Hands-On Math Activities enabling me to NOT have to reinvent the wheel, i.e. create math curriculum from scratch. That means one fewer item on mama’s to-do list, thank you very much. So far each math activity has been a hit!

Simple Hanukkah Crafts

Hanukkah falls early this year, starting on Thanksgiving (and the day I met my husband eleven years ago!). Suddenly that’s less than a week away.

Over the years we’ve done some fun kids Hanukkah projects including:

A quick and easy no-sew felt menorah,

Simple menorah decorating project with items from the pantry that our toddler loved (from Kids Craft Weekly).

Plus I blogged this roundup of Hanukkah projects to try (that’s been popular on Pinterest lately).

This year we kept it simple. We used stencils and carved stamps to decorate Hanukkah-themed wrapping paper.

Instead of buying wrapping paper, I cut the bottoms off brown paper grocery bags (that we shamefully accumulate when we forget our cloth bags 50% of the time). After cutting one side open, we’re left with a long rectangular piece of brown paper.

We used silver, gold, and blue ink pads, stencils, crayons, and colored pencils to decorate the wrapping paper. We even carved a star of David to stamp on the paper (using this simple stamp carving method)!

Our daughter then wrapped some of her brother’s gifts:

She tried to convince me to let her wrap her own presents too. Ha! She’s a sneaky, fun one, that girl.

Happy Hanukkah!