The Creative Salad – Page 5 – Crafty fun and homeschool adventures in Sonoma County, California.

Everyday Learning | 3: Leaves and Seeds

Goodness, we are loving homeschooling. This makes for a nice change from the first week of the school year when I panicked, as I enviously watched my friends suddenly have their mornings free when their kids headed off to school. After I quietly (and quickly!) mourned my lack of down time and reminded myself why we are doing this, we instantly found our homeschooling rhythm. We’re all having so much fun.

We’ve been busy…

learning the scientific terminology to describe, categorize, and identify leaves while writing a tree field guide,

using fun art projects to reinforce math concepts, such as this money and fractions activity from Math Art: Hands-On Math Activities,

saving seeds from everything we eat,

and playing leaf bingo to practice recognizing common leaves (available to download for free here).

Over the last few weeks my favorite parts of each and every day are those quiet just-us moments. When the baby naps, big sister and I rush to the kitchen table to get some time alone together, to tackle coursework, before he wakes and my attention becomes divided. Yes, we learn all day, but I treasure the one-on-one time with my five year old.

I feel so thankful that I get to spend every day with her.

Hello to Our New Kitchen Chairs

I know the topic of kitchen chairs isn’t terribly thrilling. I’m just so excited I have to share… In an unrelated note: the best part of my kitchen is the freaking awesome art I commissioned from our five year old. To see THAT please scroll down.

For over a decade we’ve been making do, sitting each day at the kitchen table on rickety wooden folding chairs that my parents generously passed on to us. Did you catch that? A DECADE! My butt hurts just thinking about it.

We’ve been meaning to get new chairs for a while now. The catch being that they’re crazy expensive.

(I’ve been talking about buying secondhand, mismatched sturdy wooden chairs and painting them a single color since moving to California seven years ago, but has that happened? No! I have too many other projects I’d rather tackle… so back to our quest to buy new chairs.)

The chairs David and I both liked were waaaaay beyond our budget (at $250 each). These metal chairs were comfortable too, but were also pricey.

Then we found these less expensive metal beauties that are similar in size to the folding chairs we already own (so we knew they’d fit at our kitchen table). Plus they’re really sturdy. I’m not going to lie: the fact that they won’t fold up on our guests sitting on them was a major selling point.

We ordered four originally and love them so much we ordered two more.

Chic, metal, comfortable, and ours.

Goodbye, rickety folding chairs. We’ll see you at Thanksgiving. Or the next time we have lots of friends over. Finally we can use them occasionally, instead of every day, just as they should be used.

Our meals just got so much more (safe and) comfortable.

The kids are sitting in their Stokke Tripp Trapp Highchairs that we LOVE and generously received as gifts from friends.

Living a Full Life

Hello, October. That was an unexpected break…

When people ask me about the transition from one to two kids I always reply the same way, “Life felt completely full before. Now it’s just full with a different ratio of things.”

Since we began really homeschooling last month, this has been particularly true. Every moment is full. (With little time to blog!)

We recently said goodbye to the butterfly life cycle to focus instead on ‘leaves and seeds,’ a perfect theme for autumn, don’t you think?

We’re busy setting up our fall nature table, gathering leaves and seeds for art projects and identification, preparing for a leaf scavenger hunt, writing our own tree field guide, creating leaf symmetry math activities, and more.

Then add our other activities to the mix: dance class, homeschool class work (math, social studies, and language arts), abstract painting projects, cooking meals from scratch, chasing after a newly crawling baby who’s getting into everything, hosting friends and family visitors, acting out a kids adaptation of Twelfth Night, maxing out our library cards with mysteries like Harriet the Spy and grown-up books like How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, visiting friends who moved away, committing myself to a regular yoga practice and early morning runs, laundry, diaper changes, breastfeeding, play dates, birthday parties, life! The list goes on and on…

Yet I don’t feel particularly overwhelmed, just tired and joyful. Maybe it’s because we’re enjoying every activity, each moment during this busy time. Maybe it’s because I wanted this life so badly and it feels so right.

Sometimes I feel tempted to add caffeine to my diet to tackle that never-ending to-do list that is life, but instead I think we’ll just have a pajama day (when we need to do laundry) or eat popcorn for dinner (when I’m too tired to prepare food) and savor this precious time with my family because time is fleeting.

Every minute is full.

Nevertheless I’m going to try to blog more regularly because I have so much to share with you and want to continue to document our everyday life. This space and my friendships with you bring me such joy too.

Fantastic Butterfly Life Cycle Books for Kids

This past month we’ve had so much fun learning about the butterfly life cycle!

We’ve raised and observed different types of butterflies, deconstructed a beloved classic, and read our way through dozens of butterfly books.

Here are some of our favorites:

Featured above:
Are You a Butterfly? prompts the reader to imagine themselves as a butterfly as it transforms from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

A Butterfly Is Patient with stunning watercolor illustrations and fascinating scientific tidbits.

Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian (above) presents a historical perspective from the Middle Ages, telling the true story of a young girl who carefully observed and documented the butterfly life cycle, thereby disproving the commonly held belief that insects were evil, created from mud in a process called spontaneous generation. What a fantastic female role model for little scientists!

From Caterpillar to Butterfly presents a story that any kid who raises butterflies at school or home can relate to: the joy at watching metamorphosis unfold firsthand in a classroom setting.

Nic Bishop: Butterflies and Moths featuring fantastic, up-close photographs of a number of different butterfly and moth species as they undergo metamorphosis.
(We also love his Scholastic Reader Level 2: Butterflies book (above) featuring many of the same photographs but written for younger readers!)

The Life Cycles of Butterflies: From Egg to Maturity, a Visual Guide to 23 Common Garden Butterflies (above) is the ULTIMATE butterfly reference book full of detailed information, stunning photos, and useful factoids about the life stages of 23 frequently seen butterflies. This book provided to be the most valuable resource in our comparison of different eggs, caterpillars, chrysalises, and butterflies. Check it out!

Other butterfly life cycle books and guides that we enjoyed include:
– Butterflies and Moths (Golden Guide)
– Waiting for Wings
– Monarch Butterfly of Aster Way – a Smithsonian’s Backyard Book
– National Geographic Readers: Great Migrations Butterflies
– Butterfly & Moth (Eyewitness Books)
– Butterfly Story
– Creepy, Crawly Caterpillars
– Butterflies in the Garden
– A Butterfly’s Life (Science Slam: Animal Diaries: Life Cycles)
– Miss Hallberg’s Butterfly Garden