This is way better than those texture books, look at that serious experimenting going on! 
We were talking about the names of different kinds of fruit and what the differences were, which led to a contemplation of smooth and fuzzy. Apparently your cheeks are the appropriate measuring devices for smooth and fuzzy. Please try this at home!
The verdict for this snack time was fuzzy got eaten. We did not do comparative taste tests. 
Or maybe it’s just me? Before I had children, I was fine with your generic alphabet book. But then I had children, and I started reading about the Montessori way of teaching literacy, by calling the letters by their primary phonetic sound rather than their name, which leads much more naturally to reading, which lead to me trying to figure out exactly how you were supposed to pronounce short ‘o’, and learning about how words that start with the letter ‘a’ are actually pronounced using 50 bajillion different phonemes, and learning about some other pronunciation discipline that I can’t even remember now because I had a second child in the interim, and there goes my brain.
But anyway, I had this book, that I really liked, the vowels were all great, (and it has neat indentations for tracing the letters with your fingers, almost as good as sandpaper letters), but every time I got to ‘X’ I got really irritated. ‘X’ does not say ‘zzz’ (xylophone), it says ‘kss’! (I finally figured out why people write ‘x’ for kiss!) Don’t get mad get even! Or better yet, just fix the darn thing. There pretty much aren’t any ‘x’ words that start with the proper phoneme, so you just have to go with ox or ax and emphasize the trailing phoneme rather than the leading one. Personally I think that’s better than the ‘correct’ phoneme being no where in the word. Sure ‘x’ says ‘zzz’ sometimes, but most of the time when you come across it in a CVC type word it is going to be saying ‘kss’. End of rant. FOR THE MOMENT!
I haven’t been getting enough sleep, which means my life starts falling apart and I start throwing mommy tantrums. Usually I’m pretty good at avoiding those. Must get more sleep… We’ll see how the weekend goes.
So anyway, here are some fun things we’ve done over the last several months that I never got around to blogging about.
We’ve done fishing with paper fish with paperclips and magnets-on-a-string, but this is much cooler. Valerie over at Frugal Family Fun made her fish out of pipe cleaners, which makes them easy, cute, and their whole bodies are ferromagnetic! (I had to look that term up… ferromagnetic materials are the ones that are strongly attracted by magnets and can be magnetized. Now we know.) Since the pipe cleaner fuzz keeps the magnet from directly contacting the wire you need a relatively strong magnet to put on the end of your string to go fishing. We cut our pipe cleaners up into different lengths, and made lots of fish! Now they are living in a fish patterned tea tin on our game shelf.
Here we made a stamp pad out of felt and wet it with acrylic craft paint. Then we stamped Totoro and Hello Kitty all over a pair of pants that were already in sad sad shape. Be sure to clean your stamps promptly afterwards or the acrylic paint will gum them up. Acrylic craft paint is great for painting clothes, you don’t really need fabric paint. This activity is an easy way for little kids to personalize their clothes by themselves. Getting out the letter stamps would be fun too.
Play dough with your feet. Why should hands get to have all the fun? This is home made glitter play dough. More sparkles is better. Rebecca had fun kneading the sparkles in. That may have been where we started using feet, I can’t remember!
If you get a box in the mail and it is full of bubble wrap, put it in the driveway! It is super fun to zoom over. Then you can revert to the traditional mad stomping dance to pop the rest of the bubbles. At our preschool they buy a big roll of bubble pop just so the kids can do this once. The environmentalist in me cries, but the kids loved it.
You can tell I’m tired from the preponderance of short declarative sentences. I’ll go work on that sleep thing now.
While we were in Vermont one of our favorite haunts on Nenny and D.Pa’s property was Hemlock Brook. On one walk there we counted twenty eight Salamanders. And Rebecca had to touch each and every one. Some of them ran away, but she got her finger on most of them. They are poisonous, so they tend to hold still and say “Hey, I’m red. It would be a really bad idea to eat me, right? Right? You know that, right?” Near the end of our visit we researched the salamanders, made a terrarium, and kept one to watch for a day before setting it loose again.
Hemlock Brook is a lovely place, with enough water to make pools to splash around in, although not big enough to swim in, lots of big rocks and sticks to move around, diverting the water, making damns, deepening pools, mucking around in the mud. Lots of wonderful moss covered fallen logs to sit and walk on too, and little waterfalls and tunnels. I really wish we could have brought it home with us. The water around us in the South SF Bay Area isn’t nearly as clean, many of the streams are contaminated by mercury from natural sources and mining in the coastal mountains. Ick.
Penelope’s favorite thing to do at Hemlock Brook was eat mud. In case you were wondering, and I know I was, the brook gets it’s name from Hemlock the tree, not Hemlock the poisonous shrub. No relation. But still, my husband and I have an ongoing debate, how much mud should you let your children eat? How much mud do you let your children eat?
Sometimes you just need to take two things that you like to play with and put them together. Like rocks and blocks. This time it was water and LEGOs. Take one large plastic storage container filled with water, some LEGOs, and mix. Or the bathtub. LEGOs are great with water, because when you snap them together they capture air, which makes them buoyant. Rebecca and her friend Samuel did need to do some experimenting with base size vs height though, Rebecca’s first attempt at a boat was three times as high as it was wide, so it tipped right over which she found very concerning!
After the LEGOs, all sorts of things ended up in the water. This is a boat too, can you see the passenger?
We are in Vermont visiting Nenny & D-Pa, my inlaws. D-Pa sells gorgeous hand turned wooden bowls at the Woodstock Farmer’s Market, and he loaned the front corner of his tent to Rebecca, to sell a handful of lavender dolls and lavender wands. She helped make them, although not really enough, since we only had that morning to make them and I was experimenting with the process anyway. But she did sell them herself! This picture is from just after we set up, and she is feeling shy. D-Pa gave her some selling advice, like, oh, smile, would you? Heh. She did let people take her picture holding the doll when they bought it, which for her is an enormous concession. I was surprised, but she’s growing up! She knew she needed to do it for the customer. I’m glad I remembered to have her put on a clean shirt!
She sold all three of the lavender dolls, and two of the three lavender wands. I was SO glad that someone bought the lavender doll that she had drawn the face on. It was really more of a scribble than a face. Although, actually, she might have been just as happy to take it home to play with. I don’t think she has any concerns that people might not like her faces, and in her mind perhaps they are just as nice as the ones I draw. So now I have to figure out if I should help her learn how to draw ‘nicer’ faces on her small wooden beads, or if that would just make her feel like she couldn’t do it. Tricky tricky, she’s really sensitive about being corrected. We’ll be here for another 3 markets, so we’ll see if she even wants to make something for next week.
After the market we went to the drug store and she bought a stretchy plastic duck. And I thought, sure, I’m teaching her about making and selling things, and natural rewards for working, but why oh why does she have to have such different taste in toys than I do? Sigh. I’m sure my mother wondered the same thing.
Things to work on:
Rebecca doing most of the making, even if they don’t look as nice.
Teaching Rebecca about giving change… young 4 may not be old enough for this, but we should try some play-acting. She could just ask how much money she needed to give back.
Getting her a money board to clip her bills on to help with figuring out change, or just a wallet to collect it in.
Does anyone want a tutorial about how to make lavender dolls? You can find the lavender wands over at 5 Orange Potatoes, although we skipped the ribbon this time, so they aren’t very practical, really.
Scatter brained crafty mama. I craft with a little bit of everything, during those precious nap time minutes.
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