One Inch World

Look at that absorbed concentration! Present your child with some halved avocados, a spoon, a bowl, a masher, and an open jar of salsa and they can make guacamole for dinner for you. Or at least start it. Important and appreciated work for the family. Also great fine motor work and strengthening with all that scooping.

Notice the haircut? That was a christmas morning present. She’s been wanting that consistently for quite a while, and now that it’s done I like it too, surprisingly enough! (I’m firmly in the long hair camp myself.) She slouched quite a lot when I was cutting off her ponytail, when it was off and she straightened up I was rather shocked at how short she had managed to get it without my noticing! Chin length in front, but up above her hairline in back. And so she ended up with a reverse bob, because that was what happened, and it was practically instantly exactly the haircut that she should have had, no getting used to it period, no who’s child are you? And I would have had no idea how to get there if it hadn’t happened by accident!

We needed something to do, so we made this clothes line out of a pipe cleaner and some cardboard triangles, and some paper clothes to hang up. I cut out the clothes and Rebecca drew on them, then hung them on the clothes line with mini clothes pins. To get the clothes line to stay up we had to put some rocks in the cardboard triangles, maybe someone has a better idea for how to make a clothes line? This one is pretty simple.

Today, through Kiva.org, I loaned $50 to a sweet maker in Mexico. Join me in my December drive to give a helping hand to people in poverty.

We like playing with Gak. We make the borax and glue kind, which is kind of like silly putty, but ours is a little closer to the jello/snot end of the spectrum than putty. You can blow bubbles in it, break it, bounce it, stretch it, let it drip off the table… and apparently you can cut it with scissors. Not my idea…

Filling it with tinsel also wasn’t my idea… But I fully accept that it was very interesting. We could have made more, but I had more fun dripping it out of the tinsel.

Here is the recipe we use, we got it from the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose:
1. Mix 1 cup hot water and 1 1/2 tsp. of Borax until dissolved. Set aside.
2. Mix 2 cups of clear glue and 2 cups of warm water together in a plastic bowl. (We use 1 cup hot water and 1 cup of washable tempera paint for color, and a glass bowl.)
3. Using a metal spoon, slowly pour Borax mixture into glue mixture while stirring quickly. Stir until the mixture leaves the side of the bowl. Gak will be sticky.
4. Knead until Gak is not sticky. The more you work with it the easier it will be.

We leave ours on the kitchen counter (in a plastic container so it doesn’t dry out) for months. If you use washable tempera in the mixture eventually (after a couple months) it goes runny and you have to make more. If you just use water it eventually gets solid, or sticky, I can’t remember, our friend made it that way. But in anycase, it lasts a good long time, probably it will be full of dust and hair before it goes bad.

Gak is fun, but remember that Borax is a poison, you don’t want to inhale the powder, and you don’t want to eat it. So if you think your children might eat this I wouldn’t really recommend making it. We first played with it in the Discovery Museum’s under 5 room, so I’m not sure what to think.

Today, through Kiva.org, I loaned $25 to a woman in Tanzania to support her used clothing store. Join me in my December drive to give a helping hand to people in poverty.

There are so many games you can play with maps. This is a map of the San Francisco Zoo that I found and laminated when I was cleaning out my desk. I set it out for Rebecca with a marker, and when she wanted to play with it we started by circling where different animals lived in the zoo, then traced lines on the sidewalk from one animal to another, then traced some of the different colored dotted line tours, and then I think there was a bunch of scribbling. I’m pretty sure we did some other things too, but now I can’t remember! Just pretending your marker is a person and walking them around on the paths is great fine motor pen practice though. I have a map of Gilroy Gardens around here somewhere, I’ll need to get that out too. Of course that will raise the question of when we are going back again, hmm. But it’s a very colorful map! The tradeoffs of motherhood. Maybe I should just print out a Google map of our neighborhood, then we could take it with us on walks to the park, and trace how we got there.

There are a lot of fine motor activities going on around our house right now.

Here is Rebecca taking all the pins out of one of my pin cushions (is it a cute pin cushion, say a cupcake, that I made myself, no, it is a boring old standard tomato thing…) and sticking them all in a line in a block of styrofoam. She found the block of styrofoam, I gave her the pins, she created the activity. When she got tired of sticking the pins in a line we started stringing rubber bands on them to make an instrument. All because when she finds blocks of styrofoam I have to come up with something for her to do with them, otherwise they end up as a pile of styrofoam snow, which since I have a little bit of a plastic phobia I can’t stand! In this case the end was delayed, but not completely averted.

And here is Rebecca wiring up a breadboard to light an LED. You know, I’ve never ever wondered until just now why they were called breadboards, and I’ve been using the things for 20 years. Luckily I have the internet! Apparently early prototyping boards were often bread cutting boards with nails banged into them. Huh. I wonder if someone made that up? Anyway.

Since our house is blessed with plenty of electronic prototyping bits I thought it would be a fun fine motor activity to stick wires into a breadboard, and what to do other than light an LED? I colored on the breadboard first with permanent marker, trying to show by color which of the holes were connected to each other, then talked her through hooking up the resistor, LED, jumper wires and battery. We talked about how there needs to be a circle for electricity to flow, and if you break the circle by pulling out any of the wires the electricity will stop flowing. And we talked about how you can make yourself part of the current circle, and how that can hurt you. And of course even though it’s simple as pie the circuit didn’t work the first time, so we had to debug it with the multimeter, tracking it down to the battery not being all the way in the battery holder. Somewhere in the debugging we got out another resistor, so we also got to see how the LEDs got dimmer with a higher resistance resistor, and she also wanted to light both LEDs we had, so we talked about how they could both be part of the circle in parallel… But she’s three, really it was mostly motivation for supervised sticking of wires into little holes.