One Inch World

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.

Merry Christmas from Vermont, (vacationing with the in-laws, much more satisfying than California!)

We had our sort-of annual gingerbread house making party yesterday, and it was a lot of fun. This year I skipped the nervous breakdown inducing making of 50 billion slabs of gingerbread, and we all used graham crackers. They work better than 3/8″ thick slabs of gingerbread anyway, they aren’t as heavy, although they don’t taste as good. I tried calling a local bakery, but they laughed at me. Someone mentioned they sold slabs at Nobb Hill, so maybe I’ll try that next year.

Anyway, there was plenty of candy and icing and graham crackers, and at least 10 houses constructed. My best friend and I collaborated on Donaldson Castle, complete with body hanging from the ramparts…

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

Finally finally finally I have a pattern in my Etsy store. Now of course I need to start another one! But the ice is broken and I’m getting my toes wet, or frozen, or something!

Now I have to go do one of those sidebar widgety things…

I have been trying to find time to post this all week! Oy!

I finished my halloween candy hiding witch ball, and I like it. The red imp is coming along too. If you stick a rectangular mini-candy bar the wrapper sticks out her mouth, but I’ve decided that’s just fine. I think the square ones will fit in better, but I don’t have any, and I’m not buying any candy to see or I will eat it!

Since we had a witch finished we worked on /w/ activities. Over two separate days actually, and I still never got to making a big W sheet for our alphabet binder. Rebecca didn’t want to, so we’ll just move on without it. W-whatever.

We wrote W’s with soap on the mirror, then w-washed them off.

We did some w-walrus walking (on your arms, dragging your legs like a tail), and some w-wheelbarrow walking (on your arms with mom holding up your feet).

We w-wiped plant leaves with water to clean the dust off. We didn’t stick with this for very long!

We worked with wire and wire cutters to make a wire sculpture in a styrofoam block, wrapping (not /w/) them around markers and pencils to make twisty springs.

We got our DickBlick order, (yay new paint!) so we got to spray liquid watercolors on paper. Also, duh, “cleans up with water” does NOT mean washable! It means you can clean your brushes with soap and water, you don’t need mineral spirits or turpentine. That was for our tempera paint, now I’m going to have to figure out whether I can make it washable with some kind of soap or not. But, the colors are MUCH nicer, and the washable paint has turned many of her shirts into ‘art shirts’ anyway, so maybe we’ve just graduated to student tempera.

Rebecca drew W’s to make w-waves using w-white crayon on blue paper, and we did a couple ‘w’ worksheets.

Also this was our first week of co-op preschool, crazy times! I think it’s going to be great.

I was going to say the letter B, but that would be counter to the way we’ve been working on things. Sometimes I still slip up with the whole phonetic letters vs letter names thing even though I’ve been working on it for at least a year now.

I’ve been feeling like I’ve been falling down with Rebecca’s homeschool activities, and I decided that I would have a much easier time thinking of activities to offer her (our homeschool is strictly voluntary and fun since she’s only 3) if I had a theme to guide me. So today we’ve been focusing on /b/.

Coincidentally I finished making a Bat Ball last night. I want to make a bunch of these little ball monsters with mouths to fill with candy to have a monster hunt, like an easter egg hunt, for Halloween. And if I get them done fast enough then maybe they’ll be my first Etsy pattern. We’ll see if I can get them done by the end of September.

So the first activity of the day was throwing the bat ball around. It’s being quite vigorously play tested.

Then we made a big B and little b out of beans, from Apples and Jammies via ABC and 123. Rebecca is working on her lower case letters first, so I did the capital B and she did the lower case, because she wanted to work together.

After the fine motor skills we went outside for some running on a very large small ‘b’, drew lots of chalk pictures of things that start with /b/,

and examined our blue feet.

Then we did some number work, counting and lining up our counting b-bean b-bags, and walking on the resulting number b-balance b-beam and counting up and down.

Then we did some ‘b’ worksheets from some alphabet workbooks we have, and made an alphabet binder to collect work in. Rebecca enjoyed snapping the rings open and shut, and using the three-hole-punch.

For snack we ate blueberries,

and played with the /b/ miniatures from the phonics miniatures that we’ve been collecting.

What a b-ful morning! Luckily /b/ is a really easy phoneme to do this with, because I didn’t do any planning, I know some of the phonemes are going to be much harder!

Maybe I should suggest lacing b-beads next? Next phoneme up I think is going to be /w/. I’ll get to work on the witch ball.