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.

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 modified this idea from Kohl’s ‘Science Arts’. Take two pieces of paper, and in between them stick colorful flowers and leaves.

Tape them down to the kitchen floor, and rub with the side of a crayon. This is both fun, and it lets you know where to bang in the next step. (Now when we do rubbings Rebecca talks about ‘finding’ things hidden under the paper.

Bang bang bang with a rubber mallet.

Peel the papers apart and see how the plant pigments have transfered to the paper.

We used our geranium (Pelargonium) hedge (yes we live in California where geraniums grow and flower in the dirt year round) and the colors were really lovely. The rose petals we tried weren’t so colorful, but they were from a lightly pigmented flower. (Yes, we also have roses flowering in front of our house in December. It gets a little boring frankly. I miss snow.)

The girls loved whacking the heck out of the plants with the rubber mallet, that’s why I suggest you use the kitchen floor and not a table you don’t want dented.

Also, have you seen Filth Wizardry’s Lego and hole punching card post? Combine paper crafts with LEGO blocks. Brilliant brilliant brilliant!

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.

Rebecca has a swing in her (smallish) bedroom. I’m not sure what this says about me, or my husband that he agreed to hang it there. Anyway! It is a very tippy swing, and has been great for her balance. The other day I suggested we stack blocks on it, it was great! It turned an easy block stacking exorcise into quite a challenging one. So, if you just happen to have a tippy Ikea swing in your bedroom… no, I thought not.

Also, see those little people? Big hit. I got some peggish people, thinking I would paint them, but it turns out the smallest, ‘1-1/8″ Baby – Little People‘, are the perfect size to go with European blocks that have a basic measurement of 4cm, like Plan blocks and HABA blocks. So now they are all living with Rebecca’s blocks, and I’m not going to paint them. I think it might be a good idea to stain them different colors, because Rebecca kept getting mad at me when I would loose track of which one was ‘her’. And I might give them eyes, but probably not, and I’m definitely not going to paint them to be different community characters, because they are so much more flexible this way.

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.