Hello!

We have moved, but we are still getting organized. In the meantime, for those of you who wanted to see that photo of my sister and I when we were kids, click here for the updated post.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all enjoy this day with your families. We will be moving over the next few days so hopefully I will have some time to blog soon. Have a wonderful day!

An Art Lesson

We have had a set of oil pastel crayons in our art supply drawer for months and no one ever wanted to use them. Last week, however, C spotted them and told me he used them in school. He wanted to present an art lesson to R and me. I was very excited!

He told us to color whatever we wanted on our paper using the oil pastels.

C drew himself wearing a Wolverine costume with a trick or treat bag. He also drew the moon and stars in the sky.
R drew a lot of colorful scribbles. She said it was a monster. I wonder where she would get that idea.

I drew an Autumn tree.
C then directed us to use watercolors to paint over our drawings.

Here are the finished projects:

I have wanted to try resist painting with C and R for the longest time and it just never happened. This lesson was great for all of us. I wish you could have heard how well C presented the lesson to us. I was very impressed. We are all looking forward to more art lessons!

The Mayflower

Do you remember the pilgrims that C and R made? We made them a boat to sail to the new land.

I cut out one side of an empty, clean eggnog carton.

Together, we wrapped the carton in brown craft paper. You could also use a brown paper bag.


To make the sails, we taped two craft sticks together and taped white paper sails back to back around the sticks. We also taped small triangle flags to the top of the craft sticks.

We placed two mounds of clay inside the boat and stuck the craft sticks in them so they would stand straight.

Here are the pilgrims on the Mayflower:

We are almost ready for Thanksgiving!

Santa Turkey

C drew this turkey wearing a Santa hat. I love it.

No Turkey Here, Really!

C had to do this project for school, and I think it would be a great activity for the kids' table on Thanksgiving. He brought home a very basic, easy to draw picture of a turkey that he had to disguise. The turkey is hoping that his disguise will prevent him from becoming the main course at Thanksgiving dinner.

C used markers to disguise his turkey as Wolverine.

If you draw a simple turkey like the one above, you could provide the kids with a variety of art supplies (markers, glitter glue, stickers, pom poms, etc.) to disguise their turkeys. I can picture turkeys disguised as princesses, cartoon characters, soldiers, cowboys, etc. The possibilities are endless!

If you decide to do this, I would love to see your turkeys in disguise!

We are packing!

Slowly, but surely we are getting ready for our move. The big day is quickly approaching. R decided that our boring brown boxes needed some color and decoration.

All moving boxes should have happy faces on them!

Hand Print Turkeys

We really love the book, Setting the Turkeys Free by W. Nikola-Lisa. In the story, a young boy makes hand print turkeys and decorates them with paper, sequins, toothpicks, feathers, and more. He loves the turkeys and they take on a life of their own. So, what will happen when Foxy the fox comes around? Don't worry, this boy has a plan to protect his turkeys.

How can you read this book and not make hand print turkeys? C and R made hand print turkeys using Crayola Air Dry Clay. I traced their hands on paper and then traced the hand prints onto the clay.

Once the clay hand prints were dry, they painted them to look like turkeys.

We added a little glitter, some jewels, a googly eye, and a foam beak.

Our turkeys are pretty fancy!

Scarecrows

I got the idea for these scarecrow cookies from Family Fun. I changed a few of the ingredients based on what I had in the house. I put white frosting on the back of sugar cookies. The eyes are m&m's, the nose is a candy corn, and the mouth is chocolate jimmies (or maybe you call them sprinkles in your part of the world). The hair is Cinnamon Life cereal and the hat is half of a sugar wafer with a whole sugar wafer on top of it with a dot of frosting. I made the little pumpkin decoration with icing to show that our scarecrows guard the pumpkin patch. Aren't they cute?

C and R enjoyed these cookies after we read a few of our favorite scarecrow books:

The Little Scarecrow Boy by Margaret Wise Brown,

The Scarecrow's Hat by Ken Brown, and

Scarecrow Pete by Mark Kimball Moulton.
We really enjoyed these books. Look for them at your local library.

Birthday Treats

Last week we celebrated Kelly's first birthday with some homemade doggy treats. This recipe from The Ultimate Book of Kid Concoctions is so easy.

Ingredients: 2 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 cup corn meal (Thanks Papa and Grandma for the corn meal!)
1/2 cup parmesan cheese
1 egg
1 cup water

Directions: Mix together all ingredients except 1/4 cup parmesan cheese. You can use cookie cutters to make different shapes, but we just made sticks. Roll your shapes in the remaining parmesan cheese and place on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Store in an airtight container.

Offer one to your doggy!

If you get this response, you know the treats were thoroughly appreciated!

Kelly wants to thank all of you for the birthday wishes you left for her in the comments section last week. You helped to make her birthday extra special.

A Drawing by C

I love this drawing by C. He told me he was drawing things from the Bible. In case you didn't know, that is God looking down on all that he created.

Turkeys in the Mail!

My children love getting mail, especially when the mail is a surprise package that includes everything necessary to make some fun and easy turkeys! Thank you Susana, you hit a home run with this one!

Here is R's turkey:

This one was made by C:

If you want to make your own turkey, visit Susana for complete directions.

Thanksgiving by C

C wanted to help retell the story of the first Thanksgiving, but instead of drawing and painting faces like R did, he decided to print out pictures of Native Americans and Pilgrims and color them. We found the images at Enchanted Learning.

After this, he was inspired to do some drawing:

A Native American

The MayflowerA Turkey

We are just about ready to retell the story of the first Thanksgiving; we are just waiting on the harvest.

Pilgrims

We now have a Pilgrim man and Pilgrim woman to join the Native Americans made by R. Aren't they cute? I just drew the outlines, she colored them, and we cut them and glued them on craft sticks.

Guess Who is One Today

Today is Kelly's first birthday and I could not resist posting some adorable photos.

Happy Birthday Kelly!