A Piece of Chalk

We recently read A Piece of Chalk by Jennifer A. Ericsson. It is a simple story about a girl who has a new box of chalk and draws what she sees around her in her driveway. C and R both enjoyed the simplicity of the story, and they loved the way the illustrations unfold.

They want some sort of project with almost every book we read right now, and this one was easy. We went out to the driveway and made our own chalk drawings. I traced both of them with chalk and let them fill in the details.

C was very proud of his chalk rainbow.

We also brought our chalk inside for a few projects.

Our first indoor chalk project was starch chalk. You dip the end of the chalk into a cup of liquid starch and draw with the chalk on paper. Continue dipping and drawing and let dry. The starch enhances the brightness of the chalk and helps resist smudging. I was impressed that a day later the chalk still did not smudge at all and the colors are much brighter than this picture shows.

We also crushed a few small pieces of chalk and mixed it with water to make paint.

Last, we wet shaped sponges and colored them with chalk. Then we pressed the sponges onto paper to make a chalk print. I didn't get a good picture of this because C and R did not really care for this activity. It was hard for them to get enough chalk on the sponges to make a good print.

I recently saw a recipe to make your own chalk paint for outside. We will have to try that someday.

In conclusion, the book was a nice read and we had fun playing with chalk.

Easter eggs

These Easter eggs are really easy to make.
1. Cut egg shapes out of cardboard (we used cereal boxes),
2. Cover the "eggs" with aluminum foil,
3. Paint the eggs, and
4. While the paint is still wet, use a stick (we used popsicle sticks) to scratch designs on the eggs.
R made this egg (pink and purple, of course)
T made this egg (he doesn't usually participate in our crafts because he
is almost 12 and a little too cool for crafts, but he liked this one)

C made this egg

Texture Collage

I got the idea for a texture collage from Chasing Cheerios. I taped a piece of contact paper on our sliding glass door and provided C and R with a bunch of different materials to place on the sticky paper. They used pom poms, feathers, sequins, craft sticks, and pieces of paper they punched out in different shapes.
They had a lot of fun with this project.

When they finished, I covered it with another piece of contact paper to preserve their work of art. It made a beautiful sun catcher!

Unplugged project: Words

I have been reading Unplug Your Kids and following the unplugged projects of other people for a few months now, but this is our first time participating. My sister, the amazing children's librarian, gave us the idea for this project.




C and I read Max's Words by Kate Banks. We both enjoyed this book. Max has two brothers; one brother collects stamps and the other collects coins. Max wanted to collect something too, and decided to collect words. He cut words out of magazines and newspapers. Max realizes that it doesn't matter how his brothers' collections are arranged, but words can be arranged to create stories. Even his brothers want to create stories with Max's words. The illustrations in this book are great. For example, the word "hungry" has a bite taken out of it! Max's Words is already a favorite in our house.



So, we had to cut out some words of our own. I did most of the cutting because C is four and doesn't quite understand where one word ends and the next begins. I did not know this until we started cutting out words. It actually surprised me because he is reading small words and Bob books and I just assumed that he understood the relationship of words to sentences. I did read words to him and let him tell me which words to cut.








Then we worked together to write a story. We talked about how words make up sentences and sentences make up stories.





C's story: The Superhero got ready for great battling. A perfect idea came to him. He was going to fight the alligator monster. A green car smashed into the monster and flattened him like a pizza. "Excellent job," said the hero and he went on a fun Disney vacation.



The ideas for this story all came from C. I simply helped him arrange the words to create a story. I wrote in some words when we didn't have it in our pile.

C then used his stencils to illustrate his story.

This is the final product. We will definitely try this again. C enjoyed using the cut out words to create a story.

We will definitely participate in the Unplugged Project again too!

Tot school

I never think I have anything to post for Tot School until I look at my photos from the week. This week went by so fast. I had a lot more planned, but it didn't happen.



R had fun counting with m&ms while we read The m&ms Counting Book by Barbara Barbieri McGrath. Check out my post about this book. I'm not sure this qualifies as Tot school, but R had her first haircut this week and she did so well. I can't believe she passed on the shampoo and scalp massage though; I so enjoy a good scalp massage.

We bought this neat map that holds state quarters. Someday I will post about my obsession with teaching my children geography. Let's just say that I am geographically challenged (thank you public schools) and I want my children to be more knowledgeable about the world. R was not very interested in looking at the different quarters, but she did enjoy putting the quarters in the map. She was also very proud of herself for remembering the names of the states. We had four different state quarters this week.

We went to the zoo this week and R laughed hysterically watching the otters play. I have to find a good book about otters (fiction or nonfiction - suggestions are welcome!) because my children always enjoy watching the otters.

We read Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews and used black pom poms to count the different objects in the book. Check out that post too!

Is there a better way to end the week than with homemade chocolate chip cookies? Would you feel the same way if I told you that C and R licked those spoons and then put them back in the bowl? I tried to prevent that, really I did.

Thank you, Carisa, for hosting Tot School!

Ten Black Dots

C and R had a lot of fun with Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews. This book is great counting practice. We used black pom poms to count along with the items in the book. C and R also enjoyed playing with the dots and making their own creations. I put this book in a large ziploc bag with the pom poms so they can work on counting and creating independently.

Noah's Ark

C loves the story of Noah's ark. We recently found some Noah's Ark foam stickers at A.C. Moore. C was very excited to create his interpretation. The yellow marks at the top of the page are lightning, the black dots are hail (he insists there was hail), and the blue lines are rain. Notice the tree on the right side of the paper; he said that a tree was lifted up out of the ground during the storm and landed on the ark. He has quite the imagination.