30 Days of Hands on Play Challenge: 26-28... I think

I meant for us to complete our activities this week, but alas, it hasn't happened. We did 3 days worth of planned activities and one day of impromptu activity.

Monday our activity was: make prints with household objects. We went around and gathered several toys and kitchen utensils and brought them to the table. It was then that I realized we had no tempera paint in the house... I grabbed a few bottles of acrylic paint and just decided to deal with the messy clean up. Will got to paint in just a diaper because I wasn't willing to deal with THAT much mess. :)



The kids had a blast dipping the toys in the paint and then making prints on their paper. They each covered several sheets of paper with paint and only stopped because I made them so we could eat dinner. Clean up was a pain, but I remembered to buy tempera paint when we were at Michael's on Wednesday!

Tuesday was our impromptu day. The girls were busy coloring in coloring books and I was about the join them when Will woke up from his nap. We decided to just color that day instead of doing the planned activity.

Wednesday we role played. We pulled out the kitchen toys and cash register and did some shopping and cooking. The kids had fun dressing up in their aprons and pretending to make food. Addy made a tomato and chocolate soup for me and Ellie made vanilla pudding.



Yesterday's activity was to play with a box. There is an activity in a Sesame Street craft book Ellie has to make animal (or monster) feet out of Kleenex boxes. We had finally saved 4 boxes so we decided it was time to make the feet. I pulled out our new paint (which turned out to be finger paint so it wasn't as opaque as I had hoped, but worked anyway) and we went to work painting Elmo and Grover feet. Will painted the box a little, but Ellie ended up finishing it while Will occupied himself with painting the table cloth (why didn't I use the table cloth on Monday with the acrylic paint?? I don't know...).




We let the boxes dry and today the kids had fun walking around in them. Oh and Will eventually did get around to playing with a box...

Ok, next week we WILL finish this!

Valentine #3- Sketch Saturday

I used the current sketch at Sketch Saturday for this card. I used my Cricut to cut out the hearts (Doodlecharms), circles and scalloped circle (Cricut Classic Font). After I stamped the bear on the large circle I felt like the circle needed more so I used some swirl stamps around the edges to add some interest. To color the bear, I used watercolor pencils and a water pen. Finally, for the sentiment, I stamped the words in white ink and then used a dry paintbrush to brush some shimmery powder over the wet ink.


Have a Happy Valentine's Day!!

Valentine #2- Cooking with Cricut and Unscripted Sketches

Here is another Valentine I made for some challenges:

The Cooking With Cricut challenge for this week is to make a Valentine using black and a brad. I used the Storybook cartridge for the heart o this card.

I also used the current sketch at Unscripted Sketches for this card:

Mojo Monday- Valentine

I have been busy making a few Valentines. I normally don't make Valentines, but I have 18 month photos of Will that need to be sent to family so I figured this would be a good time to send them out. I used this week's Mojo Monday sketch for this one:



I used my Cricut for the hearts (Doodlecharms), bracket paper and envelope (Sentimentals).

30 Days of Hands on Play Challenge: 23-25

The kids went to stay with Grandpa and Grandma yesterday, so we just had 3 days of activities this week. We will be completing the challenge next week, I can't believe it!

Monday's activity was: go on a hunt. I used some robot blocks as our item to hunt for. I started by having the kids hang out in one of the bedrooms while I hid the robots around the living room and dining room. I tried to hide some in more obvious places than others so Will could have a chance to find some. He did find a couple, with help, but I'm not sure he really understood the concept and he lost interest quickly. After they found all of the robots, Addy, and then Ellie took turns hiding the robots.


The girls really had fun with this. For the last couple of rounds, I was working on dinner and the girls were just playing so they weren't keeping track of how many robots were hidden so they were all found and we were finding robots in random spots for a few days. :)

On Tuesday, our activity was play with junk. I cleaned out the kids' sock drawers that morning and recalled that when I was a nanny about 10 years ago, I had done a project with the kids where we made snakes out of old pantyhose. I had several pairs of tights from the girls' drawers that were stained and pilly so I decided to do this project. The kids stuffed their snakes with mismatched socks and an old magazine. Once the snakes were stuffed, I tied a knot in the end and the kids decorated them with felt scraps.


If you are interested in doing this with your kids and need some tights, let me know. I had a few extra pairs of tights and would happily get them to you!

Finally, on Wednesday, we did small world play. I had heard about using masking to make roads on the carpet a while back and I used this opportunity to try it out. We got out some toy cars and animals and drove around on the roads and did a little problem solving when there was an animal blocking the road.



I think the kids had the most fun, however, when we pulled up the tape and they played with the balls of tape!

Layout Tag

I participated in a Layout Tag/ Chinese Whispers last month on the Club CK message board. The idea is that the first person uses a sketch to create a layout, then passes on their layout to the next person on the list, they make a layout using the previous person's layout as inspiration and then pass their layout on as inspiration, and so on. This time I was the 4th person in a 5 person chain. Here is my layout:


You can see the whole chain here. The original sketch featured a large circle element, but the person before me had eliminated it. I unknowingly added it back in when I decided to use the large sun paper. I initially didn't have it as part of my design, but upon remembering I had it, added it to the layout because I felt that the colors and shape fit the colors and theme of my page.

In other news, my "Chef Addy" layout is one of several layouts featured today on Practical Scrappers featuring "A Touch of Black."

30 Days of Hands on Play Challenge: 22+

On Thursday our activity was: do an investigation. This was a bit of a challenge. I had to come up with something to investigate that would appeal to a 5-year-old, 3-year-old, and an 18-month-old. We decided to explore sinking and floating in water. I put some water into a tub and had the kids gather several items from around the house that could get wet. We dropped them in one at a time, making a guess (and talking about the word "hypothesis") as to whether it would sink or float. Then I tried to explain to them a little bit about density. We also tried putting 2 items together to see if they would sink or float.


The kids had a lot of fun with this activity. Every time we ran out of items, Addy would ask if she could go get some more. We ended up with quite a few items in the tub, but it was fun!!

On Friday, we did our own activity: decorate masks. This one came from a request from a friend. My friend Sarah and her husband own and run a theatre and she had asked if we would be interested in helping make some props for their upcoming show. She needed paper masks that looked like they had been colored by children. I jumped at the chance to help and give my children a fun activity at the same time. This activity ended up having our participation split as I did all the prep work; drawing and cutting out the masks, and the kids did the coloring later.


They had a lot of fun and they turned out pretty cool!