A Farmer and his Tractor

Another activity that E worked on this week was this tractor picture:

I got the idea from here, although I didn't use their printout (we don't have a working printer, so I didn't even look at it). I just cut out the shapes myself. It was good practice for E in identifying colours, shapes and sizes, as well as a little bit of counting. It was all pretty easy for her, though.

The farmer and speech bubbles were hand-drawn by me and were to reinforce our latest Latin lessons.

-Polly

R is for Robots

E came home from her latest trip to Scitech carrying a box. Inside was a build-your-own spider robot kit that her dad had bought for her. It was labelled for 10yrs+, but it's what she really wanted. E and her dad built it that same day. She's actually getting pretty good at following instructions and identifying parts.

Now she has fun watching it scuttle around the house.

Obviously E is a big fan of robots, so it was a logical choice for some letter R activities.

Here's a picture we did together some time ago (I did the drawing and E did the painting):

And more recently we did this 'Rory the robot' picture:

Again, I drew the robot and this time E decorated it with pieces of aluminium foil. This is part of a series we're doing to help remember letter sounds and identify letters in a sentence.

-Polly

Art on the Fridge

Do you have art on your fridge? Magnets? Photos? We usually keep the toddler-height area of our fridge door for alphabet and number magnets. The other day, E decided to decorate a little.

Here she re-purposed parts from her Easter chicks to make a new artwork, incorporating plenty of those magnets:

And here she displayed some collage/drawings she'd done earlier that morning:

And another that we drew together:

There was a time when all that was kept on our fridge door was perhaps a shopping list. It's so much more colourful now. :)

-Polly

Learning Letters

Here's just some of the activities that E has been doing lately to learn the alphabet and letter sounds.

We bought these flash cards a while ago and E loves them. Sometimes we'll play memory or other matching games. Sometimes she'll make up her own games. Sometimes we use them as a reference for other letter activities.

You may remember the alphabet drawings we did together last year (I shared some *here* and *here*). Over the last few weeks we have started a new series of alphabet pictures. First, E will paint dots on letters like these, although I have been drawing my own for her. When it's dry (usually the following day) I'll cut around the letters and we'll use them as part of a letter collage like this:

We collect pictures starting with the correct letter from catalogues (junk-mail is good for something) and draw and colour some more of our own. They're all cut out and collected together to make each collage and I write the words on little pieces of paper to be stuck on, too. We use A3 size paper, often that's already been painted, such as this one for the letter C that E painted using a carrot instead of a brush.

Another series that we have started is making animal pictures for each letter. Generally, I'll draw an outline of an animal and E will use some creative method to decorate it. So far we've done an alpaca with a cotton-wool fleece, a manatee with crepe-paper skin (and googly eyes), a tortoise with an egg-shell shell and a cockatoo made of paper pieces with a hand-print crest.

We'll then choose a name for our animal starting with the letter we're working on. I'll write it on a piece of paper to be displayed with the picture, writing the key letter (however many times it occurs) in a different colour for emphasis.

E has also been practising her pre-writing skills with her collection of dry-erase tracing books and had a go at using her finger to write letters in a sand-tray.

There's always her giant, foam alphabet floor puzzle and alphabet fridge magnets to play with, too.

-Polly

Making Faces

This is what E might do when asked to make a silly face:

Recently she was learning the names of body parts and when we got to the face, I made her this face puzzle to play with:

E has also been drawing faces lately, including portraits of myself and her dad, as well as this self-portrait on her chalkboard:

-Polly

Feelings

A while ago I discovered the tot packs at 1+1+1=1, so E had some fun with some of the "feelings" pack. We used the "How are we feeling?" game and the little book.

E collects this type of activity in her scrapbook, so we didn't use a file folder, but put the pieces in her book instead.

E also had fun posing with different expressions. I love her "thoughtful" look:

She then drew how she was feeling (happy, can you tell?) on a paper plate, which we also added to her scrapbook. She was a little disappointed that her "smile mouth" didn't look smiley enough.

So that was our little look at "feelings".

How are you feeling?

-Polly

Mud Puddles and Raindrops

Yesterday, we finally got a rainy day! Above is a picture of E wearing my old slippers to check out the mud puddles. Last Winter's gumboots are 2 sizes too small.

To take advantage of our first rainy day in what seems like forever, we did some 'rain drawings'.
We got out the washable markers and drew pictures onto ordinary copy paper.

We placed the pages one at a time onto a large tray and took them out into the rain.

Then we brought them back inside to dry,

And that's how we made our rain drawings.

There seems to be no more rain today, but the weather is slightly cooler and the sky is still overcast. We spent the morning in the backyard, E playing on her swings and slide, both of us simply enjoying some much-needed outside time.

-Polly

Scitech

Last weekend we went on one of our favourite day-trips, to Scitech. We go quite often, as we purchased yearly passes when we took E there for her birthday. It's very hands-on and E gets really into all the exhibits, especially those in "Discoverland". I never think to take a camera along to take any pictures. I don't know that E would stay still long enough to take any decent photos anyway. I can share with you this picture that a robot there drew of E:

The robot will usually draw your portrait, that is, only your face, and it's not always very detailed. For some reason (probably because she was standing on the chair where you're supposed to sit) the robot couldn't find E's face, so she got a full-length drawing including all the little dots on her dress. :)

-Polly

PS. I've started another little blog, along with Morgan of Maple Syrup Molgen, to showcase some of our kids' art. Here's the link for you to check it out: http://duckartblog.blogspot.com.au/

Drawing and Colouring

We have finished A-Z of our alphabet drawings and they are currently displayed on the outside of the kitchen island. I haven't come up with a new drawing project like that one, but E has been doing plenty of drawing and colouring of her own.

Here she is using crayons and an 'easel' (a large piece of MDF) to draw:

E got a Dora the Explorer drawing set for her birthday that included pencils, crayons, markers, paper, colouring pages, stickers... lots of things. She'll often get out this set and likes doing the colouring pages best:

I always loved drawing, even as a young child. It's fun (and a little nostalgic) to watch E do some of the same things.

-Polly

Shapes, Colours and Numbers

E's been having lots of fun and learning with her blackboard and chalk lately. She's also discovered KidsTV123 on Youtube. Here's some of the activities we've tried:

Shapes:

I drew some different shapes onto the board and had E identify them. We counted the sides together and spoke about each shape. I specified a colour to use and she tried tracing or colouring each shape, or she'd choose her own colour and name it.

E's favourite shapes song: "Shapes Song 2"

Numbers and colours:

We drew this fun little number rainbow and sang "10 Little Numbers," pointing to each number as it came up in the song. E can name all of these colours and numbers quite easily. Some more favourite numbers songs are "Numbers Song" and "The Big Numbers Song".

I wrote E's name onto the board so that she could trace it, and again so that she could attempt to copy it. She had a go at writing "Mum" and her dad's name, too.

Cleaning the blackboard can be as much fun as writing or drawing on it:

One more favourite song around here is "The Solar System Song".

-Polly

S is for Snake

The latest picture in our alphabet series is S for Snake. E still enjoys colouring these pictures and will remind me if we haven't done a new one in a while. On the day that we did our S for Snake picture, we did a lot of other snake themed activities, too.

Snakes are an easy shape to make, so anything could become a snake. Even our food was snakes. I saw this fruit snake online and wanted to try making one, but we had already eaten all of our strawberries. Here's our snake made from banana, peach and sultanas on a skewer and one that we made using a (soy) sausage with sauce and mustard:

I printed out the game sheet on this page and E played her first game of Snakes and Ladders. She hasn't really played any board games before. We played through once properly (E won) and after that E was more interested in experimenting with the counters (coins) and dice and tracing her finger up and down the snakes and ladders.

Another new activity for E was threading pasta 'beads'. I had previously coloured some left-over penne and left it to dry. We didn't have a large needle and the yarn we used was a little fuzzy, so E needed help threading the pasta. She did quite well for a first go and we turned her thread of pasta beads into a snake by gluing some googly eyes to one end of the 'snake'.

Having seen this super-easy origami snake online, I just had to make some. I ended up making three of them. I drew on some eyes with a blue marker and glued in little forked tongues. Originally only two of them had tongues, but E said that the tongue-less one wanted to be like his friends. E had great fun playing with these paper snakes and they're much hardier than some of the other paper toys that I've made.

The weather here is getting hotter and drier now, so maybe we'll see a real snake soon. Hopefully not hiding in all the straw mulch that we've just added to the garden.

-Polly

Happy Halloween

So, yesterday was Halloween. We don't do trick-or-treating or anything like that, but we had our own little Halloween fun.

I sewed together some "bat wings" for E to wear around the house, following these instructions (found via Pinterest) and using an old t-shirt for the fabric. She certainly wore herself out 'flying' around like a bat. We read "Going Batty", by Charles Reasoner, which has been a favourite board book for quite some time. E loved to act like the bat in the book by saying "Boo!" too all her toys and going upside-down.

It was surprisingly difficult to find Halloween stickers in the stores this year. There were plenty of generic costumes and horrible-looking candies, though. So that E could do a Halloween collage, I printed off a page of cute Halloween drawings (and drew a few of my own) and cut them out. Then E, armed with a glue-stick, stuck them onto some paper and added some details with coloured markers. She made two of these collages, one A4 size, the other A3.

I've seen these little hand-print ghosts done various times before. Yesterday we had a go at making our own. E loves painting and making hand-prints. We simply used white paint on black paper. When they were dry, we added some googly-eyes and they were done. So simple, but so cute.

While we had the paints out, E did some other paintings as well. I gave her some more colours to use and she painted using a combination of brushwork and finger or hand painting. The white-on-black for the ghosts worked really well, so I gave her a piece of red card to paint on using the white and that turned out really well, too. She still wasn't done with painting, so she did some (more colourful ones) on standard white paper, too.

Li'l Death

Earlier in the week, I had cut out some bat shapes from felt, thinking I'd make some bat-bunting or something. I never got around to finishing it, but E used the shapes and other felt scraps to make pictures on an un-cut piece of craft felt. I did make some Halloween-y paper toys. I made a little coffin (from here) which E liked filling with all kinds of treasures from gum-nuts to crayons to socks. I also made the "Li'l Death" from urban threads. Unfortunately our printer doesn't print in black, so I made a white and greyish grim reaper.

We definitely went for the 'cute' side of Halloween this year. E was a bit worried by the little witch (a trick-or-treater, not much bigger than E) who came to our house, but she soon realised that the witch and her similarly spooky friends were friendly witches and such. E gave them a smile and a wave goodbye.

-Polly

Jiggling Jellyfish

The letter 'J' is a very active letter... think 'jumping' and 'jiggling'. We certainly did a lot of jumping and jiggling as E was learning about the letter. Our picture is of a jellyfish in the shape of a 'J'.

The following weekend, we visited AQWA (Aquarium of Western Australia), where we could see some real jellyfish.

We got to see a lot of other interesting sea creatures, too. E loved the giant sting rays and the sea turtles. Here's some pictures of some other things we saw:

anemone

boxfish

lots of fish

octopus and corals

-Polly

Owl Fun

A short time ago, E was heading out with her dad to go visit a friend. I asked her which hat she would like to wear and she replied "Owl hat". The only problem was, she never had an "owl hat". After a short discussion ending with her telling us to "buy one!" she chose a different hat and was on her way. We didn't buy her an owl hat (and I have no idea where she got the idea from), but I did make her one the next day. She loves it and wears it nearly every day. She has a little skirt in the same fabric (the owls fabric, not the spotted one), but she hasn't worn them together yet. Actually, I made her a dress in the spotted fabric... I wonder if it still fits her.

I had planned on doing an owl-themed day with E in a few weeks' time (to give myself time to plan some activities), but her sudden new obsession with owls brought it forward a few weeks. It's a good thing that "owls" is another popular theme, as it was easy to find things to do.

It all started with E waking up one morning, walking over to my computer desk (I wasn't even at my computer at the time), pointing to the printer and saying "Owl". So... I did a quick google search and found a nice owl picture to colour in. She liked that I chose a picture with two owls. "One, two, one, two..."
Then I set about finding some more owl-themed things to try.

We found pictures of owls in some of E's animal books and we read "The Owl and the Pussycat". We 'flew' around the house saying "Whoo, hoo!" like an owl and made 'owl eyes' with our fingers. We drew pictures of owls on our blackboard and played with a little owl toy that I had made.

I found this owl mask and printed one. We got out E's bowl of crayons and coloured it together. The colours were all E's choice. I then cut it out and stuck it to a piece of cardboard to make it sturdier and cut holes to see through the eyes. We took it in turns holding it to our face and E still plays with it, days later.

After seeing these owl cupcakes on Almost Unschoolers, we had a go at making our own. We started by baking some vanilla cupcakes. When they were cool, we made some grey icing and iced them. I then broke open some cream biscuits and realised that they were way too big to stay on our little cupcakes. Oh well. The cupcakes were still yummy and we didn't need cream biscuits with them, anyway. We probably would have chosen a more appetising colour, though, if they weren't intended to be owls.

-Polly

Uses for a Blackboard

We finally got around to making a blackboard recently and it's had a lot of use over the last couple of weeks. All we needed was a sturdy piece of MDF, some blackboard paint and some chalk. Actually, we've had all of that stuff in the garage since last Summer, but only just got around to using it.

Now that we have the blackboard, we are finding so many uses for it. The most obvious is simply drawing on it. We can lean it up against a wall to stand and draw, or we can lay it flat on the floor. One day I drew circles all over it in pink, green, blue and purple, while E coloured them in. I was saying "circle", for E's benefit, and she kept replying "round dot". I guess "circle" is a bit hard to say, although she did give it a good attempt when she was showing our picture to her Daddy later in the day.

Another use for our new blackboard is hopscotch. I drew squares and numbered them and wrote "HOME" at one end. I don't think E had ever played hopscotch before, but she soon got the hang of jumping from one number to the next. It's such a fun little game that we can now play indoors as well as out.

We have also used our blackboard as a train-track for little toy trains by simply drawing some tracks with a piece of chalk. This idea could be used for any kind of scenery. I'm thinking... draw a river for boats or ducks, or draw roads for little cars and buses. We could draw fences around little toy houses or to mark paddocks for farms or enclosures at a zoo.

We could use it to draw mazes to trace with a finger or for a toy to 'walk' through. I could write little reminders or inspirational quotes or verses or rhymes that we'd like to remember... Once E is a bit older, she can use it to work out math problems or practice writing, just like we did at school.

For now, we've left it out for E to draw on any way she pleases. She also enjoys using a water sprayer to clean it. :)

Does anyone else have unconventional uses for a blackboard?

-Polly

Inside, Outside, Inside, Outside

E will run to the window to watch the rain.

"Rain! Rain!"

She will run to the door when it's dry again.

"Outside!"

She will gaze out the window to see the stars

"Stars!"

And ask Daddy to take her to see the moon.

"Moon!"

Between showers of rain we head out to the garden, in gumboots and hats. We have recently harvested some turnips and some eggplants and are constantly pulling leaves from the silverbeet, spinach, lettuces, rocket and parsley, to add to our meals. We had fresh lettuce with our lunch today. A bowl of store-bought lettuce is boring, yet a bowl of home-grown, fresh-picked lettuce is a treat. A week or so ago, I made a yummy soup using a lot of the coriander which is abundant in our herb garden. There's still plenty more.

Am I really that weird to like turnips and eggplants? I seem to be the only one around here who ever wants to eat them, unless they're hidden in a soup or something. E likes to play with them, though:

Silly eggplant nose!

We've been doing some more chalk drawing on loose pavers. The constant rain showers keep cleaning them for us, so we always have something to draw on. I've also been doing some more drawings for our picture alphabet. E was in the mood for colouring this morning, so I got a lot of help with the 'G', at least until the sun came out.

G is for grapes. Gravity-defying grapes, in this instance. E loves to eat green grapes (she kept saying "Mmmm!" as we were drawing). We coloured these ones  like red wine grapes because purple is pretty. The scanned image never looks as good as the original, but you get the idea.

Although the ground is still wet, we actually have beautiful blue skies at the moment. Maybe we should go blow some bubbles like Maple and Molgaban. (Check out their gorgeous pictures!) We don't have fancy bubble blowers, but I'm sure I could find some dish-washing liquid and a wire coat-hanger.

Okay, I couldn't just sit here typing while there was a nice, clear, blue sky outside. I remembered that we received some bubble mix as a party favour a while ago, so I found it and we went back outside.

We get bubble fun, too!

-Polly