Liam the Lion

Like Angel at the same age - though possibly even more so? - Cherub likes to make things. She always  has scissors, sellotape and a glue stick readily available, and will ask for PVA glue if she needs it. For materials she usually just uses paper or whatever she can find rifling through the recycling bag. Sometimes she remembers she has a plastic jar full of collage stuff and uses that. Today she asked for four clothes pegs from the washing line, added paper and sellotape, and after a bit of colouring, cutting and sticking ... ta-da!

Liam the Lion.

I asked her if she meant Leo the Lion, but no ... definitely Liam.

Yellow M

Star's design and technology class at school had to design and make a balancing toy, using various woodwork and metalwork techniques. This was the end result she brought home. For some reason known only to herself she went for a McDonalds theme:

The balanced M is metal, the red pole plastic dipped wood, and the rest wood. The yellow M was tricky, and took some kind of special saw (I forget the name).

Very creative, I thought. And original. Star is nothing if not original!

Story Sacks: Testing the Water

After thinking about story sacks at the weekend, I decided to dip a toe in with Cherub yesterday. We had a clear morning and I wanted to do some activities with her, but I am not good at getting myself organised in advance so it needed to be something I could pull together easily. I am gradually building up a list of simple ideas for celebrating different feasts and seasons. Checking that, I found sun-related ideas for June 21st I could use for the beginning of summer and threw together a story sack and a craft activity tray.

Into the story sack (a cloth bag that once contained a set of bed linen) went:

• The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow
• Skip Through the Seasons by Stella Blackstone
• Summer Story (Brambly Hedge) by Jill Barklem
• Flower Fairies of the Summer by Cicely Mary Barker
• This sun colouring page
• A sun rubber stamp

Onto the tray (a small wooden one I found when clearing out the kitchen) went:

• Coloured paper
• A paper plate
• Yellow paint and paintbrush
• Bottle of glue
• Scissors
• Pencil

... to make this handprint sun. In my experience doing any sort of structured craft with a toddler or preschooler goes much more smoothly if everything is ready to hand before getting the child involved - otherwise you can guarantee that things will take an interesting turn in your absence collecting missing items! Trays are a great way to get everything together and have endless possibilities. (Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning is the queen of activity trays ... check out some of her ideas here, and here, and here for inspiration.)

Cherub was very pleased to get a bag "like N's" and loved digging through it to see what was inside. We looked at the summer months in Skip Through The Seasons (a simple book with a double-page picture for each month, with items to spot), read The Sun Egg and looked at a couple of flower fairies before she wanted to move on to playing with the stamp. I have dangled Brambly Hedge books at her a couple of times but she hasn't been ready to bite yet, and obviously wasn't this time either. With hindsight I realised it would have been fun to put an orange and a small carton of orange juice in the bag to go with The Sun Egg.

After stamping we moved away from the bag and on to the craft tray. We drew round her hands, then I cut out hand shapes while she painted the paper plate yellow. When that was done she painted the colouring page and her stamped suns, then we turned to making "sunny" fairy cakes (yellow food colouring and yellow icing). Altogether we probably got about two hours of happy, focused activity out in return for a few minutes preparation, using books and other bits that I already had to hand.

I think for now I am going to put together other random bags as the fancy takes me, with the aim of having one ready to produce whenever she wants something to do and I don't have any other ideas. In the longer term I have - as Blackadder would say - a cunning plan. Letter bags. More on that later.

PS. I was a bad blogger and didn't remember to take any photos.

Activity Village

Looking for Pancake Day activities last month, I found a good, free resource for celebrating special days throughout the year: Activity Village.

Although it is a UK site, it also includes dates from the US and other calendars. Looking ahead over the next few weeks you can find links to crafts, colouring pages, puzzles, games and other activities for:

• Easter (12th April)
• 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession (21st April)
• Earth Day (22nd April)
• St. George's Day (23rd April)
• Teacher Appreciation Week, US (4th-8th May)
• Children's Day, Japan (5th May)
• Mother's Day, US (10th May)

Have fun!

The Toymaker

I know what I shall be doing today - making toys with The Toymaker.

I wonder how many girls will decide to join me, and what, if anything, will survive the attentions of my littlest helper.

HT: Dorothy, who has been making beautiful things

Gentle Learning: Art and Craft

One of my regrets is that I didn't do enough hands on activities with my older children. Books are easy - you pick them up, read them, and (eventually) put them away again. Art and crafts are harder. They make messes that need to be cleared up. They require preparation. Over planning can lead to frustration when the child doesn't want to do your project, your way. Under planning means nothing will happen. This time round I want to push art and craft activities right up my priority list and make them a regular part of our day, rather than an extra that may or (more often) may not happen. Art and craft has such a lot to offer young children - it aids concentration, helps them to develop fine motor skills, encourages creativity, and gives them the satisfaction of seeing something they have made. It can tie in with every area of education - I love the idea of Waldorf style "main lesson" books, in which the child records their learning largely in art (at least in the earlier years). While I wouldn't want to start main lesson books too early, I would like to start to develop the skills that would make them an enjoyable part of learning later.

So, where to start? A few ideas ...

• Work creative activities into the daily routine. For me this is the biggest challenge!
  
• First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos by Mary Ann Kohl - this has many, many suggestions for open-ended creative activities for little ones. She has also published a series of Preschool art books.
  
• Model creativity - draw, paint and create myself. I enjoy most crafts, but drawing and painting are a challenge for me. I manage OK with a nature notebook or if I have instructions to follow, but a blank piece of paper and a pencil frighten me.
  
• Have an art centre with a selection of baskets and trays containing appropriate activities available, Montessori style, and rotate them regularly. (I'm thinking along the lines of these Christmas art activities from Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning.)
• Buy good quality materials - I'm not a purist about art materials, but I do think it makes sense to let children use better quality materials as soon as they are able to make proper use of them. I love the idea of the beeswax crayons and modelling wax used in Waldorf education and will definitely want to add them to our art supplies.
  
• Keep a file of liturgical craft ideas - but be prepared for Little Cherub to develop them in her own way (do not fixate on how the finished product "should" look!)

Knit the Classics

For some reason Brideshead made me think of hats and Catholicism of course, but not being Catholic I was unsure how to go about knitting a rosary. So I knit a hat instead.

If you like books and knitting you have to check out this unique blog: Knit the Classics. As in knit Brideshead Revisted or Dante's Inferno, not "knit this classic sweater". Fancy knitting Charles' Beret, or a Lilliputian Sweater?

Oh, this is just ... classic!

Our St. Nicholas icons

We finally finished them. Star found some bronze coloured card which worked well as a background. We have been displaying hers in between the two Advent calendars, though it has now disappeared behind our nativity set (not enough space to display everything!)

We'll be putting them away at Christmas and keeping them for next year. I'm hoping that if we do crafts like this for different saints and feast days we can build up a selection of simple items and pictures to display through the year alongside our liturgically coloured candle holders.

Scrapbooking

Even though I didn't manage much scrapbooking on Friday it got me inspired and I did four pages yesterday - two with photos from a snowy day last Christmas, and two for Angel's 11th birthday. Star's rock-climbing expedition and First Communion next ... I'm hoping I might get them done this afternoon, then I'll be ready to start on Little Cherub's photos.

While I am on the subject of scrapbooking, I have to enthuse about my favourite scrapbooking resource ... Becky Higgins' Creative Sketches. A kind friend gave me one of her books (after I kept borrowing hers!) and I love it. You can take one of Becky's sketches as inspiration for a layout and then turn it into something individual. Just look up sketches for the number of photos you want to use, choose one that fits the size and shape of your photos and you are away. And there are a number of sketches available online too :). They help me to get over the initial creative hump with a page and give me something I can run with on my own. Love them!

Blog of the Week

It has taken me well over a week to get round to posting this, but better late than never!

I am not a crafty homeschooler. We rarely get around to the making, baking, painting and growing activities that I'm sure would enhance our studies if only I were better at making time for them and more organised at getting materials together. I love the idea of using crafts to celebrate the liturgical year, but I need inspiration - a lot of inspiration - to make it happen ... and I know just the place to find it.

Alice at Cottage Blessings has a talent for coming up with wonderful Catholic crafts that work for a range of ages. Take a look at some of these. Only Alice could turn wooden ice cream spoons into a cavalcade of saints. And she does all this while homeschooling and mothering seven children.

Enjoy!

Note to self: add ice cream spoons to shopping list. I think we could manage this one!