Joyfully Weary

A morning exploring The Art Institute and an afternoon at Maggie Daley Park is one my favorite ways to spend a day in Chicago with my kiddos. They are just across the street from each other, so I only have to park once and there are no complaints about aching feet. It's also an inexpensive day out. The Art Institute is always free for children under the age of 14 and if you register it's also always free for teachers - if you homeschool you'll just need to show a co-op id. Our favorite place to park is the Millennium Lakeside Garage - there is a stroller friendly elevator that takes your right up to one of the entrances to Maggie Daley Park. We always use Spot Hero and park for the day for around $15. We went last week and had such a good time. I need to make more of an effort to visit Chicago more often....it always feels like such a big task (it's the hour in traffic that get me) to do solo but once we are in the city we have so much fun.  We are curr...

I mentioned last week that we are currently finishing up,  The Story of The World: Ancient Times . The history of Roman has definitely intrigued us; there so much to cover  and they way it's impacted western  civilization  is  fascinating! On a side note, if like me, you have the desire to learn more than what your children's history books are offering you I highly recommended the podcast,   "The History of Rome by Mike Duncan . The episodes are short, so it's easy to listen to while doing household chores, etc.  Alright, back to the reason for this post, one of the Roman themed activities we've done is create these simple mosaics. 

Several years back, while planning activities for an after-school program, I stumbled upon the  brilliant idea of turning the corner of envelopes in to monster bookmarks. This was way before Pinterest and I unfortunately do not remember the the name of book were I first saw the idea.  Big Buddy has just started asking for stuff to help him keep his place in books, so I knew this was a craft he'd enjoy making. With Easter so close, though, I decided to have them make bunnies instead of monsters. 

I've been wanting to add some art to our "guitar wall" for awhile. I also knew I wanted to use some pages from our hymnals. I like the look of sheet music and have been pleased with how it's turned out in other crafts ( here & here ). I originally thought about trying to recreate these flowers .  Which I still may do someday, but since time if very precious right now I decided to go with windmills instead. They add some fun texture but are easy and quick; all 5 took about an hour to put together.  Supplies: old hymnal, scissors, glue stick, super glue, and coins/buttons Step 1: each windmill requires five hymnal sheets, rip them out and then trim to desired size. For the larger windmills I trimmed about 1/2" off the edges. For the smaller windmills I trimmed about 2" off the edges.  Step 2: accordion fold all of your sheets. My folds were about 1/2" wide. If you end up with extra at the end just trim it off.  Step 3:...

When I saw this on Pinterest I knew I wanted to create my own version. It took me over a year to actually do it and when I did I made two (or six?) different ones for our home.  The first was of our family values (read more about them  here ) to hang in our bathroom.

When I shared our Ocean Unit I mentioned that National Geographic Kids Oceans   was one of our favorite books. There is one page in particular that Big Buddy loves - he'll study it for several minutes at a time. national geographic kids oceans, pages 58-59 Since he's so captivated by the picture we've read the text several times and decided it would be fun to create our own ocean layers... Our supplies : blue, black, and white paint, small bowls, stir sticks, bubble wrap, sponge brushes, white paper/foam board, sea life stencils, markers, stickers.  Step 1 : pour a little blue paint into the three bowls.  Step 2 : add a bit of white paint to one cup to create a lighter shade of blue. This will be the top ocean layer/sunlight zone. Step 3 : add a bit of black paint to one cup to create a darker shade of blue. This will be the bottom ocean layer/midnight zone. The remaining cup of blue paint is the middle layer/twilight zone. ...

This week the kids and I had a TON of fun doing the silly little art activity, snap painting.  Supplies: an large old frame, a sheet of paper larger than your frame, washable paint, foam brushes, various size rubber bands.  Step 1: pull rubber bands around frame the kids were only able to do about half the bands, i helped with the rest Step 2: paint top portion of rubber bands you can see here that big buddy started to paint the bottom of the rubber band too. it doesn't matter too much - it just makes it more difficult to see the splatters.  Step 3: snap the rubber bands it makes a pretty cool snap sound on top of splattering the paint - mini man thought it was hilarious Step 4: repeat steps 2 & 3 until you are pleased with your design creation #1 creation #2 This activity can get a little messy but it is totally worth it for all the giggles it produces.