Joyfully Weary

This week the kids did a simple craft and made a nativity silhouette to hang on our windows.  The materials needed for this craft are: vellum, watercolors, a paintbrush, a glue-stick, scissors, and a nativity silhouette cut out of black construction paper. I found our silhouette through Google images and then Jer tweaked it a little bit and used a laser cutter to cut all the details - there is no way I would of been able to cut this out by hand.  😬 A simpler nativity would work just as well.  The first step to this craft is to paint the vellum. I cut the vellum a little bit larger than the nativity silhouette to make gluing easier. Vellum won't work for detailed paintings, but is great for skies, etc. Little Lady was the inspiration for this craft; she's currently very into painting sunrises and sunsets.  Once the vellum has dried, use a glue stick to attach your nativity. Then you can trim around the edges to make the final product look a bit nice...

Every other week or so I always pick up a bouquet of flowers with our groceries at Aldi. They are simple bouquets, but for less that $4 they do a lot to brighten up our home. Little Lady has been asking for awhile to paint with flowers; so when a batch started to wilt I let her and Mini Man go to town. Supplies - flowers, heavy paper, and washable tempera paint.  Directions - lightly dip flowers in paint and then gently press them onto the paper.   While they were painting BabyZ woke up from his nap and insisted on joining the fun. Luckily for him, Mini Man is a softy.   Their  creations...  

Recently, I've been seeing lots of pins about  cotton rounds and color absorption. It such a fun idea I can see way it's been so popular. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was something I had to try it with my kids. They love using eye droppers and mixing colors. We decided to use buttons and ribbons to turn our dyed cotton rounds into flowers. 

We are just finishing up taking a look at Ancient Asia in our history book, Story of the World, Volume 2: The Middle Ages . My boys, of course, were very fascinated by Samurai and Ninjas. They've spent a lot of time the past couple week coloring pages from  Samurai Arms and Armor . We currently are not doing an official geography curriculum so we piggyback off our history curriculum and use it talk about other countries and cultures. All the kids were a little envious that in Japan children get their own holiday, Children's Day. During this day a  koinobori  or carp streamer is flown above houses. The carp is chosen because it it thought of as the most spirited fish. Spirited is a good way to describe all my children, so we decided we had to make our version of a carp streamer.