Crayon Hearts

I basically forced the kids to do my last two crafts because I already had them all prepared. Poor little kiddies. I know. It's a tough world.

The first forced craft we made was our crayon heart deals, an idea from the Martha Stewart website.  Of course, Martha's crayon hearts turned out amazing, whereas ours turned out not exactly like Martha's. But still, pretty cool. It's fun to hang them near a window so the sun can shine through the wax paper, giving the hearts that "stained glass" effect.

We followed the directions from the website implicitly. To paraphrase, we:

• used a sharpener and some valentine's colored crayons to get crayon shavings
• sprinkled the shavings inbetween 2 sheets of wax paper
• ironed over it on super low
• cut the waxed paper into hearts and hung them up

That's about it. It's very simple, but honestly, my kids didn't enjoy it very much. In fact, after we used the iron, they ran away rendering them out of commission. I had to finish up the cutting of the heart shapes and stringing from the ceiling solo mio. Ah well. What do you expect from kids who didn't want to participate in first place? 

My children did get a lot of practice with the sharpener. That's something.

Anyway, the hearts are lovely. 

Estimation Station

After our last crafting activity my son said to me, "Mom, why do we keep having to do this stuff that we don't want to do?" Well, what does one say to that, I'd like to know. So I thought for a minute and said, "Ok, no more crafts. Let's do some math, shall we?" Now, truth be told, I had everything all set to make these crayon heart crafty thingees, but obviously, it was time to switch it up a bit. I cast my eyes around for something math-ish and came upon a jar filled with conversation hearts that I had left out for snacking on after we had done our candy graphing a few days earlier. It was just the thing I needed--come to rescue us from the crafting-doldrums.

This is the jar that I grabbed and set down between us--

and led out with: "So, how many conversation heart candies do you think are in this jar? How many would you guess? What is your estimate?"

To which my oldest said: "I think there are 100." 

"Fat chance." I thought to myself.

"20!" said my younger son.

"Hmmm...probably a few more..." I thought to myself.

"I'm going to estimate that there are 50 candy hearts in this jar." I said proudly.

We then poured the candy hearts out onto the carpet and commenced counting. I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to practice counting over 20. And indeed we did count over 20. And over 30. and over 50. We counted all the way to 99! When we got there my oldest son yelled out an exultant, "YES! I won, I won, I WON! I'm smarter than Mama!" And indeed he was. Can you believe there were 99 little candies in that jar? It doesn't seem possible to me, but there you have it.  Count them and weep.

After our bout with the conversation hearts we went on a hunt all over the house to find other things to estimate and count and see who won. Let me just say that I never, actually won, pathetic as it is to admit. But those little buggers had quite the case of beginner's luck...er...something.

Estimating is fun! That's what we learned. Apparently, it is WAY funner than crafts. Depending on who you ask. Nevertheless, I think I will have to abandon crafts for a few more days.

Valentine's Placemats

I wanted to make something to decorate our table for dinner on Valentine's day; placemats got the vote. So I searched for a fun idea and found this one: valentine's activities, including placemats.  

The site has a billion ideas that I wanted to try, but we only found time for a couple of them. Good thing there's always next year. 

This idea is pretty simple. I cut out matching rectangles (or ovals, or whatever you want) from clear contact paper. I also cut out hearts in various sizes and shapes from red, pink, white and purple construction paper. Then I gathered the leftover squares of tissue paper I had saved from when we made our ugly wreaths. I pulled out some old glitter and I was ready for the kids to take a turn. 

First I let them pull the backing off the contact paper and they helped me tape it, sticky-side-up, onto the table. Then I gave them free range to stick as many hearts and tissue paper squares as they wanted all over the contact paper. When they said they were done, I let them pick some glitter to sprinkle over the top. The final step is to pull the backing off the other contact paper portion and lay it, ever so carefully, over the one taped to the table. This part was tricky and I found that I mostly had to do it for them. But they were able to help a little bit--they liked to use their fingers to spread out all of the air bubbles that get trapped in between the contact paper. 

And there you have it. Ta-da! Super fun (not to mention, sparkly, always a bonus) placemats that the kids can be proud of and enjoy at dinner.

Family Home Evening

Every Monday evening we get our little family together for "Family Home Evening." It's an idea instituted by our church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I think it's the most wonderful idea ever, and my kids love it too. They look forward to FHE all week long. Every Monday they each get assigned a job, and whether it's to do the lesson or the activity or plan the treat or pick a scripture to read or a song to sing they are equally thrilled to be a part of our big family night.

Tonight we combined our Family Home Evening and our preschool lesson because I didn't have time during the day to get to the preschool lesson. We were pretty busy getting prepared for Valentine's day and the big surprise we were planning for our daddy (which involved a lot of baking)!

Anyway, I feel I am not unduly proud of our heart-themed FHE (they are not usually so well coordinated) so here's what went down in our house:

Song: we always let our kids pick whatever song they want when it's their turn. if it's "I'm a Little Teapot," well, then, so be it.

Prayer: someone gets a turn to do this too.

Lesson: we read an article out of the February 2012 Friend magazine entitled, "My Heart is Happy" and talked about what types of things make our hearts happy.

Activity: earlier in the day we had read the book, My Map Book, by Sara Fanelli, and now we took the opportunity to make maps of our hearts similar to the author of the book, based on our conversation about things that make our hearts happy. I got this idea from the Playful Learning website.

This picture is from the Playful Learning website-it's not my own-because we forgot to take a picture while we were painting. I don't know what the other author used, but we used watercolor paper; black sharpies for the lines, pictures and words; and watercolor paints. They turned out beautiful!

Treat: earlier in the day I had made red cinnamon rolls (dyed the dough red with food coloring), with pink frosting! Heart-shaped sugar cookies were my second choice, but I wanted to eat cinnamon rolls more ;-)

The end. Our FHE's are pretty short because our kids are still really small with relatively short attention spans. Usually, I'd say 95% of the time, our activity is a physical activity like swinging the kids in blankets, or jumping contests, or playing Red Light/Green Light. So I was worried that painting wouldn't be something that proved equally enjoyable for the kids, but it turned out to be a smash hit!

Strung-up Hearts

So, I know I pretty much strike out whenever I try to do an idea that I think up all on my own. But I thought I would give a go, just one more time. 

I wondered if I might have more success by keeping it really simple. SO I bought those paper doily heart deals, super cheap from the store. Then I drew hearts on red and pink construction paper that were big enough to accommodate the doilies. I thought I would have the kids cut out the heart shapes, but when we sat down to do this activity, neither were in a very scizzor-ish mood. Sometimes that happens. Therefore, I -myself- ended up cutting the hearts out for them, but it would have been cooler had they done it themselves. Next, I let them paint watered-down glue on the back of the doilies and attach them as close to the centers of the cut-out hearts as they could get. I tried to emphasize the "center of the heart" to them so it would give us a chance to talk about positional words and phrases like: bottom, top, center, middle, on the side of, kitty-corner to, etc. They got pretty close. Obviously, if you look at the picture, some of our attempts were better than others. Then I let them pick a color of crepe paper that they wanted to use to hang their heart and taped it to the ceiling. 

They are not, actually, very attractive decorations, but they were decently fun to make. Also, I liked this activity because it kept the boys' attention the whole time, as opposed to other crafts that seem to be a bit too long for my guys who would generally prefer running around and smashing things to doing artsy-types of sit-down activities. Oh well, so it goes as the mother of little boys. 

Candy Graphing

I was spending some time looking at the Playful Learning website and loving it. So I found this idea there and decided to try it with the boys, since conversation hearts are in abundance right now in our household.

The coolest part was that the author of Playful Learning also included a printable empty chart that I could print out and use and not have to come up with one myself. Hooray for other people doing the work for me! :-) Anyway, the kids loved this activity and it gave us a chance to ask a lot of great comparison questions like, "Which line is the tallest?" "Which is the shortest?" "How much taller is the tallest line than the shortest line?" We also got to talk about which color was our favorite to eat. Both boys chose blue.

What I like about activities like this is that both kids can participate at the same time, even though their understandings are at different levels. I feel that the younger benefits from the kinds of questions and answers and ideas that the older comes up with, and the older benefits from the reinforcement that comes from listening to the more basic explanations I use when talking to the younger.  Good activity--very easy--and you get to eat all the candy at the end. A winner all around!

Popover Perfection

In the previous post I explained about our fun trip to the library, which event led to the temporary acquisition of this book, which I am very excited about. 

The truth is, I had never heard of this book, I just picked it up randomly off the shelf at the library. But it looked interesting so I gave it a little look-see. I like it because it has recipes in a format created entirely just for kids. Particularly, kids who can't read yet. It also contains a whole page or so on tips for how to involve your children more when you are cooking/baking together. Tips like letting your kid use a ruler to smooth off the top of a measuring cup so they make sure they don't get too much or too little. Genius! I've always wondered how to help them figure out how to do that part. Anyway, we brought it home and today we tried out the popover recipe. 

I've never been able to get a popover recipe to be successful. Should I even begin a paragraph with that information? Well, you should probably know that I don't get many recipes to come out overly successful. In fact, if you must know, I usually despise cooking. It's just not my thing. But I enjoy cooking with the kids so maybe I just liked this book because I thought it could act as a positive segue between my lack of interest in cooking and the kids' enthusiasm for making something-themselves-that is yummy. And the verdict is that it totally worked!  Ha!

Let me chronicle the levels of success for you:

• the popovers popped over--I've never gotten them to do that before, though I have tried many a time
• the popovers were delish--usually they are ok, but these ones were awesome!
• the kids followed the recipe, easily, all by themselves because the recipe is made up of pictures
• the steps are clear and accurate
• really, I mean this, I didn't have to read anything to them. they sat down on the floor with the cookbook between them, looked at the pictures and got to work! how cool is that?! 
• SO, when Daddy came home and I pulled the popovers out of the oven the kids could, in all honesty, say "Daddy!  We made these popovers for you!" And when he looked at me like, "Look at our poor, disillusioned children.  Aren't they cute?" I got to shake my head at him and smile and say, "No really, they really made them all by themselves." 
• The pride that my kids felt was palpable--and THAT was the best success of all :-)