Tuesday Night Playtime : Little Boats

This is our last Tuesday Night Play for a while as D’s choir starts again next week.

This week we took opportunity to play with some walnut shells and created a sea adventure. Initially we hoped to make mini candles so we have floating lights, but those didn’t work out.

kids were very free with the beeswax 😀

We ended up just sticking little flags made out of washi tape into the shells and let them float.

kids also added glass beads, plastic snowflakes, ice and even a stray cranberry for more dramatic set-up. A candle served for the setting sun

Later children added an island- one of D’s earlier ceramic creations, and some animals to liven up the scene.

mysterious island

and a baby hippo guarding the treasure (love how kids picked turquoise tissue paper to put underneath our glass bowl, creating a lovely tropical beach)

 

So here is our Tuesday Night Play, I loved seeing kids play small worlds again. A little bit sad because D. is slowly leaving it behind (they grow up so fast). Stay tuned for more, we will definitely keep this tradition, if not on Tuesdays, there are 3 more free nights in the week 🙂

 

 

Tuesday Night playtime: creating tiny universes

Evenings are long and dark , but tonight was delightful. I saw the idea of playing with marbles and assistive light on the phone somewhere on the web, and today we finally got a chance to try it out. We had marbles and beady decorations from the floral section in the craft store. Warning, don’t look directly at the light, it will definitely hurt your eyes!

Just a marble put on top of phone’s assistive light and a complete darkness- all you need to create a tiny amazing universe, we found that craft store beads create better galaxies, but marbles make amazing planets:

our first marble universe

 

 

the blue one most definitely has water 🙂

 

A good chance to remember differences between opaque, translucent and transparent- and the biggest marble becomes Neptune

half the planet is covered with ice

my favorite spotty marble reminded us about Earth

It gets even better – the colors reflected on our ceiling absolutely charmed little C.

 

 

We also had some rocks bought from the museum long time ago and those made some magic of their own

this shard of crystal like rock created icy and fierce asteroid

this one looks like a glowing ember

This one, white with lilac strikes is our favorite, it looks like it has a heart

 

Fun and calming time tonight…

Week’s Roundup: June 7-June 14, 2015

Another week went by, and suddenly it’s half of June gone just like that.

Photo of the week:

Despite my protests they managed to sneak a book each to the table 😀

What were we up to this week?

Two Weeks Roundup: Goodbye May and first week of June, 2015

Sunflowerous summer is in full mode!

Such a bliss to wake up on some days and not have any plans at all!

Picture of the week:

our summer playground aka Roxborough State Park

What we’ve been up to so far:

Digging the earth, talking to the plants

What a bliss, no plans, no engagements…we had most wonderful start of the week.

During breakfast on Monday we decided that we will definitely try to make a tiny container garden this year. There were less successful attempts before, but this time we are determined.

But first we read a little bit about plants.

A Seed is Sleepy by Diana Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long is one of the most beloved and most beautiful books about plants we have, and even though we have read it before, we marveled again at the beauty and complexity of a seed coming to life.

The Where, the Why and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science is a recent addition to our home library and it was this book that answered questions of whether trees do or do not talk to each other and how long do trees live. Also whether plants eat animals and why, this was especially fascinating to children.

Second we went out on the patio and started digging. We turned the soil in all our pots and added some new. We planted tiny seeds for herbs and flowers (not sure if flowers will come up actually). We moved our poor lavender (which we though had died, but it came back to life) into a roomier pot. C. was so good about planting and replanting. She sang to plants, and wished them to grow strong and be well. She was the first one today to rush and check if the soil dried up.

Today we continued our adventures as we purchased a geranium and a viola and our patio instantly looks more cheerful.

But the most important thing we did is we started! our very first! FAIRY GARDEN! Can you tell how excited I am. I regret not doing it earlier, as D. is turning 10 this summer, and I am not sure if this very first fairy garden might also be his only one. Anyway…

I got small shallow pots as I wasn’t sure if children will be into it at all or not, and now we are thinking to add a couple more. We put some dirt, some pebbles and some moss in it. We got a tiny strawberry plant and some ground cover plant from the nursery today and added to a landscape. C. got a tiny table for fairies to have their cake. Kids added shells for additional seating options and some glass pebbles for festivity. I don’t think they are finished yet, so it is work in progress, but boy does it look cute.

D.’s garden

C.’s garden

We also watched a fascinating documentary What Plants Talk About on PBS (it is also on youtube for those that can’t access PBS) , and some things blew our minds like plants sending distress signals (little C. was very aware to plants “screaming for help” today, so if you have a child that is easily impressed or is very young, please use caution), or a network of communication between plants of the forest. Very very interesting.

Today we also visited local working farm/museum  and were surprised to see how far along their garden is. I guess the fact that it is almost June haven’t caught up with us yet 😀 We sat in the shade of big trees, kids happily got into mud, ran around and looked at all the animals. We saw dear friends who joined us in our walk.

always something new to discover! we didn’t realize there was a pond there

Lovely, long days, perfect and carefree, how I missed those!

Week’s Roundup: Goodbye February 2015

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February is over and thank goodness it is. It was a good month, but it seemed long and heavy. Russians congratulated each other on the beginning of spring today. And even though here, in the US it doesn’t come for a couple of weeks at least, I think it is here already, lurking in the woods and soon will drive winter out completely.

Photo of the week:

nothing better than spending Sunday afternoon with my baby girl by my side, all nice and cozy

Lunar New Year

Our week flies buy in another blur of business, but we did have a little event for Lunar New Year yesterday.

First, we talked about why some people celebrate New Year’s arrival on the days other than January 1st  (such as Rosh Hashana, Russian “old style” New Year (January 13th) and Lunar New Year among them). Then we read D is for Dragon Dance by Ying Chang Compestine (affiliate link) to see the major elements of Chinese New Year Celebration.

Then we read about the legend of Chinese Zodiac animals in Russian (Легенда о Восточном Календаре. Мария Ершова, Игорь Олейников. Еще мы  прочли Нианское чудовище, тоже Олейникова иллюстрации)

and read our horoscopes for the upcoming Lunar Year, C. was delighted to find that she will have a very lucky year, D. was promised reward for his hard work, mine was more or less ok, my husband’s year is supposed to be luckier than the one that just ended. We’ll see 🙂

We did a couple of simple art projects

1. The idea for this finger print art came from this blog. It’s a simple and fun art project. First children painted their backgrounds using watercolor paints. Second I printed out some articles in Chinese (you can use newspaper too if available in your area) and children cut out buildings. Third, buildings are pasted onto the background. Children added cute panda stickers (affiliate link)  too. Then they put yellow and red blobs on the page (we used acrylic paint and brushes for that, but for tiny artists fingerprints would be more fun). After everything was dry, children connected their lanterns to create a garland, and added fireworks in the sky.

D.’s artwork

C.’s scenery

2. The second art project was to create a sheep- symbol of the new Lunar Year. Children painted the background -sky and grass, then painted the sheep- paying attention to the head and legs and just outlining the body. The body was filled in with pom-poms and cotton balls. Since it’s the year of Wooden Sheep they used some brown pom-poms in addition to the white ones. Oh, and don’t forget the googly eyes 🙂

D’s sheep

C. draws rainbows a lot nowadays, I love her sheep’s ears too 🙂

So, this was our little event for this Lunar New Year celebration. Hope the Year of the Sheep will bring a good fortune to everyone!

Arctic play

Today, there is so much snow outside, we can’t go out due to C. having very strong sniffles still. So we had a spontaneous Arctic study.

I picked up North: The Amazing Story of Arctic Migration by Nick Dawson, illustrated Patrick Benson (affiliated link to book depository) at the library the other day

and it proved to be just the right thing for little C. who’s fascinated with Arctic animals at the moment. D. read about the voyage of Pytheas  to the northern seas in Into the Unknown by Stewart Ross, illustrated by Stephen Biesty  (affiliated link to book depository).

We looked at the map of Arctic and Antarctic in our Maps book. We also read in Russian about types of movable houses nomadic people of Polar Regions make, also about igloos (“Дома мира” Ольги Колпаковой- Серия Настя и Никита).

After that C. drew a picture of whales migrating to the Arctic Ocean.

In the end of the day kids created a lovely play scene on the floor- as always nothing more than a blanket and colorful pebbles in addition to our stash of Schleich animals. Well, actually we did use old towels to create icebergs and C. insisted that we have Antarctic too, a couple of magical creatures joined the party and Lego Flynn Rider was on his way to shore (but he was careful to avoid a hungry orca)

We made some ice to see if our animals can ride on the iceberg. We kind of failed here, because our iceberg was only half frozen, still kids had tons of fun playing with water

drifting 🙂

the hungry orca

That was our spontaneous Arctic Day (it’s quite cold outside too, if the weather keeps we might be lucky enough to try and build a snow fort tomorrow).

Interesting posts on the subject I came across:

Kids Dioramas and Small World Play at Artful Parent

Simple Ice Experiment

ETA: Movies to watch

Arctic Tale Trailer

To The Arctic Trailer

Learning about Galileo

Today is Galileo Galilei’s birthday, we decided it would be a good idea to learn about this amazing scientist and inventor.

Week’s Roundup: February 2-February8, 2015

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Another busy week flew by in a blink of an eye. It’s been so warm here, it doesn’t feel like winter at all!

Photo of the week:

I will never get tired of cotton candy sunsets here in Colorado