Building with unit blocks

My parents got our children a wonderful set of blocks for Christmas and they've been in almost constant use since. I'm always amazed at the uniqueness of each structure they design. They've built car washes, race tracks, parking lots, houses with furniture and people, elevators, grocery stores, towers with well-concealed hiding places and tunnels, walls, giant people, windows, castles, random abstract structures, and on and on. Most often other toys are involved, which I totally understand. Someone small enough has to have the pleasure of being inside these awesome buildings.
The pictures I have don't demonstrate much variety, but I'm not always standing at the ready with my camera when the kids exhibit their genius. And, actually, I was contracted building help on a couple of those.
If you're on the hunt for a high quality set of blocks, I highly recommend Barclay Blocks. Their website is very informative, their blocks are excellent quality, come in a great variety of shapes, are offered in sets for school and home, and are made in our backyard (Indiana). You can purchase blocks by the set or individually, which means you can always add to what you've got. I'm looking forward to supplementing our set in the future! We also got their recommended Block Building for Children and have had fun duplicating projects inside and have been inspired by the examples pictured.
Some benefits of having a well-made set of unit blocks (besides being so much fun) are that the pieces are standardized and made uniformly which makes them great for educational purposes and allows for sturdy and dependable construction.
As a parent, I really enjoy creating and building with my kids and our blocks. I prefer it over most other toy-play that happens in our home. These blocks are great for kids and entire families since the play varies and will continue to be interesting as the kids grow older (and the blocks stand up to all the wear!) I did happen to see that Barclay Woods is currently having a sale, which is another point for their company.
Check back here tomorrow for one more block picture. Surprise for our Nanna.

Flour painting at the pool

My kids enjoyed our backyard painting enough that they asked to do it again. This time, we (my mom and I) changed things up on them a little by having them make their own paint first. We used a recipe from First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos by MaryAnn F. Kohl. I am pleased with our results, but struggled a bit getting them. I'll share the recipe as it's written in the book and then our modifications.

Flour Paint
flour

liquid soap

water

measuring spoons and cups

spoon

bowl or large jar

food coloring drops or paste, or powdered tempera paint

Combine 3 cups (375g) flour, 2 tablespoons (30ml) liquid soap, and 3/4 cup (180ml) water in a bowl or large jar until the mixture is a thick paste. Mix in food coloring until a desired shade is reached.

I assumed "combine" meant stir it up with a spoon. (Oh yeah, the recipe says "spoon.") But I found combining with a spoon left the mixture way too lumpy. I preferred using an electric mixer.

Also, the suggested amount of soap and water was not enough liquid to even make thick paste. I added quite a bit more water and some more soap. Wish I could tell you how much, but I tend not to keep track of those things.

After finally getting the mixture to my desired consistency (never really knowing what the intended consistency should have been), we divided it up into muffin tins to dye with food coloring. This worked really well.

After making our paint, we carried our supplies to the backyard, taped some paper to our little tables and began painting. The kids painted with little brushes, big brushes, and hands. They painted on children's painting paper, newspaper, freezer paper, and of course, their bodies. All paintbrushes, fingers, and other random painted body parts were frequently rinsed in the wading pool, making me think I'm now too spoiled by the convenience to ever paint indoors again.

This was a lot of fun, but I'm still puzzled by the paint recipe. Has anyone used this before?

Shirt shorts

So I did squeeze in a little craft time last night.
I'm excited about making the kids some clothes for summer and got a head start last night with these shirt-shorts. That's a shirt I got in high school (the old baggy boy's shirt days) and I cut it into a pair of shorts for my son. I think they turned out pretty well considering the number of mistakes I make when working on a new project.
I found tutorials for this at Sew, Mama, Sew! and in Amanda Soule's book The Creative Family.

P.S. If you notice my son's shirt, you'll see my daughter's face drawing that we iron-transferred onto t-shirts for Christmas. This picture below makes the shorts look a bit scrunchy in the crotch for some reason and there's a sticker behind him that looks like it's stuck on him, but you may be able to see the face a little better.

P.P.S. Cassi has featured our play-doh cookies on The Crafty Crow today (previous features here and here) so I've gone back and updated my old post with a few tips and photos.

Wonderplay and celery

So today's on-the-fly experiment: Capillary action with celery and potato plants.
Inspiration from: Wonderplay, Too! Another book that's great to just flip through and find a quick and doable project right when you need it. (Also great for bigger projects or outings when you have more planning time).
For the potato plants, take a white or sweet potato, stud it with toothpicks so it's bottom rests in a clear container of water. This one will require a few days' observance as it sprouts roots and leaves. (We'll get back to you with our results). I like the book's suggestion to have your kids draw the changes they see in the potato. Keep enough water in the container to wet the bottom of the potato.
For the celery, make a fresh cut at the base, drop the stalks in food-colored water, wait a few hours and then observe. You should be able to see that the stalks and leaves have perked up and that the water has traveled up through the veins and into the leaves. After seeing our results, you may decide to try darker water and colors other than yellow and green (I wasn't really thinking when I did it).



This bottom picture compares a blue stalk and a yellow stalk. You can actually see the yellow in person, and a marked difference between it and the blue, but not as much in the picture.

Money laundering

I really like The Preschooler's Busy Book by Trish Kuffner. I've mentioned it before, but this is my official recommendation. I know that means a lot. I like, first of all, that she is honest about being crazy at home with multiple small children. Then she offers planning systems for overcoming the long days at home. But even if you don't get around to making a schedule for your time at home, you can still use the 365 +/- suggestions for rainy days, craft days, holidays, cooking days, etc. It's full of ideas that you may already know but appreciate being reminded of and activities you may never have thought of in a million years. And they range from simple enough to pull together at a moment's notice to slightly more complicated requiring a bit of advance planning. I love creating new projects for my kids and myself to work on, but I also love being able to pick up a book, flip a few pages and say, "Okay, we'll do this now!" Definitely worth it.
So, today's project: Clean Coins. You just put some soapy water and dirty coins out, let your kids scrub them with old toothbrushes, dry them with towels and that's it! The book suggests this will actually clean the coins, but my kids' scrubbing wasn't so effective. They take after me, I suppose, when it comes to cleaning. But the condition of the coin didn't matter a bit as my kids just enjoyed the process and the bubbles.

Good Stuff for Kids

The Charlie and Lola series of books and videos are great! The mixed-media, childlike illustrations are fun to look at, the dialogue is actually spoken like a child, and you can't beat British accents. I love hearing my kids mimic it. We have only four of the many books and I think my kids can recite part or most of each of them. Currently, they are most intrigued by the colorful drawings and explanation of germs in I'm Really Ever So Not Well.
The DVDs each have a collection of several short episodes so they're great for brief periods in front of the tv. Or, should I say, the "telly."



We were given a Stokke Tripp Trapp chair for my daughter's birthday last year and are so pleased with it. You can adjust the height and depth of this chair (seat and footrest, individually) to fit your child and your dinner table. You can get it with a 5-point harness or without. With a cushion or without. With a guardrail or without. In red or not. You don't have to clean up a nasty tray or booster seat when they finish eating (just your nasty table), your child doesn't have to sit uncomfortably on their knees or some other contortionist position to reach the table, and, surprisingly, I don't often find myself telling my daughter to get back in it, as I do with grown-up or child-size chairs. If you find you hate your high chair or the switch from high chair to big chair, put one of these on your wish list.
Oh, and it holds up to 300 lbs, in case you have the world's biggest baby.




My Giant Sticker Activity Book. This is...well, a giant sticker activity book by Roger Priddy, who has tons of kids books I'm sure you've seen or own. It comes with topical pages, like shapes or animals, and corresponding pages of brightly colored or photographic stickers. Each section has a simple explanation or question pertaining to the stickers to be placed in it and color-coded shadows showing your child where exactly to place the sticker. My kids love it. They are young enough that I have to do it with them, but it is pretty fun and a good teaching opportunity. Older kids could entertain themselves with it.
A great thing about this sticker book, besides just being fun matching the stickers, is that when your kids are finished placing the stickers you can go back and reread it like a regular book and they can (somewhat carefully) remove and replace the stickers.
We enjoy this at home, but it would be a great plane-ride surprise activity.