Pumpkin Art

I had some thin wood pumpkins from ACMoore that I bought for the girls to paint. 

Apparently, though, I forget how quickly we paint.

So I supplemented with some little wood pumpkins leftover from one of my projects.

They blew threw those, too, and still weren't ready to be done painting.

So I pulled out some paper ones.  This went fine, until Emma started using her fingers.

My first reaction was to yell "Noooooooooo..."  (And I'm sure I did.)  But I'm trying not to impose my OCD tendencies on them.  And I'm trying to say "yes" instead of "no" as long as no one is going to get hurt.  So I let them go to town.  Plus, at that point, it was less effort than trying to keep a separate paintbrush in each color of paint.

The results:

Build and Grow

I had to pick something up at Lowe's last month, and I saw a flier for their Build and Grow workshop.  I'd heard good things about it from my cousin Aimee, so we decided to try it while we had extra hands.

They are set up with some big blocks of plywood on the floor as tables in the lumber department.  They had a couple of different heights for different ages of kids.  They gave us kits and we worked at our own pace.

They've done some hammering nails at school, so they pretty much knew what to do.  We had to line up some parts for them, and set the nails in some pre-drilled holds.  Some of them were still kind of hard to get in, but the girls did lots of hammering.  We came out with all 70 fingers in tact.

We got to decorate our "Ghoul Busses" with stickers.  Stickers!

They're so proud of them.

And then, of course, we had to test them out.

I'll have to say it was pretty cool.  And it's a good balance for all the princess stuff, right?  I think we'll try it again sometime, hopefully soon.

Pastapalooza

Thanks to Pinterest and a test run by a blogger friend, I finally tried my hand at dyeing pasta.  4 boxes of pasta, 5 big bottles of rubbing alcohol, and a package of food coloring later, this is what we got:

You'll notice that the blue looks kind of green.  And the purple looks kind of brown.  Not sure if they just needed more food coloring or what.

On a particularly whiny afternoon, I gave the girls each a big bowl and asked them to sort them by shapes.  Totally took away the whining.  Mission accomplished.

The next day, they said, "I want to do a project!"  I don't think they knew what they wanted to do, but I got some black construction paper (what else is black construction paper good for?) and drew some shapes in glue.  Emma asked for an "E."  When she finished that, she asked for a "little e."

Becca asked for a moon (well, I suggested it.  There are only so many shapes I can do with glue.).  Emma felt the need to point out that it looked like a banana.

Julie didn't want anything to do with glue.  I gave her some cups and told her she could sort by color, but she got tired of that and just played.

Emma's big E.  I had to fish out some more curly pasta (Julie calls it 'crinkly') for her.

See that little green wagon wheel on the middle arm of the E?  I thought that fell on there by accident.  And I took a picture because I was pretty sure she was going to throw a fit.

I forgot to get a picture of the final product, but she totally went with it, and just made the whole center arm out of wagon wheels instead of the curlies.  Blew my mind.

If they were a little older, I would have done fish shapes, and used the elbow macaroni to make little scales.

Letters

Last weekend was tax free weekend.  I took Friday as a vacation day, partly because I needed a mental break, and partly to do some shopping.  I ended up out all day, despite the fact that my original plan included a lot more nap time.

Anyhow, I was in Target, climbing over piles of kids to get at the school supplies (a guilty pleasure) and I saw some Crayola dry erase markers.  It prompted a memory I had maybe, oh 6 months ago, when I bought a laminator.

The girls like to trace letters all the time.  It's usually when we're out at a restaurant and they want to draw letters on their menus.  They want us to draw "lines" for them to trace.

I downloaded a free "dotted" font and somehow even figured out how to install it.  Put 8 letters on each page.  I was going to print front and back, but then noticed that we had bought the cheap Target printer paper, and it was really too see through.

Found the instructions for the laminator, plus the free laminate folders that came with it (it's no small miracle to find all 3 of those things around this mess).

And voila....

My lefty  :)

Rainbow W's

She's a little proud.

Tracing certainly doesn't teach them how to make letters...  I watched Becca doing the "X" by doing the left half, then the right.  But at this point, I think it's more about pen control.

Since it seems to come up a lot when we're out, I'm considering a more portable version - maybe 4x6" size, on a binder ring.  Of course, that may take me another 6 months to pull off.