Kaleidoscope Fun!

Our letter K week continued with K is for kaleidoscope. This was so fun to make and Bekah is still playing with it. I found the directions over at Sewing School.

Bekah first colored her toilet paper tube.


While she colored I got everything else ready. We needed a rectangle of plastic wrap, seed beads (I used Fall colors), and a rubber band.


After the tube is all decorated, put a few seed beads in the middle of the plastic wrap. Fold over the plastic wrap to make a seed sandwich. (Sorry, I don't have a picture of this...I was helping my little one.

Put the tube over the beads. Wrap the plastic wrap over the tube and attach with the rubber band.

Cut off any excess plastic wrap and enjoy your new kaleidoscope. It doesn't really make patterns, but looks pretty.

Don't you love her mismatched pajamas!

K is for Kangaroo

This week we're learning about the letter K. This afternoon we did K is for Kangaroo. I had seen this idea at Our Alphabet Adventure. In case you were wondering, yes, Bekah did color that poor kangaroo black! She couldn't find her brown crayon, so decided he should be black.
After our project, we pretended to be kangaroos and had a blast jumping all over the house!

Muffin Tin Monday - Letter K

Today we're starting to learn about the letter K, so our Muffin Tin Monday lunch focused on that.

Bekah had ham and cheese kabobs, kiwi and grape kabobs, and Keebler Elf cookies (I know, this one was a stretch!)

The weather is so warm here, so we were able to enjoy a picnic outside.

Happy Monday!

Fall Leaf

Here's a fun Fall leaf project Bekah and I did recently. We took a paper bag and I drew a leaf shape on it. Bekah then used her crayons to color it with some Fall colors. Any colors would really be fine, however, I did notice the brighter the colors came out better.

After she was happy with her coloring, we used watered down brown paint to paint over the leaf.

Bekah was very good at painting the whole leaf brown!

Then let it dry. It took quite awhile.

After it's dry, cut out the leaf and crumble it.


Open it up and you have a beautiful Fall leaf that looks authentic. It looks like it has all the veins and colors of a real leaf.

stART - The Busy Little Squirrel

This week our stART project was using the book The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri. I used to think that squirrels were really cute....until they got into a part of my husbands car, chewed some wires and cost us a few hundred dollars! My daughter, however, still likes them, so we chose this book. It's a really cute book about a squirrel who is so busy collecting food for the upcoming winter.

I found the idea for this craft at Preschool Playbook. Bekah has always loved the song Gray Squirrel, so we sang that as we did our project.

Print a coloring page of a squirrel off the computer. I found mine my googling squirrel coloring pages.
Then, have your child drizzle glue all over the squirrel's tail. (don't mind the bedhead...she had just woken up!)


Put cotton balls all over the tail....Bekah wanted a nice bushy tail!


Using a spray bottle with blue and red food coloring (I just mixed until I had a somewhat gray color), have child spray the cotton ball tail. Bekah really loved doing this part.


Let Dry and sing Gray Squirrel, Gray Squirrel, Swish your busy tail. We also read our book again. What a fun project!

You can see what others have done at A Mommy's Adventures.

Open Ended Art - Matisse

Bekah is finally beginning to feel better, only a lingering cough now and then. We're not sure if it was H1N1 or not, but it was sure terrible! She's still very tired, so I thought this would be a perfect project to get back into the swing of things.

We went to the library today to pick up a few books on Henri Matisse. To be honest, I didn't know anything about him before this.

The one book we picked up was called A Magical Day With Matisse by Julie Merberg and Suzanne Bober. It has his artwork throughout and Bekah really enjoyed this one.

The second one is Matisse, The King of Color by Laurence Anholt. This book was also very good and went more in depth of Matisse's story, but my daughter's attention span was gone by the middle of the book. I would recommend that book for an older child.


After reading these books together we went to work on our art. Bekah wanted to do artwork with shapes, so she told me what colors and shapes to cut and she glued them on the paper. Here is our version of Matisse's artwork.

Sorry I don't have any pictures of the process. I couldn't get my camera to work. Well, at least I got one of the finished product!

You can see what others have done for Open Ended art at Mommies Wise Little Bookworms.

Hanging in there

Sorry for not posting lately. Bekah got sick on Wednesday. She was throwing up (thankfully that was over in 24 hours) and now has a terrible cough. I called the Doctor and waited a half hour to get through. The nice thing is that I could never get her to drink tea and now she will. I make it lukewarm with honey and she drinks it well. It helps the cough.

We didn't do too much for Halloween, so that stunk, but she really didn't seem to mind. Hopefully we'll be back doing fun activities and I'll be back blogging in a few days. Hope you're all well and had a Happy Halloween!