These are some of our favorite out-of-print “thinking” books.
The back of the books say: “This is not a mathematic book in its usual sense; it is a book about thinking. It is about perspective, and about abstracting to look at things in a new way.” That simple description concisely explains why I love them. These books are unlike any typical math book.
A couple of weeks ago during a string of snow days, we came up with the sweetest afternoon routine, and it centered around something we’re calling “Quiet as a Mouse Tea Time”. Continue reading
Meet Whip Horn, Luc’s newest little buddy. Continue reading
Knitting looms are a great tool for helping young kids make useful garments and play items out of yarn. Click through to see a variety of looms and how we use them.
Fun back story: the idea for today’s post was hatched during a trip to our favorite thrift store, which is slowly becoming “the infamous trip to the thrift store” because so many awesome items were purchased.
We stopped in on a whim to pick up some thermoses, but left with so much more, including a pair of spy glasses for Alex. One thing led to another, and he wanted to write notes in invisible ink. Snow was predicted for a couple days later, so I made sure that we had the supplies on hand, and this little activity made for a fun morning indoors!
You might be surprised to learn that you probably have everything you need to start writing secret spy notes tonight… Continue reading
We love good books. Who doesn’t?
Below you’ll find a running list of our favorite nature books for kids. Have something to recommend? Let us know in the comments!
If you’d like to learn more about some of the books on this list? Check out this post. And we wrote about our favorite kids’ beach reads here. And a tree focused post here.
Finally, you’ll find our full archive of book-related posts here.
Today we’re excited to inject a bit of science into this ingredient series!
You may know this as the “Naked Egg Experiment”. You may have even done this experiment as a kid. In this post we take that basic experiment and add a few more fun steps.
Have you ever used potato stamps before? The idea is super simple : carve a shape into the smooth side of a cut potato, dip it in paint, and print it on paper!
Today we created a simple project inspired by Swimmy, a book written and illustrated by Leo Lionni.
Lionni is said to be the first children’s illustrator to use collage as his main medium. In this book, the illustrations are printed. And, on many of the pages, you can see that the same stamps are used over and over again, as in these examples with the fish.
Swimmy’s story is relatively simple. He stands out from his school of fish, but sadly one day they are all eaten (except him!). He ventures out into the ocean and sees many wonderful sites. Eventually he finds another school of fish, and this time he teaches his new family a way to work together and protect themselves.
If you’ve never read it before, we’ve included a video of the story above. But really, there’s nothing better than reading aloud to your kids, and it’s nice to have the book on hand to discuss the artwork and how to use a couple of stamps to make a complex image, so we suggest picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore or the library.
You’ll see that we focused our work on the pages of Swimmy and his school of fish. But there are many beautiful illustrations in the book that you could recreate (my other favorite is the seaweed printed using doilies).
I prefer keeping projects simple, because I often believe that that helps little kiddos create beautiful artwork without too many complications, confusing steps, or accidental blunders (like mixing all of the colors and just getting brown!). In an effort to keep this project simple, we used just two stamps and two colors, EXCEPT at the last moment when we added a black Swimmy to our pieces.
The nice thing about using Swimmy as inspiration for these projects is that the kiddos can stamp a school of fish going in any direction. As you can see in the original work, fish are swimming up, down, and all around.
And as you can see from our pile of work above, stamping takes a bit of practice. At first the boys wanted to stamp and slide the potatoes. Similar to how they would slide a paintbrush across the paper. It took a little bit of help and some practice to get them comfortable with stamping and lifting the stamp straight up.
This is a great project for making a book “come alive” for the kids. Imitating art found in books is a great way to expose kids to different techniques. It encourages them to start questioning how different pieces of art are made and gives them the tools to start making their own original pieces!
Today we’re popping in with a super simple science activity : flower dissections!
Flowers aren’t often the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions a dissection (maybe you’re thinking about that frog or shark from high school biology?). Read on to see why we think flowers are the perfect specimen for preschool dissections.
Today we’re sharing some of our favorite games for preschoolers. I’m on a mission to start family or family+friends game nights in our house. It hasn’t happened yet, mainly because I’m (almost) all talk and no game (hah!). I haven’t invited anyone over, and I haven’t opened an adult game box in years. But behind the scenes, I’m cultivating a few young game-lovers and am slowly building my game-night momentum.
With a 4yo and 2yo in the house, we’re still slightly new to the kids’ game section. Fortunately, I think we’ve already found some great ones. Sometimes we play in the evenings as a family, and I love the together time. But the mom in me also loves that playing games can be used to reinforce other skills that they’re learning. Read on to see what I’m talking about.
This guide contains a few games that we’ve played and liked. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift for a 3-5 yo, I really don’t think you can go wrong with anything on our list. A few are card games, making them perfect stocking stuffers.
