March 2011

Hammering (real) Nails

Since my daughter (now almost 3 y.o.) practiced hammering with golf tees back in October, I’ve been waiting and waiting for just the right time to introduce her to REAL nails! After working really well at piercing gumdrops with toothpicks, I had a feeling that the time had come. So I dusted off an old [...]

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Gumdrop Sculptures

The provocation: A bowl of gumdrops and a handful of toothpicks. The first question: “Can I eat these?” Oh yeah, I guess they do kind of look like a snack. The second provocation (after we each ate a gumdrop, just to get that elephant out of the room): A square base of four gumdrops, attached [...]

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Pitched Roofs

Our neighbor’s house had a leaky roof and the handy man came for a visit. This peaked my daughter’s interest and she wanted to know why. If you’ve had a small child living in your home, I’m sure you’re familiar with this barrage of non-stop questions that keep coming even if you’ve already answered them…at [...]

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Colander Sculpture

This surprisingly fun sculptural activity kept my 33 month old engaged for a long while. And the added bonus is that it’s also great for strengthening fine-motor skills, making color choices, and developing spatial understanding by making sense of the exterior and interior of an object. The set up A handful of pipe cleaners and a [...]

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Rubber Band Painting

One of the almost-weekly segments of this site is called Creative Experiments, and last week’s experiment was to create something with Rubber Bands. Danielle and her daughter Simone were the first to participate with their Elastic Project, which you can view on Danielle’s blog. I love how they hung the piece from the ceiling. I’ve had [...]

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Making Chocolate Lollipops

Welcome Spring and Hellooooo Rain. This past weekend it poured. All weekend long. So we stayed in and made the best of it by inventing all sorts of rainy day activities like playing with our new chocolate lollipop molds. Recipe 1/3 cup chocolate chips 1 heaping tablespoon of butterscotch chips. (N isn’t super fond of [...]

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Coffee Filter Flowers

We recently started using a Chemex coffee pot (next to Blue Bottle, it makes the BEST coffee ever — anyone else with me?) and we had a stack of old filters collecting dust, waiting to be repurposed into watercolor coffee filter flowers! I mixed a little water to liquid watercolors, and added droppers. You could [...]

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The Creative Life with Kids

There’s never been an art material that I didn’t like. When my husband and I recently teased out our family values in order to better focus on our priorities, it was no surprise when we each identified living a creative life as a guiding principle for our family. We both love to tinker with projects, [...]

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Creative Experiment #4: Rubber Bands

Make something with Rubber bands. (Or binders, laggy bands, elastics, elastic band, lackey bands, and laggy bands…what do YOU call them?). Rubber bands are generally used to hold objects together, but what else have you or your children used them for? Have you wrapped them around Easter eggs, cinched them together to make a paintbrush, added them [...]

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