March 2011

Traveling Magnets

While we make a lot of art in our home, I cherish any project that develops creative and critical thinking skills. I’m attracted to fun activities with an experiential twist, and I’ve noticed lately that we’ve been dabbling in the worlds of science, literature, and dramatic play, as much as we have in that of [...]

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Art Dice

Thumbnail image for Art Dice

I’ve been saving these wooden cubes for the just the right project, and it recently occurred to me that they could be repurposed into Art Dice: a fun tool for creating some randomly generated art. Every flip of a dice becomes an opportunity to explore art vocabulary, drawing skills, color recognition, and shape identification, to name [...]

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Dream Catcher

“If you have bad dreams you have to spit them out of your mouth and into the dream catcher.” After a recent visit with some friends in their new house, my daughter could not stop talking about a dream catcher that they had. And she wanted one for herself. Of course. She also wanted a [...]

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Funnel Painting

This was inspired by an idea we found in Mary Ann Kohl’s Preschool Art. I know I’ve said this many times before, but Mary Ann’s books are brimming with creative and engaging projects, and each of mine are dog-eared in a million places. We used materials that we already had around the house — low [...]

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The Butter Experiment

Last week we made butter! I have friends who made this fine food back in their grade school/scouting/summer camp days, but I haven’t had this pleasure until now. As such, this was much an experiment for me as it was for my child. And it was SO worth it. This project appealed to me because [...]

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Rainbow Play Dough

Hello happy St. Patty’s Day surprise! My plan was to make a simple batch of play dough to replace the sparkly dried out purple stuff that happily met our cookie-making, glitter infusing, practice cutting, snowman-making needs over the past two months. I asked my daughter what color she would like this time around, and she [...]

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Scary Spaghetti

If you haven’t already seen the newest addition to our site and you like a good challenge, check out the Experiments section. There are currently three posted experiments, which are assignment-like challenges that you can do with your kids. If you tinker with one of these, you have the option of adding a link back [...]

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What can we spin?

My daughter was glued to the spin art table at a carnival that we went to a few months ago, so when I saw this easy spin art machine from Crayola I couldn’t resist purchasing it. My friend Jean at The Artful Parent recently set up a fun spin art project for her five year old [...]

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