Imagination

Sensory Activity: Wheat Berries

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Could your child spend hours sifting flour or scooping sand? Sensory activities like these can fully absorb the minds of young children as they test the limits of materials and build imaginary worlds through pouring, filling, and building. This sensory activity is so easy, it doesn’t require a lot of materials, and the process of exploring [...]

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Creative Ways to Spend a Sick Day

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How do you get through sick days? With Spring just around the corner, I thought that maybe maybe maybe we would be the lucky ones who made it through winter without getting sick. Wishful thinking! My oldest came down with a fever the other day and we’ve been holed up at home, gathering our energy [...]

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Sensory Activity: Shredded Paper

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If you’re afraid of a mess, I have to warn you up front that this is a messy one. But it’s not a dirty kind of mess and if you stick with me here, you might become a shredded paper convert like me. It all started innocently, and rather boring, enough. It was a bill-paying [...]

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10 Simple Ways to Raise Creative Kids

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“The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” — Alan Alda I think a lot about what’s involved with raising creative children, and [...]

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Pop up Paper Zoo {Free Download}

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Back in September I wrote about how we made a Pop-Up Paper Zoo. This is one of my favorite posts because the project is child-directed and it can lead to imagination-building and experimentation. At the end of the post, I asked if anyone would like to have a PDF template so you could make these yourself. There were [...]

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How to Build a Simple Clip Fort

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How was your Valentine’s Day? We had a drizzly pre-Valentines romp in the park with friends and I spent Valentine’s morning leading a fun docent training workshop at the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA). Under the leadership of Education Director, Lucy Larson, SJMA one of the most visitor-centered museums around. It’s not a huge museum, [...]

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Paper Bag Museum

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In case you missed yesterday’s post, we’re hosting a super fun Paper Bag Creative Challenge that brought over 50 kid-directed paper bag projects together in one spot. Today I’m excited to share our own take on the challenge. This is how our art table looked the other morning. Me and the girls crafting up a paper bag collage storm. [...]

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Organic Shape Monsters for Halloween

When I saw this idea over at We Heart Art, I loved it for its open-ended qualities and simplicity. Joanna did this project with Kindergarteners, but it was adaptable to my 3-year old and could easily scale up for older children. Plus, the monster theme played out so nicely with Halloween right around the corner. [...]

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Fine Tuning the Mud Pie Kitchen

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In case you’re one of the few who doesn’t read my blog religiously (gasp!), we’ve been building a mud pie kitchen in our yard. It began in part as a way to lure my child into our yard, but its popularity with our resident 3-year old has organically turned this into one of our summer’s [...]

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