Outdoors

How to Make a Paper Airplane

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Have you ever made a paper airplane? Did you learn how to make it from a book? Or maybe it was from the kid you shared a desk with in the third grade? I fall into the second camp, learning from my friends in school. And for all of the hundreds of airplanes we made, [...]

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50 Earth Day Activities

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Earth Day is our annual reminder to slow down and appreciate the bounty of the earth and all of the blessings it gives to our lives. As an avid recycler and upcycler, I’ve always loved Earth Day (April 22 this year), and I wanted to mark it with a round up of activities from some of my favorite [...]

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Crushed Flower Experiment

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Now that summer is coming to an end (sniff — I’m kind of in denial — you?), it’s a good time to harvest some of your last blooms for some flower-painting experiments. We took a walk around the neighborhood and picked some weeds from wild roadside gardens, and also selected a handful of flowers and [...]

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Natural Playground with Tree Stumps

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Let your walks now be a little more adventurous. – Henry David Thoreau Do you have a natural playground in your yard or near your home? A natural playground is an outdoor play area that’s landscaped with materials such as logs, dirt, grassy hills, sand, natural bridges, and streams instead of plastic playground equipment. Aside [...]

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Messy Art: Splat Paint Olympics

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Today I’m over on the Melissa and Doug blog, writing about our experience making Splat Paint Olympic Rings with household sponges. Painting with non-traditional materials does wonders for helping children look at the world with fresh eyes. And throwing paint-soaked sponges? Well, that’s just silly fun.   While we did this with the end-game of [...]

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How to Make a One-minute Bubble Solution

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I’ve been so busy with all sorts of parenting/household/traveling/social things lately, and love to find easy projects that make my kids happy. This is one of those things. My daughter’s preschool has a big bubble table set up all summer long, and it’s a magical place where the kids can chill out and regroup while [...]

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Plant a Garden with Kids

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Do you have a little spot of dirt for your kids to garden in? If not, today I’d like to challenge you to think about your outdoor spaces and see if you can come up with a spot that’s just for the kids. It can be anything from a large plot to a couple of [...]

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Thrifting for the Garden

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Is it warm in your part of the world? Are your kids spending lots of time outdoors? Summer is here and our garden is getting so much attention. My kids are happy when they’re outside, so I’ve been thinking up ways to turn our outdoor spaces into play pockets and learning laboratories. In addition to [...]

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Creative Adventures: Tidepooling

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 Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. - Edward de Bono, psychologist and writer This post is something new for me. I usually write about our hands-on projects, but I thought it would be fun to take our creative thinking out into the great wide world. [...]

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