Sparkly Cinnamon Pine Smelling Fun

I promised I would attempt to write, and for the first time in about a week, BOTH of my children are napping at the SAME time.  Yippee!  This gives me an opportunity to cram the 30 million things I need to do into a few hours of space.  :)

Just as I predicted would happen, the boys are all about Christmas trees, present wrapping, and the Arctic.  I have to admit that the movie Polar Express has added to the Arctic interest, with the caribous crossing and all.  With that being said, here are a few activities we have accomplished in the last few days.  We have been snowed in, so that has allowed a LOT of time to do things.

Play dough Meets the Arctic

I did not plan on this happening, but I should know when it comes to homeschooling, that what you plan is not always what happens.  I intended on making red and green peppermint smelling play dough, but the odds quickly stacked against me.  First off, I was apparently out of peppermint oil.  And red food coloring.  And it was a sleeting icy mess in which I could not get my car up the driveway, even if I had tried.  So, plan B.  I made green play dough that smelled like Anise, and to still have red play dough, I made it our of beet juice (not the best smelling, but it looked nice).  I got out the Christmas tree cookie cutters, along with snowmen, beads, pipe cleaners, etc., and set it up on their craft table.  They didn't really have a complete interest in it, and I asked the boys why not.  Pierce stated, "we need brown play dough."  So back into the kitchen to make a 3rd batch of play dough, that smelled like cloves and was brown.  When I went back to the table with their play dough, they had the Arctic animals there waiting to be explored.

It was also decided they needed some cinnamon sticks to build pens to keep their animals in, so they could make an Arctic zoo.  They furthered their Arctic play dough adventure by getting their trains, and making train tracks through all of the Arctic animals (hrm, this sounds like a familiar scene in a certain movie).  

Artistic Trees

I have seen various tape resist art on contact paper all throughout Pinterest.  My friend also accomplished this feat with pumpkins back in October.  I decided to try it with the boys, and see how cool the trees would look on the windows, to go along with our other decorations we are making.  I taped off the tree area, and gave them various colors of paint.  Of course, I pictured a green tree with a multi colored background.  But, my two little artists had their own plans.  

 As you can kind of see, the trees were a cool blue/purple/pink/green color.  And the whole piece of contact paper was as well.  I gently moved the paintings downstairs to dry by the wood stove, and came back to find all of the paint flaking off the contact paper.  I don't know if there was something I was supposed to do to the contact paper before we painted, or if we used the wrong type of paint.  However, I have promised the boys this week we will try a different contact paper experiment.  I was so sad.  Their art looked awesome!


Sparkly Pine

We have had quite the growing collection of pine cones in our house.  Or as Carter puts it, pine corns. I knew eventually I would do something with them, other than sort them by size, weigh them, etc., but I just couldn't figure out what.  It was actually while painting the trees that I decided we needed to paint the pine cones and play with glitter.  My boys LOVE glitter.  To the point that I am convinced there will forever be glitter in our floor boards, couches, etc., no matter how many times I clean and vacuum.  I have come to terms with this.

I had the boys start out by painting their pine cones with which ever colors of paint they wanted.  I then layered the glitter in a shallow tray so that they could roll the pine cones and glitter the tips.  Well, they loved the first part of those directions.  But, the second part was vetoed.  The tips of the pine cones being covered in glitter was not enough.  They needed more sparkle.  And so we developed our fine motor skills by pinching glitter and sprinkling it over the pine cones.  These will be added to our tree.  :)

I loved how they worked together to create their art.  And I love how they came out.


The most important part of all of this was the boys were able to express themselves and have fun all at the same time.  They are able to show pride in their work, and love to show everyone their ornaments on the tree when they come in the house.  I also love to see that they are making correlations between what they read/see and what is actually tangible in their hands.  That gives me those warm, tingly, goose bump feelings.

Yesterday we spent about 75% of our day in the snow, and this morning we spent it grocery shopping.  But it was great that they were pointing out different numbers, letters, and items.  We were also discussing what was healthy vs what was not healthy thanks to the lovely NuVal number system we have.  I cannot wait for them to wake up soon, since we have plans of making some really awesome gingerbread houses out of graham crackers today (way too busy to make gingerbread).  Hope you are all having a great week, and I will try again in a few days to do some more updates.

Thanks for reading!