Happy Summer!

 Happy Summer... I'm just sayin' !! 

I'm soooo glad it's hot and sunny! I just saw on The Weather Channel that it was snowing somewhere out West!! I am soooo glad I'm in the hot, sunny South. School is out and we've already had our first big party on our porch!! This sign is hanging on said porch and I feel a watermelon project or two coming up for the kiddos!

We love having cook outs with friends on the porch, going to the beach, reading in the evenings and I love working in the yard planting flowers in the Summer ( the rest of the fam is back on the screened porch for this one!!)...what do you like to do??

P.S. Summer is my catch-up time for scrapbooking, too. 

Or at least I try but I am never "caught up".

One more flower for Mom...

I needed one more  activity for a Mother's Day project.  It needed to be quick and from items I had on hand... and no prep time!! Easy enough... I had all of this stuff close at hand:

Paint samples that I punched into  1, 1 1/2 and 1 3/4 inch scalloped and plain circles

green popsicle sticks - mine came that way or give them a quick coat of whatever green paint you have hanging around

Crayola Model Magic - love this stuff

scraps of green tissue paper

glue dots (for a quick project) or white glue

A bag of Rolos candy - I did run out and buy those!! Yum and the perfect color foil wrapper :)

and some of those little galvanized buckets I've talked about before...

We put it all together and we have one cute flower for Mom.

We chose 2 of the punched circles - any color, scalloped or plain- their choice- and glued them together.  We glued this to a popsicle stick. We cut some green circles in half to make "leaves" and glued those on the popsicle stick stem. Then the best part ( I have found that including an edible component in a project really helps everyone focus!) is the Rolo.  A glue dot on the back holds the candy "center" on the flower. We put a glob of air dry clay in the bucket ( you could use a small clay pot if you can't find the little buckets) and pushed the popsicle stick stem down into it. We crumpled some green tissue paper scraps and pushed them around the stem to cover up the white clay. Easter grass would be cute too but I am quite frankly over Easter grass at this point!!

Cute. Quick. Everyone loved choosing their paint sample favorites. Mom will love it. And there were Rolos leftover for everyone to have one.

Happy Mother's Day!

Guaranteed to BLOOM by Mother's Day!!!

Yikes! With Easter falling so late Mother's Day has really crept up on us!! Both of these projects are cute and quick !! And sure to please mom!

The first project is these cute cards made from cardstock, paint chips and left over peel and stick fun foam Valentine's hearts. We made these as cards but if you wanted a more substantial gift the same process could be applied to one of the Dick Blick classroom canvasses I am so fond of ( No, I do not get so much as a thank you from Dick Blick and certainly not a dime - I wish :) - but their product is sooo great and sooo affordable. ) We used black cardstock ( or paint the canvas black - it makes the colors on the paint chips POP!!) then we chose a smaller rectangle of yellow or turquoise paper so the black created a bit of a "frame." Just use compatible colors - this is a "use whatcha got" project but still super cute! I punched circles from the paint chips and cut strips from green paint chips for stems. I put the circles, stems and hearts out on the table and everyone got creative.( The card on the left has petals made from cutting the hearts in half- love it!) They turned out great!!

Next project...

From a few simple supplies you get this...

 A little flower stake for the garden.
So that this will hold up in the yard I use Liquid Nails to glue the clay saucer ( about 5 inches in diameter and about a $1.00) to a wooden stake
( which come in bundles of 12 and cost about 30 cents each. I buy mine at Home Depot and they are for staking out silt fencing - just ask, they'll know what they are. Or have someone cut a 1x2 into stakes.) That dries overnight. Then we use the little tear-dropped sponges in the first picture to sponge white exterior housepaint onto the saucer. I let each child determine the number of petals. Next we used a q-tip to dot yellow paint in the center. Some put 1 dot and others put lots of dots!! We then used a little green paint to decorate the stems. We put stripes or dots or both on them. The leaf is a scrap of green fun foam that we painted veins on and then I used a staple gun to attach the leaf.
We had a bumper crop of blooms this year. Sixty eight, yes 68, 4 year olds are taking home beautiful blooms for their moms!!

Miss Patty stopped by my office today to say that every year she watches the "4's" make these and next time she wants to come make one, too. ( She teaches "2's") Well, she has a surprise coming because I made one step-by-step with the classes and so she gets the extra flower stake in my office!!!  SHHH!! Don't tell her..
Happy Mother's day to Miss Patty!! She has 4 adorable little redheads and she "mothers" her little "two's" all week- she deserves a flower or two, wouldn't you say??

Happy Mother's Day to everyone!!

Earth Day!!

I love Earth Day projects -

I love to reuse, recycle and repurpose anyway plus I love the colors on most of my Earth Day projects. Turquoisey blue and green.  Here are some old favorites.
 

This one I've done for years ( I mean YEARS!) Any age can do it, too. Even 2 year olds. If you can hold a Crayola water based marker you can do this :) Place a coffee filter on a piece of waxed paper and smooth it out so it will lay flat. Then you just scribble with markers in blues and greens. That's it - really. Then the children simply spritz the coffee filter with water using a spray bottle set to the finer mist - not stream. The water based markers "bleed" and create an Earth that looks like you are viewing it from space! Let it dry and then you can laminate it if you like and hang it up on display. ( I think you could make a whole Solar System this way by varying the marker colors and cutting the coffee filter to appropriate size- Let me know if you do.)

At church we celebrate Earth Day as Creation Day and one of our all time favorites is 

Creation Day Snack Mix.

I am the queen of snack mixes ( Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fishes and Loaves, Daniel and the Lion's Den - you name it!!)

I like for the children to make their snack mixes so I line the ingredients up assembly style and put different " scooping utensils" in each item. On the sign in front I put the number of scoops they should put of each item ( and they can always choose to omit an unwanted ingredient!) Since it's a snack mix it really doesn't matter if the directions are followed perfectly:) I give them a cup or baggie and they fix their own snack.

This is the sticker that I print and we stick it on the baggie that the mix goes into. We usually make one to eat right away and one to take home and share :) YUM!
( *on Day One I use mini Oreos and I twist them apart so the white cream shows as the "light" and I separate a big bag of m&m's by color for the different days.)
Be  green  for Earth Day!!

Painting and Looking Forward..

I've been painting and ...

I'm looking forward to teaching ( F-U-N with the ABC's again) at a preschool teacher training workshop in Carrollton, Georgia on Saturday. It's being hosted by Tabernacle Baptist Preschool and it's always fun to be with a large group of teachers- very energizing!! A bonus is that I'll get to squeeze in lunch with my college girl, Mollie!!

Here's a little glimpse of "my bag of tricks"-

projects, ideas, tips, favorite books, recipes and more.

PS- regarding the little signs I've been painting- the ones about morning starting later are not for me :)  They are for friends! I am a morning person and I like to stay up late, too (I'm drinking my fave Earl Grey Tea out of a polka dotted mug right now). 

It's the middle of the afternoon that gets me...

PSS. remember the Sign for Heather?? I was right - she totally cracked up. I hung the one I made for us on our front door and every time someone came to our door I would open the door to laughter or someone saying, " I love the sign. We need one!!"

Spring Break!!

I am ready to look at this!!

I'll be back in a few days...

A Gnome and His Home!!

I am not a gnome in the garden kind of girl ( a pink flamingo on the sandy beach, maybe...) But everyone is loving the new movie and I really like polka dots so the cute little mushrooms appeal to me. It got me to thinking about a doing a little afternoon art camp and

A Gnome and His Home came to mind! Or A Gnome and Her Home... 

Some of the little girls wanted to make "girl gnomes."

 All very cute and very easy. A fun project for a birthday party.

I glued a small saucer to a clay pot ( with Liquid Nails and let it dry 24 hours) to make a little "pedestal." My Wal Mart had these nice taupy brown clay pots and I thought they'd look nice with the moss and natural items as well as the red mushrooms and gnome hats. I purchased little birdhouses from JoAnns' for a dollar and cut off the perches. I bought the pointy top birdhouses because we thought gnomes and their pointy hats would fit better :) We used a scrap of black peel and stick fun foam to make a doorway - we placed it over the birdhouse hole and pressed it on. The gnomes are made from the little turned wooden people that come in bags of 8 at Hobby Lobby. They are less than 40 cents each. 

Then the gnome got a coat of paint and a triangle of felt for the hat. The boy gnomes got a white felt beard and girl gnomes got yarn hair. The mushrooms were made from a small amount of air dry clay. ( We used Crayola Model Magic- I love the stuff because it takes paint so well and it's easy to use and it's white !! ) We used a roll of sheet moss that I purchased for 1/2 price with a coupon at JoAnn's to line the saucer. I had a class of 14 so I needed the whole roll but Dollar Tree had small bags that would do one or two gnome homes. Then we just started gluing on twigs, itty bitty pinecones from my yard, scraps of the moss and leaves from some old silk ivy vines I had saved for crafting. We put the gnomes, their homes and some little rocks and branches in the pedestals and the Gnome and His Home was complete. They are super cute and the children loved making them and using all the natural materials - free, so they could use all they wanted. We used Tacky Glue to hold all the chunky natural materials on the houses. They could be displayed on a protected porch for Spring but wouldn't hold up out in the yard. That would require close adult supervision to use a waterproof glue.

The clay pot and saucer were less than $2.00 for both, the gnome was 40 cents, the birdhouse was $1.00. If you don't have moss around the house it is $1.00 for more than enough at dollar tree. I had the scraps of felt, yarn and fun foam. The rocks, pinecones and twigs were free. I had air dry clay but a small bag is a couple of dollars at Hobby Lobby and would be enough for a ton of mushrooms. You could use bread and a little white glue to make bread dough if you didn't want to buy Model Magic or create mushrooms from found objects. ( A champagne bottle cork looks just like a mushroom when painted but I didn't want to use those at work - for obvious reasons! )

The creative possibilities are endless and it's fun to make miniature little environments and play with them. When the children left with their finished Gnomes and Homes the adults were wishing they had come to the class!!

** Disclaimer continues... I'm still having "issues" when I try to post pictures and with spacing but at least I got something posted this try. I had more pictures to go with this post but they just wouldn't load. I'll keep trying but meanwhile please forgive the weird spacing on my posts!!