To Do In This Town

As our celebration of National Children’s Art Month continues, we are trying to find ways to fit art into all our subjects. We really needed to practice math facts and were really tired of the ways we had been practicing them. I found the book MATH-terpeices by Greg Tang, at the library and it was a fantastic way to use art to practice math in new and fun ways. Below is a picture guide to our process. You’ll notice my middle girl used hers only for addition facts while my oldest decided to see if she could make 2 multiplication 2 addition and at least one subtraction fact for each number. You could also use this project to practice simple counting.

Supplies:
MATH-terpieces by Greg Tang
3×5 cards (you could also use cut up squares of paper)
Dot Art (I used these because they are fun but not super messy and dry really fast)
Wet-Wipes or Paper Towels
Paper Divided into 4 squares, with one number written in each square
Marker or pencil to write facts with

1. Flip through the book and notice how the author uses a riddle about a piece of art and then smaller pieces of art to solve math problems. Tell your kiddos that you’ll be using small pieces of art to solve problems too.

2. Make your small pieces of art. I had mine make 10 small pieces using the dot art. I had them make the same shape and reminded them not to add too much detail. They were dry and ready to use by the time we were done making ten. (If you are doing this project in parts, I would stop here on day one.)

3. Once your parts are ready, read through the pages one at a time and try the challenge on each page. We did ours all in one day, but you could go one page at a time or a few at a time whatever works for you.

4. We made the facts with our art cards and then wrote them on our paper in fun colors.

5. When we were done, we practiced saying the facts we found.

Since we did this project, my girls have been talking a lot about facts and looking for ways to make them in real life. This thrills me.
We hope you have fun making math art and stop to enjoy the art all around us in this great town!

It’s spring break and it’s National Children’s Art Month. That sounds like the perfect time for some fun art themed field trips. Here are two of our favorite art places to visit.

Here in Lincoln: We love the Great Plains Art Gallery located across the street from the Lied Center at 13th and Q Street. It is a lovely collection of art that is either created by Nebraska Artisits or has a Nebraska based theme. The upstairs gallery is a great variety of paintings in various styles and techniques and the lower gallery accessible through a stroller friendly elevator has more 3d art like sculptures and artifacts. The lower gallery is usually a themed exhibit so check their website to see what is on display before you head out. Don’t forget the location is right downtown so there are lots of fun places to eat lunch. While we loved the museum, we are big Lewis and Clark fans so my girl’s favorite thing was the statue outside.

If you are wanting other art musuems close by the Sheldon and it’s sculpture garden are within walking distance but are bigger and not Nebraska themed.    Don’t forget the Quilt Museum on East Campus as well.  If you pick that one, the campus up the street features the dairy store and lovely places to picnic.

Kearney:  We just returned from this field trip and loved it.  Kearney is home to the Museum of Nebraska Art or MONA.  It is a lovely 3 gallery collection of art housed in a historic building.  The map on the site is accuarte and easy to follow and there is lots of close free parking.  It also has elevators.  It too features a unique sculpture garden.  We loved visiting the permenant collection and the traveling ones as well.  Their site has a schedule of exhibits if you want to know what is on display.  For the rest of this month, the upper gallery features a beautiful display of paper cranes that support an important cause as well as one of the most unique art and fabric dispays I have ever seen.  It too has a crane theme, the girls loved that this display includes audio of the sounds of cranes the entire time you are viewing it.

If you do venture down the road to Kearney, it’s only a two hour drive, be sure to plan time to stop and see the Cranes who are migrating this time of year.  They too are a form of art.  Here are a few other ideas of how to make good use of a day trip to Kearney.  The park really is amazing.

We hope you have a great spring break and take time to enjoy some art in this great town!

It’s National Kids Art Month. What a perfect time to use some fun books to learn a few art concepts. We’ll kick off our art celebration with the book Lots of Dots by Craig Frazier. It is a really fun book about all the places and colors you might find dots in. I love the simple text and striking colorful illustrations. After we enjoy the book we’ll do 2 projects as a part of our art month celebration.

Project #1: Art is Everywhere: Seeing Dots

For this project you’ll need a notebook or a piece of paper and a clip board and colored pencils. I like to put the colored pencils in a bag so they don’t get lost or spilled quite so easy.

Then say, “Wow, there were dots everywhere in this book. I wonder if there are dots all over our town?” Let your kiddos think and share their ideas a bit and then say “Let’s see if we can spot the dots!”

Load your kiddos and your notebook and pencils in your vehicle and head out to see dots. Instruct your kids to draw the dots they see and write a word or two that tells where they see them. If you have non-writers they can draw and you can add words later. I am a bit strategic with our route, we’ll headed to the mall and walk around there so I can help with the thinking and labeling and so we can stop for a dot treat at Cherry on Top! We’ll eat our favorite flavors in a bowl with pink dots and only have dot shaped toppings.
As we eat we can chat about our favorite dots and some of the fun colors we have been seeing dots in.

When we get home we’ll do the next part of the project.

Project #2: Painting a Dot Book

1. Each child chooses 3 of their favorite dots they saw to turn into book pages.
2. We used this site to think about mixing colors. I use paper bowels to mix and the small sized craft sticks to mix the paint with. I also keep paper towels and wet wipes close by. My girls love mixing paint so we spent quite a bit of time talking about paint and colors. As we are choosing colors to use for the book, we’ll remember the Lots of Dots book and think of happy bold colors and how we might mix colors to get the ones we want, we will use the Color Dance book as a guide/reference.
3. After we have experimented with paint and color we’ll paint the three pages for their book. I will ask they they paint themselves in one solid color, just like in the book and then add the dots leaving quite a bit of white so the colors really pop.
4. We’ll paint a fun dot page using lots of fun colors and lots of different sized dots to serve as our story cover.
5. While the paint dries, we’ll clean up the painting supplies and ourselves.
6. The final steps will be to add simple text in black, just like in the book. “dots on….” or “dots that ….” and to make a title. For the title, I’ll ask the girls to think of fun words that rhyme with dot.
7. After the book is dry and the words are added, just staple it together and you have your very own dot book full of color and you have officially celebrated National Kids Art Month!

**If you don’t want to make a whole book, you could just make one fun page and display it in your house.

We hope you have a great time seeing and doing art in this great town.

Presidents’ Day is February 20th this year. This is a fantastic time to learn a bit of history and have a lot of fun in the process. This is how we plan to learn and celebrate this year:

Presidents’ Day by Anne Rockwell is a great book for kids. It is a really fun read that is full of facts and cool ways to express them. The illustrations are really diverse and engaging. We will read this book together several times as we study Presidents’ Day. Once we are done reading, we’ll do a couple of activities to think more about what we learned.

Floating Facts: The illustrations in the book picture Washington floating in a boat across the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. Keeping with that theme, we’ll use our laundry basket to row across the living room. With each movement the child in the basket will state something they learned from reading the book. You could play this game with any book or website you use to learn about Washington or any of the presidents.

Floatin' Facts

Chasin’ Down the Facts: This book talks a bit about Abe’s hat, in another book we read, we learned that it was so tall it often blew off his head and he chased it because it was full of his important papers! Following that theme we made some tall hats.
I wanted the making of the hats to be quick so we went super simple.
Just take a large piece of black construction paper and roll it in a cylinder shape.
Then make a thin lip around one end.
Next take an upside down paper plate and place the cylinder in the middle so the lip is on the plate.
Staple the plate to the lip and presto, a tall hat.

Once the hats are made you are ready to chase down some facts. Simply line up on one side of a room. Then have kids “wear” their hat by placing it on their heads and begin walking. The goal is to walk from one end of the room to the other, but they must stop each time the hat falls off their head. As they stop and put the hat back on, they must say a fact about Lincoln or presidents day (or any of your presidential studies). You can go one at a time or in teams whatever works for you.

This is a great game to play on line as you think more about the actual job of the president.

Here are some fun ideas for “presidential food”.

Have a great week celebrating some history in this great town.

Valentine’s Day is such a fun time to celebrate people we love, just because we love them. One of our favorite ways to celebrate is to make and give away “heart” gifts. Here is what we are making this year.

“Thumb-body Loves You” Cards:
These are easy to make, highly personal and darling.
You’ll need:
A Blank Card or piece of paper
colored stamp ink
thin lined markers or sharpies
wet wipes

Step 1. Write your message across the top of the card. Ours will say “3 Thumb-bodies in Nebraska, Love YOU!”
Step 2. One at a time have your kiddos stick their thumb in the ink color of their choice and press it down on the card. Remember to space them far enough apart that they can decorate them without hurting the next print.

Step 3. Wash the child’s thumb you printed with the wet wipes!

Step 4:  We usually read a Valentine book while wait for our projects to dry. After the card is dry, let the kids decorate their thumb-print person. I do remind mine not to over do the decorating, we usually do a face and little hands and feet and some hair.

Step 5: Have each child write or dictate a message on the inside of the card. Include a cute photo and send some Valentine happiness to friends and family far away.

A HomeMade Heart Pillow

These are new for us this year so I can only offer a few ideas I have before we tackle this project.

1.  I think we’ll make ours a lot smaller, so the finished heart is 6 inches across.  I’m thinking we could give two or three as a little decorative set.  They would be cheaper and a lot easier to sew.

2.  If we do make the bigger ones, we’ll machine sew them and then just close the stuffing hole with hand stitching (we’ll still hand stitch the bow on, I can see my girls wanting to hand stitch other decorations like smaller hearts as well).

If you don’t have time to make a little love gift, here are some great LOCAL places to buy one.   Remember, a gift card for a sweet treat is even sweeter if it comes with a little homemade gift card inviting the recipient to join you on a “date” to enjoy the treat together!

Great Local “Sweet Treats”

Le Cupcake

Butterfly Bakery

Ivanna Cone

Great Local Gift Shops

Kreative Greetings

Avant Card

Great Local Photographers (this is my favorite kind of treat!)

Ashley Nicole Photo

Joyful Photography

Sullivan Photography

Hope you have a fun week thinking about and planning ways to celebrate the people you love in this great town!

The dusting of snow this week thrilled my girls. While we didn’t make an actual snowman, it renewed their hopes of snowman and sledding yet this winter. All the snow talk made their teacher mamma really curious about the science of snow. We had a fun time learning, we hope you enjoy it too.

How is snow made?
We read this article, which I thought did a fantastic job of explaining the concept without losing the girls in the details.  It also has lots of fun extension ideas.

Then, we watched this video. It has a lot of information and was made by students, I love the idea of kids learning from other kids!

How Snow Is Formed-A Short Video

Once we had a basic idea of how snow was made, we decided to do a few projects with snow.

Marshmallow SnowFlakes: You’ll need toothpicks and small and large marshmallows. If you are worried about the toothpicks, you could use pieces of pipe cleaner as well.

Choose a large marshmallow to serve as the center (the small molecule that starts it all) of your snowflake. Attach 5 toothpicks from the sides of it. From there use your imagination to make as many patterns as you can by adding the small marshmallows onto the toothpicks. You can add a few marshmallows or just one, you can leave spaces, you can connect the ends, your imagination is the only limit to the possibilities. We loved making lots of different patterns and remembering that each snowflake is a unique design.

Snowy Water: We wanted to know how much water is in a snowflake. We scooped snow into a measuring cup and recorded our starting measurement. Then we all made a prediction about how much water the snow would turn into. We let ours melt naturally and checked often. As it began to melt, we did some changing of our predictions. If you want it to move along faster, you can either set the snow in a warm spot or heat it slowly on a stove. Be sure to record your final measurement, and check if your predictions were correct or not.

Winter is the Warmest Season!
No, you didn’t read that wrong, we found this darling book by Lauren Stringer at the library last week and have so enjoyed it. We read the story many times over. Then we made a list of all the things that changed in the story. (This went really well with the changing from snow to water experiment.) After we made our list, we brainstormed a few more things that could change from the cool of summer to the warmth of winter. Then we picked our favorite reason why winter is the warmest season and drew an illustration to match it.

We hope you have a great week in this great town!