Easy Peasy Playdough

For our preschool, I usually make this recipe X 7 but I make it two batches (X 3 and X 4). That allows 8 kids to each have an ample amount of playdough at once.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup warm water
• 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
• 1 teaspoon oil
• 1/4 cup salt
• food coloring

Directions:

Mix all ingredients except the food coloring in a mixing bowl with a whisk.


Add food coloring and pour mixture in a large saute or omelet pan. (The color with change slightly once cooked.)

Stir over medium heat until all liquid is cooked into dough.


Remove mixture from pan, allow to cool and knead until smooth.

Store in a plastic bag once completely cooled.

The Graduates

Both Jack and Logan had milestones in June...graduations!

Logan graduated from preschool after attending it for 2 3/4 years.



And Jack graduated from kindergarten, his first of many elementary years.

This is the gift I made (I mean, Jack made, of course!) for Jack's teacher, Mrs. Jung. I'm hoping we see it hanging in her classroom next year and hoping that Logan has her for kindergarten!

Congrats (belatedly) to my two big boys! I'm so proud of you!

Easy Peasy Playdough

For our preschool, I usually make this recipe X 7 but I make it two batches (X 3 and X 4). That allows 8 kids to each have an ample amount of playdough at once.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup warm water
• 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
• 1 teaspoon oil
• 1/4 cup salt
• food coloring

Directions:

Mix all ingredients except the food coloring in a mixing bowl with a whisk.


Add food coloring and pour mixture in a large saute or omelet pan. (The color with change slightly once cooked.)

Stir over medium heat until all liquid is cooked into dough.


Remove mixture from pan, allow to cool and knead until smooth.

Store in a plastic bag once completely cooled.

Will you be my Valentine?

Last year, I wanted to hand-make Valentines with the boys for school. At the time, I even posted what I hoped I would do this year. I'm proud and even surprised to say that I stuck to it.

After giving the boys a few different choices of Valentines to make for their preschool classmates, Jack chose to make the heart crayons and Logan wanted to make Valentines using glow sticks. Here are the finished products with directions following for anyone interested in making their own:











You Color My World
I found various different "recipes" to make crayons. I mixed a few together to get this one.
Supplies:

• crayons (I used a brand new box of 64 crayons and some odds and ends that were around the house)
• cupcake wrappers
• silicon candy molds or silicon ice trays or cookie-cutters
• red card stock
• double-sided adhesive
  

First, preheat your oven to 275 degrees.

Use a sharp knife to score/slice the paper wrapper on the crayons. Have your kiddos unwrap the crayons and break them into small pieces. (Each crayon into 3 or 4 pieces worked pretty well for us.) Put the broken pieces in the cupcake wrappers and place them on a foil-covered (for protection) cookie sheet.

Place the cookie sheet in the hot oven and remove when the wax is melted (about 8-10 minutes). (I only placed 3 or 4 crayon filled cupcake wrappers in the oven at a time because once they come out of the oven they cool quickly and you need to work fast.)

From here there are two ways to finish the process. I used the first method.
1. Gently pick up the cupcake wrappers filled with melted wax and pour into the silicon molds or ice cube trays. (You can mix different colors or use a toothpick to swirl the melted wax into a design.) Let them cool (you can speed up the process by putting them in the freezer) before popping them out of the molds. (For the record, the melted wax stained my silicone ice cube trays.)

2. Let the wax cool in the papers before using a cookie-cutter to cut out different shapes.

After one of the above two steps, gently rub the crayon to smooth rough edges.

We then attached the crayons to pieces of red cardstock with one of two messages: "You color my world!" or "You make my heart melt!".


You Make My Heart Glow
Supplies:

• glow stick bracelets (pack of 12 at T@rget in the $1 bin)
• 2 colors of cardstock
• double-sided adhesive

Cut out medium size hearts (I used a cookie-cutter for a stencil) from the red card stock. Cut out smaller hearts form the blue paper. Gently fold (but don't crease) the medium hearts and use a hole punch at an angle to cut two holes. (I had to have a test heart to get the angle right.)

Write your message on the medium-sized hearts: "You Make My Heart Glow!" or "You Light Up My Life!". Insert a glow stick through the holes being careful not to snap/activate it. Using the double-stick adhesive, attach a small heart to each end of the glowstick so that it resembles cupid's arrow.


I wanted to get this posted sooner in case someone actually wanted to copy these ideas but in true procrastinator fashion, I just finished assembling the last of the Valentines...the night before the kids are to hand them out.

The Idiot's Guide to Gardening

I'm quite sure that if I head over to Amazon and do a search for "Idiot's Guide" and "fruit and vegetable gardening," I'd find a book (or two or three) that would mention my husband and I by name.

Months and months ago, maybe even a year ago, Scott built two 4x2 foot raised containers so we could do some square foot gardening. Without doing any research about what would grow in our area and when, we set out with the boys and purchased seeds. To keep a short story short, I'll just say that possums, squirrels, our dog, the boys and myself contributed to the garden's demise. Sorry Scott...

After Logan recently decided that some chopped peanuts were really watermelon seeds and was desperate to plant them, did we decide to revive the garden. Once again without any research we set out with the boys and purchased seeds and seedlings. We spent one morning planting basil, peppers, lettuce, cantaloupe, broccoli, carrots, strawberries and a few others. The next day the boys made their own watering cans.

This was an activity I was planning on writing a Summer Survival post about. I'm a couple of months late but here it is:

Homemade watering cans:

This is a project that I like for a couple of reasons...it reuses trash and saves me money because I didn't have to buy new. The watering cans are made from plastic milk jugs. After cleaning them well, you'll need to use a hammer and nail to poke holes in the lids.

Then the kids can get their hands on them to decorate them. We used markers and foam stickers.


Fill them with water and the they are ready to go!

After a little less than two weeks (and some watering help from Papa), this is what our garden now looks like:

Tuesday's Tips for Summer Survival - Marble Paintings

Tuesday's Tips for Summer Survival (TTSS) is a weekly carnival to help mamas survive the long summer days. The goal is to share kid-friendly tips so we can end up on the other side of this summer with what little sanity we had when we started.

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Marble Paintings:
I read about this activity in a magazine (probably my favorite, Wondertime, which unfortunately ceased publication) about a year ago and always remembered it.

You'll need:

a shoebox or lid

a piece of paper cut to fit inside the box/lid

paint

cups

marble

Put the paper in the bottom of the box/lid. Fill the cups with just enough paint to cover the bottom of the cup. Drop a marble in the paint and roll it around by shaking the cup.
Gently drop the marble from the cup to the box.
Tilt and shake the box to get the paint covered marble to roll around.

Repeat with more colors if desired.

Remove the paper from the box and let dry.

This entertained Jack (age 4) for quite awhile. He tried different techniques...fast frantic shaking versus long back and forth slow tilts. He also tried a large marble versus a smaller marble. Logan (age 3) has a shorter attention span and only made one or two paintings before running around the yard like a wild banshee.

Sorry the pics are a bit shadowy...we were doing this late one afternoon.

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Here's how you can participate in TTSS (and please do):
Grab the code for my button (over there on the left) and write your own post about a kid-friendly idea that might help a mama keep her sanity this summer. (Feel free to include the obligatory cute kid photo!)

Then come back here and add your link to the widget built by my wonderful and geeky talented husband. (Pays to be married to a geek!) Simply add your new (or even an old) post's link to the form below.

Then, most importantly, visit the other blogs that have linked and leave comments, hopefully encouraging them to give us more good ideas next week.

Jar of appreciation

Jack and Logan's preschool is very unique. There is only one classroom, so kids 2 1/2 to over 5 are all together. This also means that Jack and Logan will both have the same teacher for three years straight.

Because our school is a co-op and we only have one paid employee, our teacher, all the moms have to work. So our kids' teacher is kind-of also our boss. But since I'm on the board of directors, the teacher is also our employee. Let's just say it's a complicated relationship.

But I can say that their teacher wholeheartedly loves our kids and has their best interest at heart.

Every year for Teacher Appreciation Day we pool together money for a gift card and pass around a card for the moms to sign. This year, instead of the card with the generic message from parents, I decided to try something new.

Each child got a slip of paper (made from Jack and Logan's cut-up paintings that they made at school). Their parent was supposed to ask their kid about the teacher and write down their response on the slip of paper.
For example:
Logan said, "She help me learn criss-cross applesauce." (That's the politically correct way of saying Indian-style.)
Jack said, "I like her. She helps when we have problems."

I collected all the slips of paper and put them in a jar (decorated with ribbons by another mom at school). This little jar of sweet and funny notes will be given to our teacher tomorrow for Teacher Appreciation Day.


Hopefully, when she's had a rough day at school (and there are certainly plenty of them with a classroom full of little maniacs) she can pull out a note or two from her littlest fans and know how much she is really appreciated.


I saw this idea on Tip Junkie from Imperfectly Beautiful's Valentine's Day teacher gift.

She's crafty and she's just my type

I had a novel idea for this post. Instead of focusing on my amazing skills of procrastination, I'd demonstrate that, on occasion, I can and do finish something.

Viola! In case you can't automatically tell, it's an advent calendar. A very, very long advent calendar.



I should fess up about a couple of things. First, I did not make all the bags and stockings. They are from the $1 bin at T@rget. I merely numbered them and clipped them on a red rope. Second, I had the bags for a couple of weeks before I numbered them. I finally got around to it on December 1st. So I guess there is a bit of procrastination in this tale.

When I decided to post this an old Beastie Boys song, She's Crafty, got stuck in my head (hence the title of the post). Way to date myself, huh?