Christmas crafting

This was a fairly easy crafting and it gave Luana a chance to show off her skills with the scissors. I got the idea from a Finnish website but I can't remember for the life of me what that was...

We first cut a star and then a spiral. We then glued the star in the middle of the spiral and added lots of little stars. You could use glitter or anything you like to decorate this. We then attached a string on the top of the star and there you are! The kids really enjoyed these and even Lucas showed a lot of patience choosing which little star goes where :)

Pastels with the kids

After the charcoal I thought some colours might be in place. So we tried pastels with the kids today. They again enjoyed smudging the colours and getting their fingers (and faces and tummies and legs) all colourful. We didn't really draw much, mainly just experimented with the colours to see how you can use them.

Charcoal with the kids

This was their first time with charcoal and they loved it! We drew some insects inspired by one of the Green Hour challenges we did last week as well as lots of other things too. The kids watched in awe as I first explained to them some of the different techniques one can use with charcoal. They loved the part where your fingers get all black and it's completely acceptable! :)

P.S. Blogger turned the pictures around quite a bit but it's too late now and I can't be bothered to start messing with that at the moment...

Painting stones

The kids have been asking for ages to paint some stones and we finally did that.

Look at that concentration!

First cards are ready!

We finished off ten cards for the Christmas card swap. Luana glued the pressies under the trees. These were such fun to make (and easy too) that we might be making more of them... We're running out of pompoms though and I haven't seen any around over here but I'm sure we can think of something else to glue on the trees.

Green Hour challenge 8

This was such a big hit with the kids! They just loved looking at things through the magnifying lense! We used and different lense that my husband uses for work. You can attach things to it so you don't have to hold them while you work on them. I just asked the kids to be careful with it and it went fine. I guess it was a good lesson of sharing and waiting for ones turn as well :) Seriously though I'm thinking we should get two magnifying glasses, one each.

I'm not a huge fan of insects at all but I found this one dead outside our door in the morning and it was just perfect for our study. It's a rather big bug but as it wasn't moving anymore and as we looked at it more closely the kids wanted to touch it. We were all amazed by the beautiful details we could see.

After the bug we looked at this flower and then went around in the garden looking at other flowers too.

Luana was greatly inspired and wanted to draw insects. She ended up with this great picture of two friends dreaming about the things that are drawn on their faces (insects and a tiger that is).

Dia Nacional de Alfabetização

We practiced writing Luana and Lucas' names last week. I gave the kids some black paper and these super soft metallic crayons (photo below). They are such a delight to draw with and they look great on dark paper! When they were done drawing on their papers (i e when there was no black surface left) I cut the letters to form their names and we glued them on light yellow paper.

Green Hour challenge 7

We did this challenge already more than a week ago but I've been lazy with posting lately... This challenge was called field guide but instead we did a field trip! Talking about slightly modifying the task... :)

We visited some relatives in the countryside (there are more pictures in my photo blog) and got to see some new plants as well as some old favourites.

My sister-in-law has two rows of pineapple (ananas comosus) growing and the first ones should be ripe very soon. So we didn't get to taste any but the kids liked the way pineapple grows - they had never seen the plant before.

I learned later on that the Portuguese name for pineapple, abacaxi, comes from an Indian language called Tupi. They call it ibacati which means "smelly fruit" (iba = fruit and cati = to have a strong smell).

I thought I hadn't seen this fruit before but when I tasted it I realised I had eaten it in Costa Rica many many years ago. It's called ingá-cipó in Portuguese and apparently in English it's called ice-crem-bean :) The Latin name for this is inga edulis. It wasn't quite ripe yet but we tasted some anyhow. You can eat the fruit around the large seeds.

And then there was our old favourite manioc (manihot esculenta) that we also have plenty of in our own back yard.

We saw lots of other plants too but these were the kids' favourites.

Christmas is on its way...

My head is already full of all sorts of Christmas crafting ideas and I think we'll start today with the kids! I know it's a little early but Christmas cards have to be sent off early if I want them to make it before Dec 24th.

I signed up for the Christmas card swap. We get to make 10 Christmas cards with the kids and send them to 10 randomly selected families. In return we should receive 10 Christmas cards from other families. It sounded so nice that I just had to participate.

edit. We did start indeed! These little Christmas trees were ever so easy and quick to make. The kids could have made many more of them. I simply cut some tree shapes out of green felt and the kids glued small pompoms on them.

A new blog

I finally started a photo blog that you can visit here.

Bible study - Isaac and Rebekah

Our Bible study was on Isaac and Rebekah and first we read the story of how Rebekah became Isaac's wife and talked about it. Then we made some necklaces remembering the gifts Isaac's servant gave Rebekah upon meeting her.

Luana loves beads and Lucas likes them too. These just happened to be a little too small for his fingers. So I gave him another task - he moved the beads from the original tray to an egg carton and was really happy doing that! :)

Luana's necklace.

In the countryside

We went to visit some relatives in the countryside this weekend. My sister-in-law is the teacher of a tiny village school and I had the opportunity to visit the school again (we were there in December last year for the first time, I posted about that in here). They don't have any crafting supplies so I took some with me and we did some stars for Christmas.

Luana and Lucas came with us to the school as did their little cousin. She's only 4 but she usually follows her mother to school and is quite used to being there. There are less than 10 students between grades 1 and 4. I love to visit them as I get the warmest welcome. Apart from the crafting my sister-in-law allowed me to teach the weekly religious education. It was just like teaching my regular Sunday School class and I enjoyed that a lot too.

I'll post some more about our trip soon regarding Green Hour challenge.

Day of Culture

November 5th was the National Day of Culture over here. We talked briefly about what culture is and focused on the art side of culture. There were several paintings and drawings that the kids had done while in Finland and we decided to create an art exhibition so that daddy could see all of the artwork too.

I told the kids how in art galleries you usually have a little party when a new exhibition starts and we organised our own gallery and served some light refreshments as daddy arrived home from work.

This is the artist discussing one of her drawings with daddy.

Some artwork was hung on the clothes line.

And most of the bookshelf was taken over by the paintings and drawings.

Mudcakes

Today was supposed to be another day for the Green Hour Challenge. However after their nap the kids went out and they're still playing there. I'm so happy and amazed that they've been going on for over two hours now without any major arguments or problems. I will have to spoil the fun at some point so that I get them washed and ready for dinner but I'll let them play for a while still, dinner can wait :)

Bible Study - Abraham

I finally started "proper" Bible studies with the kids. We'll be working our way through the Old Testament using a really nice children's Bible (we've got the Finnish translation). We take time once a week to do this in more depth but the kids like the Bible so much that they often ask me to read it more often.

We had looked at the creation and Noah's Ark already before and done some crafting on the creation as well so we just read about them and moved on to Abraham. We then made this picture about Abraham, Sara and some of their animals. The kids coloured the pictures and we glued them on the cardboard. In the end we spread glue all over the brown parts and sprinkled sand on it.

Some more gardening

This time the kids planted manioc with daddy. We got loads of manioc just from one plant a few days ago and yesterday they decided to plant some more on the back yard. You can check out the manioc harvest here.

The kids were again really keen to help and honestly did a great job. Daddy is also very good in letting the kids help. I think he's got more patience in that sense than I do :)

I was so happy to see the kids engage in a longer creative play yesterday. It seems all they want to do nowadays is to watch TV and if that's not allowed they don't seem to be able to come up with anything to play with. I simply can't be there ALL the time telling them what to do and how to play. Yesterday they were busy carrying wood and building things. I allowed them to play with the wood but warned them that they'd have to take everything back to where it was once they were done. It worked out so well - no fights, no arguing, just nice imaginative playing for a good while. And a very happy mama :)