Nature Lover Day Two

One day down two to go. Today we worked with the children on blending with colored pencils and practiced on flowers. We went over primary and secondary colors, and how they can achieve those colors with blending colored pencils. Some of the drawings turned out quite amazing. It is interesting to see how children can be drawn to different mediums. Colored pencils are certainly more controlled and exacting. Last week with watercolors those children who like controlled mediums had to let go a bit. I think it is good to let them try all different kids of mediums because it challenges them to think differently about how to achieve what they want to produce. Below are some photos from our session.

Tweet, tweet, or these days I guess I should say chirp, chirp so web savvy people don't get too confused. Birds are all around and certainly in the east bay. We get so many birds that come into our backyard. Some even get brave enough to come into my kitchen. They quickly realize they are in the wrong place when our small dog Bento goes chasing after them. While researching projects for the summer we came across so many birdfeeders, and we really liked the idea, but we wanted to do something that didn't use plastic bottles. My partner in crime remembered doing them as a young girl with lemon rinds and nailing them to a tree. We really liked this idea, and since I have two orange trees we thought it was a perfect match and compostable. So we sliced the oranges in half, and had the kids scoop out all of the meat of the orange leaving the rind. All of the students then got to fill their "birdfeeder" with birdseed and peanut butter. Then we spot glued some string to hang the birder with. They turned out cute, and they attracted some other living friends as well, particularly a bug that looked like a ladybug but was green and black.

Our last project for the day was our posable frogs. This is one of those projects I was really looking forward to because I wanted to have them around the house. We gathered some really great fabrics for them to, and being a fabric fiend it was fun going through all of our fabric and creating groupings that would work really well together for the kids. The kids picked out two fabrics that they liked best, and traced to pattern piece onto the fabric. Promptly then utting out the pieces, and then we assisted the kids in sewing the two pieces together and helped them turn the frog inside out. We used buckwheat hulls to fill up these frogs. They picked out pony beads for the eyes and we sewed them on for them. Some of the children wanted to help sew them on which was a great help. I just love how they turned out.