June 2011 – The Creative Salad

Alphab’art: Find the letters hidden in the paintings

Our family tends to collect art appreciation books written for kids.

Our latest discovery is Alphab’art, a book about finding letters hidden in paintings.

This wonderful book presents a wide variety of art styles and subject matter with paintings by some of the masters of western art including Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh, Matisse, Giotto, Chagall, Mondrian, and Klee. Many of the paintings in the book came from French museums and private collections (the book was originally published in France) and were unfamiliar to me.

We found that looking for letters in the paintings jump started our conversation about the many other interesting things hidden away in the works of art.

Our daughter felt proud that she spotted three letter O’s in this painting by Henri Matisse. I love the idea that we can find shapes and letters all around us, in pictures, photos, bookshelves, toy bins, doorways, if we really look. We’re surrounded by beautiful, interesting and educational things.

The book has inspired us to go on an alphabet adventure! I feel a photography project coming on…

Curious about other art appreciation books for kids that we love?
Read all of our previous posts on the subject here.

Plant Names Revealed

Thank you to our friends who participated in our Plant Identification Quiz earlier in the week. Here are the names of the plants, all spotted growing in Sonoma County.

Plant 1: AMARANTH

Plant 2: FAVA BEAN

Plant 3: POMEGRANATE

Plant 4: GRAPEFRUIT

Plant 5: BLACK CURRENT

Plant 6: PINEAPPLE GUAVA

Plant 7: GRAPES

We had to include that last one — we live in wine country! We’ve got grape vines growing everywhere.

Swapping the Sand Out of the Sand and Water Table

Our daughter loves playing in the sand and water table that we set up on our back porch.

She plays on the porch for hours, excavating shells, driving matchbox cars on ramps and over bridges, playing in the water, building castles with sticks.

Unfortunately the play area has gotten to be a bit of a mess.

Actually that’s a bit of an understatement.

With sand in both sections of the table (the side that drains should contain just water) and sand all over the floor, our back porch had morphed into a big wet sandy mess.

We decided to swap out the sand for inexpensive colored aquarium gravel.

So far, so good.

Hey, it looks pretty too.

Plant Identification Quiz

In addition to taking my parents to the beach, we visited several beautiful wineries under the pretext of seeing their spacious gardens, of course. Those wineries really know how to draw the tourists.

Right now in California there are so many beautiful, crazy plants blooming. Even after living in Sonoma County for the past five years, I feel still amazed by our crazy Mediterranean climate. I’m humbled by the sheer number of plants that flourish here that are completely foreign to me, having grown up three thousand miles away on the East Coast of the United States.

Here are some fun favorites we’ve spotted recently for you to try to identify.

Ready. Set. Name that plant!

Plant 1:

Plant 2:

Plant 3:

Plant 4:

Plant 5:

Plant 6:

Hint: the flower petals are edible (I personally think they’re really tasty!)

Plant 7:

I’ll post the answers on Friday.

Good luck!

Beach Trip and Field Guidebooks

Last week we traveled around wine country sharing our beautiful home with my parents who were visiting from the East Coast.

One day to beat the heat wave sweeping Sonoma County, which I guess could technically be called summer, we headed to the shore hoping to see interesting sea birds and a colony of harbor seals with their pups at Goat Rock Beach.

This beach is particularly interesting because it’s where the Russian River intersects the ocean. Below you can see the river on the right flowing westward into the sea on the left.

The two sides are distinctly different not just in the salt content of the water, but also in the clarity, color and turbidity. During the summer months a sandbar builds up along the beach, separating the Russian River from the Pacific Ocean, making an idea location for harbor seal pupping.

The smooth sand and interesting driftwood also make for a fun place to explore.

Any time we travel to the beach we bring several field guides so we can identify the animals and plants that we encounter. Here are the best ones we’ve found, our favorite beach field guides:

– California Seashore Life: An Introduction to Familiar Plants and Animals (A Pocket Naturalist Guide). If you’re going to buy just one California beach guide, this is the one to get. Laminated and pocket-sized, this is our most used guide. (Evidently they have hundreds of guides in this series, so you’re likely to find one specific to your area.)

– Pacific Coast Bird Finder: A Pocket Guide to Some Frequently Seen Birds and Pacific Intertidal Life: A Guide to Organisms of Rocky Reefs and Tide Pools of the Pacific Coast are inexpensive, pocket-sized guides with great picture and interesting factoids (shown on the top row, above). There are many books in this series focusing on trees, tracks, flowers, and wildlife across the United States and Canada. Check them out!

– Pacific Coastal Birds (Peterson Flash Guide). Evidently this laminated field guide is out of print, although there are several others in the series that are still available (including the Atlantic Coastal Birds). An alternative to this guide is the Peterson Field Guides for Young Naturalists: Shorebirds that contains more in depth information about commonly found shorebirds for elementary and middle-school students.

To ensure that we always have these guides with us on impromptu beach trips, I try to keep them packed away in our trunk all summer long (along with our picnic blanket and sand toys). With the beach just a half-hour away, we find the cool ocean breeze to be a needed reprieve on hot summer days. We want to be able to hit the beach in a moments notice. We love California Living!