Morning Drawing Time

Inspired by early morning birding activities (there’s a bird that keeps trying to build a nest on the wind-chime on our porch!), we decided to do some bird drawings of our own.

We drew Sandhill Cranes,

Belted Kingfishers and

Great Horned Owls (clearly a joint effort).

An educational, fun, and creative Mama-Daughter activity.

OUR FAVORITE BIRDING RESOURCES:
– The book pictured above is The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America, a fantastic resource for birders of all ages.
– For a similar online resource, visit The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website.
– For more of our favorite birding resources, including some great birding books, read our Early Morning Birding post.

Make Your Own Literary Magnets

Our three year old loves her Very Hungry Caterpillar magnets, a wonderful hand-me-down from friends. Unfortunately, these Eric Carle magnets appear to no longer be available for sale.

This got us searching for other magnets featuring beloved storybook characters. You know what we found? Nothing! There were plenty of magnets featuring television or movie characters, but none featuring our favorite storybook characters.

So, in true Spritzer Leyba fashion, we quickly set out to make our own.

We printed pictures from our favorite Kevin Henkes picture books onto plain white paper. Next time we may print the characters directly on magnetic photo paper (who knew such a thing existed?! Brilliant!).

We then laminated the paper (alternatively, instead of laminating sheets you could use packing tape).

After adhering the paper to magnetic sheets, we then cut out the characters.

A simple and quick project! Now we can use and love these literary magnets on our fridge or on the magnetic board that’s waiting to be hung in our daughter’s new room.



Curious about the characters?

From left to right: Jessica (from Jessica), Lilly (from Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse), and Chester, Victor, Wilson, and Lilly (from Chester’s Way). All family favorites! We almost always read each and every one of these books before bed each night. Check them out!

Craft Drawers

We’ve finally been making headway on our arts and craft supplies organization project.

This week we focused on decluttering and reorganizing these plastic drawers. To refresh your memory, here is what the drawers looked like before:

They were (inadvertently) fully accessible to our daughter (who discovered that she could reach the drawers by standing on a chair), yet full of all sorts of messy supplies that we didn’t particularly want her to use entirely by herself like finger-paints and mama’s hot glue gun:

Luckily she always asked before she delved in those drawers, so I don’t have any horror stories to share. Nevertheless I knew the day would come when she explored them entirely on her own, so we had to move the supplies around to get them out of her reach.

We essentially emptied these drawers, placing those supplies elsewhere (more on that soon!), and filled the drawers up with more age-appropriate supplies.

We also moved the drawers to a more easily accessible location so she can help herself to…


stickers,


activity books,


pads and pens (pencils are always accessible, placed out on the table),


crayons,


and miscellaneous supplies.

We’re very pleased with the results. We have one more drawer to fill and I have yet to tackle the clutter on top of the shelves, but it’s better and supplies that had been forgotten are being used. Success!

Stencil Exercises

In the past I’ve written about activities such as using scissors and winding bobbins that help build hand strength and dexterity in young children, an essential first step towards learning to write. Playing with stencils is another such activity, one that our three year old adores.

We picked this set of kid stencils up from our local resale shop — thrift store score!

Simple good fun with an educational purpose, an everyday learning activity!

Decoupage Paper Mache Eggs

A simple, fun decoupage project for a spring celebration or Easter craft. You could also use this technique to cover balls with blue and green tissue paper for a fun Earth Day project.

We covered these paper mache eggs with watered down glue and colorful tissue paper.

After we glued the tissue paper on the egg, we painted over the tissue paper layer with more watered down glue to smooth out the layer of paper and ensure that is was properly adhered.


The toddler wants me to add that “we got our hands all covered with stuff… with red tissue paper!” Translation: the color from the tissue paper may bleed all over your fingertips. This only happened with the red and pink tissue paper; the blue and green tissue paper didn’t bleed on us, so different brands and different colors may make a difference.

Our eggs, shown below while they were drying, have a matte finish. I may apply a coat of glossy mod podge to create a sheen, but for now we are enjoying them.

To no one’s surprise, both of these decoupage paper mache eggs have made their way into the play kitchen.

For more information about decoupage, see our Picture Frame Decoupage Project post.