Tiny gifts that keep on giving.

After a few years of homeschooling, it becomes more than a weekday activity and turns into a way of life.  It’s like Christmas in June every year when the curriculum comes in the mail; opening packages from art supply places, new packages of sketch books, and little stacks of books all waiting to be read.  Beyond the art supplies are art kits, where you can build anything from a catapult to a tiny brick building to creating beautiful friendship bracelets for your friends!   I like to get the most bang for my buck, so I often pack the best of these away for birthday and Christmas gifts!  New drawing pencils end up in the stocking, new sketchbooks end up under the tree tied with ribbons and perhaps a chapter book tucked in on top.  Education is a 24/7 thing around here!

Here is a list of educational gifts that I think would make wonderful Stocking Stuffers for some always learning kiddos. 

FOR THE YOUNGEST - ages 2 - 6

My children like to use playdough or clay when I am reading chapter books.  I have found that it helps with their dictations later if they are listening intently while working creatively.  Homemade playdough is cheap, easy and modifiable in SO many ways.  Add a little essential oils to your playdough and you have a whole other sensory experience for your little one!  Lavender for relaxation, orange for uplifting and alert… so many possibilities! 

Here’s a few that we love:

Gingerbread Playdough recipe - Smells awesome!  It may inspire more than a playdough baking session.  Just a warning!

Candycane playdough recipe - I haven’t done this one, but I have made peppermint!  That is uplifting and always makes me feel clean afterwards.  Even when the playdough is still under my nails.

Pumpkin Spice Playdough recipe - Smells like pumpkin pie.  Are you hungry yet?  Seriously, this stuff is awesome! 

If you are not up for making your own, my personal favorite for my kids is Mama K’s Play Clay!  The aromatic smells that Mama K uses in her clay are amazing! 

Enjoy some fun pattern recognition games with the Pluck Carrot Play Set!   Who wouldn’t want to see this tucked in a stocking with a sweet little bunny puppet or two.

 

And speaking of puppets!   What a great learning tool!  They create a space that is a bit removed from being human, so even the quietest of children will start talking when handed a puppet.  Besides, there isn’t anything cuter than a stuffed face sticking out of the top of the stocking on Christmas morning.  Why not make it one they can learn with?

FOR THE MIDDLES - Ages 5 - 11

If I had to pick ONE toy for children this age it would be playsilks!   They can be a covering for a fort under the table or a silken robe for a Greek warrior.  They have so many incredible uses that each  time your child picks them up they can create a whole new world!   The best variety for the expense has got to be Esty.com.  There are tons of different vendors that make some of the most beautiful playsilk creations!  (Another great thing about playsilks is they fold up into TINY parcels that can be stuffed into a small toybox, or *gasp* a stocking.   

Taking the silks one step further is dress up.  They can create whole worlds for themselves with a simple dress up frock and a wooden sword. Nova Naturals has a great selection of earth friendly gifts that can complete any dress up wardrobe for a little knight or fairy that you may know. 

Gift your kids even more imagination play with wooden and felt food!  Have your little girl make you up a tea party, or your son cook you up a pizza!   This felt pizza from Mellissa and Doug looks like tons of fun!

 

FOR THE OLDEST - Ages 11 - 18

As the kids get older, educational gifts get harder to find that are not electronic.  And if it needs a cord or batteries, it’s probably expensive!  Here are a few gifts that you can tuck into those stockings with out breaking the bank for the oldest kids in your clan. 

Start off the new year right with some creative Writing Prompt Cubes!   These fun story starters would be great to have a sit-in with my teen and tween and just listen to what comes after “One day I want to visit…”

Learning a handcraft is a great TV free pastime for older children!   This felt ball set from Nova Naturals would be a great gift to keep any tweens hands busy and felt balls are wonderful for the youngers.  Perhaps they could make them for their younger siblings?  (There are many more in the ‘crafts’ section at Nova Naturals that would make a great gift for any kiddo with busy hands.)

Magazine subscriptions - online or in paper - are a great stocking stuffer for older kids and teens. 

New Moon is a writing magazine for teen girls written by and even edited by other girls around the globe!

Zoobooks - All my kids love reading the fun facts that are in the Zoobooks magazines each month.  Grandparents in our family have paired Zoobooks with a NorthWest Trek membership for the past few years and I have watched the kids pour over each magazine multiple times. 

I hope this post got your wheels turning about what you can give to those little learners in your family.  If you have any other great learning gift ideas, please pass them along in the comments! 

Blessings for a wonderful holiday!

Great Wolf Vacation!

We spent the last days of our May vacation at Great Wolf Lodge!  Everyone loved it but Luke.  I happened to forget that he was afraid of the shower before I took him to a HUGE loud indoor waterpark!  lol!  Poor baby spent the entire time just like this:

Usually on me, but Alex and Don took turns when I was off having moments to myself. 

Cyan, on the other hand, was off and running with her girlfriends the second we got there and we hardly saw her for the whole time we were there.  This is a pic from the brief moments I saw her:

It was wonderful to go with friends!  It was ‘homeschool discount week’ so we had tons of people we knew from the area.  I had absolutely no issue with taking care of the baby and staying in one spot while Cyan was running the entire park grounds.  Mainly because I knew that #1 she was with at least 3 friends at all times, and #2 there were homeschool mamas I knew EVERYWHERE.  It was the best way to go!

Theo Chocolate Factory Tour

This year, our vacation is a low budget one… so instead of going somewhere for our two weeks off we decided to have a ’staycation’ in which we go on field trips every two days!  The Theo Chocolate Factory Tour was Staycation Day #1!

The first thing we had to do on the Theo Chocolate Tour was put on a hair net.

 

Everyone had to wear one.

Dad even had to wear one on his face!  Logan decided he needed a beard net too:

Did I mention everyone?

They sat us in a room and the chocolate eating began.  They started by describing how chocolate is processed and grown.  And in fact, I found it interesting that the tree that first grew their chocolate is called the “Theo Cocoa Tree” which is how they got their name!  I always thought it was a guy named Theo.  lol!  But in fact, it’s named after a variety of cocoa tree.

We started tasting with the very darkest chocolate (91%) and moved to the sweeter stuff.  Kind of like a wine tasting, we could taste the differences between chocolate grown in different places and climates.  It was VERY interesting! 

After that, we went into the actual factory.  We were blessed to have two workers on our tour… a tour guide and a former coco roaster!  Something else I didn’t know is that Theo is one of the only factories in the USA that actually roasts it’s own chocolate.  Most places that claim to ‘make’ chocolate actually only ‘melt’ chocolate. 

This flow chart shows how it’s done and which machines do what:

Cyan really loved watching the ‘coco liquiour’ come out of the machine and mix with the milk powder and sugar.

Then we got to go into the ‘confection room’.  With no Oompa Loompas in sight, we watched real people make chocolate bars and confections right before our eyes as our tour guide told us what was what and who was doing which chore:

This was one of the 5 bar guys.  Making the actual chocolate bars is a HUGE job.  This room is where all of the add in’s for the bar chocolates are added:

He’s making cherry almond bars in this picture.  YUM!

Our tasting time was well from over though.  When in the confections room we got to taste quite a few different confections and then went into the gift shop where all of the bar seconds were broken up and we could taste them ALL.  By the time I left I was chocolated out… for probably the first time ever!  lol!

It was a wonderful tour and a great start to our staycation!

Advent Around the World is going nicely

If anyone would like to see all the fun things we are doing this year for Advent, please pop on over to my other blog Collecting the Moments for the details! 

Cold Summer Button Art

This summer has been cold.  Like REALLY cold.  And so we have been spending more time inside than any other summer I can remember.  I have been trying to keep perspective, but a lot of time it’s hard to not be depressed with such a cold wet season that is supposed to be the warmest we have all year.  We have all enjoyed crafts… but the joy to post about them here has just been gone.  I decided that I needed to get over that. 

This morning we were playing with buttons and the scanner. And it turned out to be tons of fun that started my kids on a drawing-fest that has lasted all morning long.  We put buttons on the copier in the fashion of Bloesum Kids… but without the color matching…. we used far too many buttons!  We just had fun!

Logan, age 4 1/2

Cyan, age 10 and 8 days

and Me!  :)

I think we will pop these in the mail for our family down in the sunny southern CA.  Perhaps they will have time to get out of the sun and play with buttons too!

Look how much you’ve grown!

That last trip we had to the Seattle Science Center was almost 4 years ago. 

Logan at 4 months old:

Look how much he’s grown:

4 yrs and 3 months

Butterflies…

This year I decided not to hatch butterflies.  Instead we are going to study frogs and ladybugs.  But I was THRILLED with the little butterfly lesson reminder my kids got at the Seattle Center this last weekend with our trip to the butterfly house.

We got to watch a Blue Morpho Butterfly come out of it’s chrysalis!  It was incredible!  We watched it come out, and as it started to pump up it’s wings with fluid to make them bigger (from it’s distended abdomen) I got to give my kids a refresher course.  How amazing is this??:

What a beautiful little bug!

We also got a great refresher in how to tell an aging butterfly.

This is a young butterfly.  See the smooth edges on the wings?

And this is an older butterfly… can you see the torn and tattered wing edges?

It was a beautiful refresher and a really great day!

Fun with dry ice

We are finally getting back to school stuff. We have been doing nothing but bookwork for weeks and weeks. Frankly, bookwork is easy. It still teaches them and when pregnant, overdue, or cuddling a newborn babe it makes perfect sense... but I have been really excited about starting to enjoy our school days just a little bit more lately.

We have been taking everyday opportunities for fun experiments and today was a really cool one. We got dry ice in our weekly grocery delivery! The kids have played with it many times before, but today, Alex asked if he could put it in really hot water. The effect was really cool. Gaseous bubbles billowing everywhere making one of my mixing bowls look like a witches brew, and the kids enjoyed it as well:

It was quite the cool effect. I look forward to what they will think of to do with next weeks dry ice!

Advent ~ Days 15 - 18

Day #15: Gingerbread houses

Due to being 8 mos pregnant right now, I opted for kits for our gingerbread houses this year... you would think this would be an easy project, but two dropped box kits later and us two mamas were pulling out the glue gun to put back together the beautiful gingerbread houses so the kids could decorate them. It was quite the adventure and I am SO glad I planned to do this one with friends! :)

They turned out pretty cute anyhow and the Alex added the origami stars at above each house. I think they added a wonderful touch. But eatable? These houses were NOT! lol...

#16: Paper snowflakes and bake something YUMMY!

Since we had already done snowflakes, this day was another way to get my kids to help with the holiday treat making! They had a lot of fun (as you can see from the rainbow that Alex made out of these yummy treats).

#17: Poptop can gifts for friends

These are the cutest gifts I think I have ever seen. Made out of recycled cans, each of these little treats have a diecast car (boys) or a Littlest Pet Shop critter (girls). Click over to my other blog (here) for a tutorial!

18. Special chocolate and surprise!

These last two go together... we spent the evening going around to all of our friends houses and bringing some surprise cheer to all the children. We decided to take the long ways through the neighborhoods to scout Christmas lights (of which, there are surprisingly few this year) and pick up hot chocolate and hot cider to keep warm along the way.