Kid Art

We started framing the artwork that came home from school about a year ago. Our fridge was always covered with all of these pictures my kids would color and they were constantly falling off the fridge. One day I was at a friends house and all of the art work that was in her kid's rooms were their own. I was so impressed. She then told me that framing your children's artwork helps to improve their self esteem. I wanted to find out if that was true or not. I went home and  searched on the web and sure enough I found dozens of articles that supported her claim. If you don't believe me, you should google kid's art and improve self esteem. You'll be surprised what comes up. 

Right away I wanted to do this with my kids. My husband thought it was a great idea, but we just had to find the time to get frames. We found a frame for each one of my kids at Hobby Lobby. What makes this frame so unique is that it opens and you can easily slide different pictures in and out. Whenever my kids come home from school with new art, this frame allows them to slip it into the frame themselves (my kids are old enough to do this…I wouldn't recommend wee children taking this on). 

Here is an example of my daughters framed artwork (I believe it is the water cycle).

My favorite part is the fact that it is so easy to open and there is a little pocket to store other art inside. 

I can't tell you how many times my kids have come home, telling me they have something to put in their picture frame. We hang the frames by the stairs so every time they go up and down them they see their pictures. Not only is some of the clutter off of the fridge but it is fun to have frequently changing artwork.

Fairy Garden

Since spring is in the air, I thought it would be fun to do a fairy garden with my twins. First, I started out googling what kinds of gardens other people had done before I made a list of supplies I would need to get. Once I had my vision of what I wanted it to look like, I went to Hobby Lobby for the decorations and I found my plants at the grocery store (which is really ironic).

 I found a birdhouse at Hobby Lobby but I stained it, put sticks on the roof, and glued a little moss on it. The goal was to make it look more nature-like. 

 These little items I found with all of the dollhouse supplies (so exciting and cute).

 I wanted the majority of this garden to be small plants even though I did buy a few primroses for color.

 I thought this plant was perfect because it is so tiny and dainty (it is called "baby tears").

 Some more tiny flowers.

 I just couldn't resist this color…isn't it amazing?

 Kelsey is making holes for the different plants (I ended up splitting some of the plants in half so we could fit more variety all around the little house).

 Sophie is covering all the plants with dirt and making sure there are no roots exposed.

 Here is our finished product! There is a pebble trail, wheelbarrow, and a lovely sitting bench.

Here is a close up. 

 I feel that this all came together nicely. My girls and I enjoyed figuring out what pieces and flowers should go where. I am excited to see how it looks when the plants start to grow and fill the pot.

 The twins are very proud of their work. Since we built this together I told them it was going to be their responsibility to water the "fairy garden". Hopefully this will teach them a lot about caring for plants.

Of course this project would have not been complete without some serious "sisterly love"!

Restaurant

Pretending is such an easy way to get your kiddos to help out and to be able to teach them valuable life skills. This week we decided to play "restaurant". I am sure many kids everywhere have played this imaginary game. I wanted to take this activity a little further. For the first part of this I had my kids go grocery shopping with me. You can't play restaurant and not have good food. We had discussed previously to going to the grocery store what would be a simple meal to make (hot pockets). While we were there, they picked out all of the produce and groceries for this meal in addition to the other groceries for the week. I had them pick out what looked good (I told them what to look for) and put it in the cart. When we checked out, they put everything on the conveyer belt and unloaded the groceries from the car when we got home. Even though I didn't take any pictures of this, they wanted me to blog about how much "behind the scenes" work they did. 

Now for the second part of "restaurant".

The most diplomatic way of assigning jobs was to have my kids to draw what they were going to do out of a hat. (You may want to do it differently depending on your kids and their ages. This is what worked for our family.) 

Kelsey was the server and menu maker

Porter actually should have been setting the table but traded with Sophie. He is the chef.

Sophie is the buss girl but didn't like the sound of that so we changed it to dish girl. She was in charge of setting and clearing the table. 

Sophie got right to work setting the table. 

She also rolled the forks in a napkin (so it would be more "fancy").

Kelsey created the menu.

The menu for tonight is:

Hot pockets (made from crescent rolls) with ham or cheese

Broccoli

Strawberries

Milk or Water 

Porter chopping broccoli.

Porter's sisters washed the strawberries while he cut them.

Everyone had decided that they wanted both cheese and ham in their "pockets"

Our finished dinner. 

Porter dished up the food on plates and Kelsey served everyone (which they thought was quite funny).

It was such a good meal! I am so proud that they did all of this (mostly) on their own. I was surprised how eager they were to do everything by themselves. On regular days their arms and legs don't work as well. It just goes to show, that when you turn things into a game, it becomes way more exciting.  

I loved doing this with my kids because they learned so many life skills while doing this. Here is a list of what they learned:

• Grocery shopping
• Picking the best produce
• Knowing good meat from the bad meat
• Looking for expiration dates
• Washing produce
• Setting a table
• Cooking on a stove
• Etiquette at the dinner table
• Enjoying what each person is doing for the other

That's just to name a few.

I hope that your "restaurant" night with your kids is just as fun as mine was!