Snow-Themed Hands-on Activities

December 11th, 2020

snow-themed-hands-on-activities

I recently gave a workshop on snow-themed hands-on activities, explaining how to cook snowflake funnel cakes, how to make snowflakes that cling to glass, how to build a successful snow cave, and how to create snow scenes for a centerpiece for your dining room table.

Snow-Themed Hands-on Activities

Here is the workshop with snow-related fun this winter season:

The workshop began with a demonstration of how to make paper snowflakes. This is important in making snowflake funnel cakes because in the same way that you cut out snowflakes on paper, you can cut out snowflakes using flour tortillas.

Cut a piece of paper into a circle, and fold the circle at least twice. With scissors, cut out designs as illustrated in the video. Then unfold the paper to see your unique snowflake. You can glue glitter to your snowflakes or hang them from the ceiling.

Snowflake Funnel Cake

In the same way, grab a fajita tortilla and fold it twice. Using the kitchen shears, cut designs into the tortilla’s folds. Then open the tortilla.

snowflake-funnel-cake

Heat about an inch of oil in a pan, and deep fry the snowflake tortilla on both sides until golden brown. Remove the tortilla with tongs and place it on a plate with a paper towel on it. The paper towel will absorb some of the oil. Sprinkle powdered sugar over the tortilla snowflake. Enjoy eating your snowflake funnel cake!

How to Make Snowflakes that Cling to Glass

To make snowflakes that cling to glass, you will need dimensional fabric paint (or regular white school glue), wax paper, and a paper and pencil.

tracing-snowflake-glue

First, draw a snowflake on a piece of paper. If you prefer, you can find a design online, and print it out. Place wax paper on top of it, and tape it down. Have your child trace the design with the dimensional fabric paint (or white school glue). Make sure that there are no thin lines. All lines should be thick so that when you peel the cling snowflake off the wax paper the next day, it will stay together.

snowflakes-that-cling-to-glass

It works much better with the dimensional fabric paint, since it is thicker and more solid, but it can also work with the white school glue. Make sure to dry the snowflake overnight before trying to peel it off the wax paper. You can stick it to a window or a mirror.

How to Build a Snow Cave

snow-cave

To make a strong snow cave that will not collapse, start by building a mountain of snow. Have the kids climb on top of the hill of snow to compact it down. Then start digging an entrance to the cave. You can make several rooms depending on how big your mountain of snow is. It’s particularly fun to play in the snow cave at night with a flashlight. For more information on building a cave out of snow (and a video of the finished snow cave my kids built), go to: How to Build a Snow Cave.

Snow Scene Centerpiece

In the video I describe how to make a snow scene centerpiece. You get a glass container and dump rock salt in it. Grab some greenery and some winter decorations (or a nativity scene), and arrange it on the “snow” in your scene. Take a look at one of my creations: Snow Scene Centerpiece.

Bonus: How to Make a Snowflake Card with Yarn

I’ve added a bonus snowflake hands-on activity for you: snowflake cards. I did not discuss this craft in my workshop above, but I give a step-by-step tutorial here: Snowflake Card.

snowflake-card

You will need black card stock paper, white string or yarn, and a thumb tack. Draw a snowflake with pencil on the black paper, and use the thumb tack to punch holes along the lines. Then sew the snowflake onto the card. You can use a thick needle, or just push the string through by hand. It looks gorgeous as a Christmas card!

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Posted in Fun Winter Activities | 2 Comments »

Hands-on Thanksgiving Ideas

November 9th, 2020

Hands-on Thanksgiving Ideas

This year of all years, we have had unprecedented world problems, from the pandemic to the rioting to politics. If we focus only on the negative, then we are likely to become stressed out and even depressed. Instead, why not focus on the positive?

  • The relationships with family members that you have been able to build during this time.
  • The interior design projects you’ve done around your house because you have finally had time to get to things on your to-do list.
  • Gardening has also been really popular during this time, along with getting exercise, going for walks around the neighborhood.
  • I have had opportunities to pray with people and encourage them and see them draw closer to God.

Thanksgiving is about being thankful for what we do have. Look around you and list all the people in your life that you are thankful for, and all the basic things like shelter, a bed, food, and water that we often take for granted. I grew up in the third world country of Guatemala, and I saw true poverty, houses with dirt floors where all they ate every day was beans and rice. And a lot of times, they seemed happier than Americans.

Hands-on Thanksgiving Ideas

In this workshop, I speak about how to be thankful during difficult times, and I describe many hands-on activities you can do with your kids to make this Thanksgiving meaningful:

Here are some activities that can help us focus on thankfulness:

1. Thankfulness tree: Get autumn colors of card stock paper and cut out leaf shapes. Place the card stock paper into your printer and print out maple leaf shapes that your kids can cut out. (There is a free template here.) On the back of each leaf, the kids (and the adults) can write what they are thankful for. You can hang them up on an indoor tree with Christmas ornament hooks, or you can attach them directly to a blank wall with sticky tack.

2. Thankful cards: Why not write thankful cards to each member of your family this year, and hand them out at the Thanksgiving table? You can tell each person what you enjoy about them and why you are thankful for having them in your life. These can be really meaningful.

3. Point out positive qualities about each person: Go around the room after Thanksgiving dinner, highlighting each person. Other people say good things that they appreciate about the highlighted person.

turkey-cake

There are lots of other activities that you can do for Thanksgiving that are whimsical, but they are meaningful because you are doing something fun with your kids, and that creates family bonding:

1. Turkey cake: Bake two cakes from a box, one rectangular one and one with two circles. One circle is the body of the turkey, and you can cut out the head of the turkey from the other circle cake, with a bowl. Make the feathers with the rectangle cake. Or if you prefer, you can use twinkies. Then tint frosting with autumn colors, and frost the cake. I kept a small amount of white frosting for the eyes, and put chocolate chips for the pupils of the eyes.

2. Live turkeys: Go look at some live turkeys, either at a farm or around your neighborhood. (You can even watch an educational video about this bird.) For several years now, we’ve had a whole family of turkeys parading down our street. I captured it on video:

3. Culinary arts: Teach your kids how to cook and bake while you prepare for your Thanksgiving dinner. After Thanksgiving, have the kids brainstorm new recipes for leftover turkey. One year we made little pies by using a muffin tin to place circles of pie dough filled with cherry pie filling, and criss-crossed strips across the top of each one to give them a lattice look.

This is also the perfect time to study the Pilgrims. For several years, we put up a Mayflower ship on our back deck using inexpensive PVC pipe and an old white sheet. The kids dressed up as Pilgrims, and we made candles and butter from scratch. We did a lot of other hands-on activities, which I show you in my Pilgrims Unit Study (that happens to be on sale right now for only $5).

I hope you have gleaned some ideas on how to make your Thanksgiving more meaningful. It really does make a difference when we focus on the good. May you have a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Posted in Fun Autumn Activities | 4 Comments »

Art Gallery: A Library of Creativity

September 8th, 2020

art-gallery-creativity

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an art gallery is like a library of intricate creativity. It makes an intriguing field trip for your kids to be exposed to greatness. Most art galleries in large cities have rotating exhibits that feature famous works of art from well-known and loved painters and sculptors of all time. Recently my family went to a Norman Rockwell exhibit, where row upon row of Life Magazine covers were displayed, capturing the essence of many decades of history.

My kids pointed out intricate details in the sketches. They noticed humorous and emotional scenes of various kinds. We saw presidents from the past 70 years or more, all with the themes of the day behind them, depicting wars, mundane life (hanging clothes to dry on the line), and the mischief of children.

I have taken my children to many different exhibits over the years. Two of our favorite artist displays were a collection of paintings of Rembrandt and the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci.

When my children were very small, I had a large packet of postcards of famous works of art, so my children were already familiar with the artists before we went to the exhibits. This made the exhibits even more meaningful to our kids. I highly recommend taking your family to a local art museum so that you, too, can experience some of the most creative minds of all time.

advantages-of-art-galleries

I would like to leave you with a poem I recently wrote about an art gallery:

Art Gallery

The eyes of a portrait
Peer out from a canvas
Hanging larger than life
In a hall where people pass

Suspended in time
People from long ago
In elaborate costumes
In row upon row

Framed in splendor
Trapped in stone
Each masterpiece
Cries out to be known

Looking closer
Details can be seen
Inside the masterpieces
That look like a dream

Leaving the gallery
No longer night
Back to reality
Blinking in light

————————————————————————————————————-

More posts about classical art:

  1. Da Vinci
  2. Rembrandt
  3. Monet
  4. Van Gogh
  5. Picasso
  6. O’Keeffe

Mixing-with-the-Masters-600

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Posted in Art | 5 Comments »

Best of the School Year | Homeschool High School

July 22nd, 2020

best-of-the-school-year

Today I will be sharing with you the “best of the school year,” including some of our favorite activities, field trips, and curriculum that we used for homeschooling high school this year. This will include unique and interesting field trips for geography and astronomy, and some fun psychology skits. Even through the quarantine, I will show you some activities that we did to tie our homeschooling to current events.

Best of the School Year | Homeschooling High School

Watch the following video to hear about some of the most memorable highlights for our 2020 homeschool year:

The math curriculum we are using is Teaching Textbooks because there is no teaching or grading required by the parent, since all of it is done on the computer. This was especially helpful for higher math.

If you want to see all of the curriculum books we used for all the other subjects this year, I wrote a blog post earlier this year to show what we would be using:

high-school-homeschool-geography

We made up our own geography, which I show you in the video. We made a scrapbook for each country of the world, coloring a map, writing a paragraph about the country from a video about that country, and gluing down a flag of each country. We went on a field trip to Canada, and while we were there, my daughter spent a day immersed in the culture of North and South Korea:

high-school-homeschool-astronomy

High school astronomy was also incredibly fascinating. We attended a star party put on by the local Astronomy Society. During that time, we identified many constellations, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. We attended a workshop put on by a NASA representative, where we saw a real space suit, Shuttle EVA suit glove, small rocket steering thruster, a Martian meteorite, etc. We looked through a special telescope during the day to look for solar flares and sunspots, and we went to a planetarium. If you would like to see the entire set of books we used this year, here it is:

high-school-psychology

Probably my favorite subject to teach this year was psychology. We used 7 Sisters homeschool curriculum, and we brought it to life in this set of videos and blog posts:

Near the end of the school year (in April and May), while in quarantine, we did a lot of gardening:

We also cooked and baked many delicious foods for home economics. Here is a British cake my daughter made:

British-cake

We went on many walks, too, in order to get out of the house and get some exercise for PE. Here is a goofy walk that my daughter and I went on:

This school year is one of my favorite years of homeschooling. Yes, it can still be fun to homeschool high school!

back-to-homeschool-giveaway

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY:
$200 to spend on homeschooling curriculum at Rainbow Resource!

I’ve teamed up with a group of homeschool bloggers that would like to bless a few homeschool families this year.  We will be giving THREE families $200 to spend at Rainbow Resource Center to buy curriculum, resources, and supplies for their homeschools.

To enter for your chance to win, simply use the Rafflecopter form below.  Now I know this is quite a few entries, but each of these bloggers has generously chipped in their own money to make this giveaway possible, so I hope you will take the time to do all of the entries.  And hey, the more entries you do, the better your odds are of winning!

Giveaway ends July 31, 2020 at 11:59pm ET.  Must be at least 18 years of age.  Must be a resident of U.S. or Canada to enter.  Selected winners will have 48 hours to respond to email notification to claim their prizes or another winner will be drawn.  By entering this giveaway, you agree to be added to the email lists of the participating bloggers (see the Terms & Conditions on the Rafflecopter form for the complete list).

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