Our Yellow House School

Lately Saturdays have been dedicated to house projects, and I've found if I set the girls up with a project they will play happily for long stretches of time. We got this burger making set for Rosie at Christmas time but ran out of the appropriate colors of playdough long ago so I quickly whipped up a batch and dyed pieces into brown, beige, red, green and orange for some food making play. I like having these gel colors around for projects like this, I think they last longer than regular liquid food coloring.  I think giving the girls small bowls of sesame seeds and sprinkles really added another fun element to their cooking session. I use a basic cooked salt dough recipe like the one found here . This post contains Amazon affiliate links which means I get a small kickback if you purchase something I linked to. It doesn't cost you anything but helps support this blog. Thank you! 

This year we are using A Year of Playing Skillfully and one of the art projects this month is to make Dale Chihuly inspired Macchia Bowls. Since my girls have done something similar already,  I tried to come up with a different "glass-like" sculpture we could make. We go through a huge amount of eggs and I'm always saving cartons to use for art projects. I noticed my plastic cartons would make perfect little bowl shapes for us to paint and turn into a sculpture. The girls and I watched this video to show them examples of Chihuly's work, and we read a little of his biography when they inevitably asked about his eye patch. For this project you'll need: A plastic egg carton (we just used one 18 egg carton from Costco) Sharp scissors Glue (we just used plain white Elmer's) Liquid watercolors Foam brushes Glue gun (I bought a low temp glue gun to use around the girls) I cut apart the carton into individual bowl shapes, leaving the edges irregular f

This is a new series I'm introducing called "Story Snacks". Food always sounds so delicious when it's part of a story, even when it's just a small detail. I love reading to my girls and cooking with them, and I thought it'd be fun to start pairing a book with a recipe to eat while we read. Our very first edition is the book " Dance at Grandpa's " which is part of a sweet collection of stories based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. One of the best parts of the book is the beautiful feast the kids enjoy eating at a festive holiday party- including sour pickles. We were able to used cucumbers from our garden and I bought this special knife so the girls could help me slice them. I used this refrigerator pickle recipe. This post contains Amazon affiliate links which means I get a small kickback if you purchase something I linked to. It doesn't cost you anything but helps support this blog. Thank you! 

We started homeschool! This year we are doing  A Year of Playing Skillfully  which I think will bring a wonderful structure to the playing and learning we already do. We started just as the curriculum suggested, with a pretend play hot air balloon ride and a story about hot air balloons. It definitely takes some getting used to, but we are all enjoying homeschool so far! I put a lot of work into organizing and gathering materials for our classroom, so I'll share a tour here as soon as it's completely finished. I'm really looking forward to spending the year teaching these girls.

(This title is a joke, we had a horrible toy that chanted that phrase and it always cracked me up how it was clearly so much more to put parents at ease than teach children, and also my kids are 5 and 3, hopefully the learning started a long time ago.) REGARDLESS! I bought our homeschool curriculum and can start this summer! After much research I settled on using " A Year of Playing Skillfully ." I don't know what direction we'll take in the future but I feel good about our choice for this year.   Margot has been wanting to do a lemonade stand and our neighbor was having a yard sale (which meant finally some traffic on our quiet street) so she cleaned off her stand (still sticky from the last "sale" we had at her birthday party), grabbed her cash register and all the cold drinks from our fridge.  It was a slow Saturday morning so I decided to help her with her project. We moved her stand up near the road, made a sign, and got additional drinks. Our first