Our Yellow House School

My sister Laura is in the midst of caring for 25 monarchs- from eggs to caterpillars to chrysalises and she graciously hosted us one morning last week so we could see her set up. Even though it takes a lot of maintenance and patience, it definitely made me want to plant some milkweed in our butterfly garden next year!   It was a great opportunity to work on counting practice, crack open our nature journals and use Laura's butterfly guide to identify other butterflies we spotted in her garden. The girls loved getting the chance to carefully handle some expired butterflies Laura has collected and they even got to bring a few home. We were so grateful for this special field trip, thank you, Laura!

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...