On our nature walk yesterday morning, we gathered LOTS of leaves up and headed back inside for a fun project.  We used tempera paints and regular paper and construction paper, a roller and brushes.  We ended up liking the brushes better for this project.  I'll let the slideshow do the rest of the talking!

 

 

We love blueberries!  We love to eat them fresh and bake them in homemade blueberry muffins.  And now, we love to paint with them too!

Once again, I owe this idea to my daughter Hannah.  She had taken some frozen blueberries and rinsed them off to eat for lunch one day.  When she was unable to finish all she had in her bowl, next thing I knew I saw her with a paintbrush and paper in hand.

She first created an outline with pencil and then filled bits in with blueberry juice.

She liked this project so much we tried it again just today.  This time I measured out about a 1/2 cup of frozen blueberries and added a 1/4 cup of hot water and used a potato masher to mash the berries up.  And this time Gabby got in on the fun.

We experimented with adding some crayon first and washing over it with blueberry juice.  We think they turned out really neat!

Mom's Masterpiece

Hannah's Masterpiece

Gabby's Masterpiece

After I was finished painting mine, I headed inside to work on the computer.  Suddenly I heard Hannah yelling for me saying, "Mom, Gabby is eating the paint!"  A little artwork and a healthy snack...all in one.  Happy blueberry painting!....and eating!

During our nature time today, my daughter set about collecting all sorts of nature items to make a woodland fairy house!  She had the most marvelous time using her imagination on this project.  I told her in order for it to be proper, she must use all natural materials, and it must have all the proper things a comfortable home might have such as a table, bed, etc.  And then she set about working for over an hour designing and putting it together!

She was careful to choose a very comfortable spot for her fairy house, nestled in amongst the roots of a large tree on the hill by the creekside.  The living area is protected by small sticks all around the perimeter.

In the center, you'll see her kitchen table, fashioned from small sticks stuck in the mud, and a bark table top.  Her table is decorated with little, dark pieces of bark for plates and torn leaves for salad.  Straight behind there, you'll notice hanging ferns which she attached to the wood with mud.  This is the clothes changing area.

Next, we go to the comfy couch area.  The couch is made with a bed of soft green moss with a leaf for a cover and the tops of four Philadelphia Fleabane wildflowers for pillows.  And two beautiful ferns in the background for visual appeal!

And to the right of the home, nestled in amongst the tree root, you will find the bedroom.  Equipped with soft moss for a bed and a leaf for a blanket and a lilac sprig for a pillow.  And a lovely stone vanity (attached with mud) and a bark mirror.  And one tiny acorn cap hat to wear.

And last, but certainly not least...one must have a fairy broom in order to sweep up all that dust.

Pretty nice place if I may say.  Hmm, I think I'd might like to live there.

Here is a link to some other ideas for a Fairy House.

I'm so very happy to annouce that I finallly have an official nature table!  No more cattails on top of the bookshelves or bug watchers on the floor in the walkway or completed nature projects in the way on the school table.  My very sweet hubby was so good to help me work very hard this weekend in re-organizing my schoolroom and making a spot for our new table.  Our computer used to be in this spot but has now found a new home down the hallway.  We also put an extra bookshef next to it to hold all my nature, science, art, and library books.  The top shef is for library books only.  The table is made of knotty pine wood (which I thought was very "nature-like").  It was an extra table we had bought on clearance a long time ago that was collecting dust in our basement.

A handy basket for all our field guides, clay pot to hold nature finds (hawk feather) and a couple "pretty rocks" the kids found

A book display holder for our current focus

Another basket to hold miscellaneous nature tools such as magnifying glass, bug nets and catchers

Now, I'm sure if I know ourselves well enough, this table will undergo lots of changes and will be HEAVILY used, having lots of new finds on it constantly, so it won't always look so organized!  But with how much nature study is such an integral part of our homeschooling it is such a blessing to have such a place!  My kids are as excited as I am to have a place to bring their neat nature finds now.

If you do not have the room for a big nature table, how about using a small round one like one of those decorator tables; or I've also seen people use shelving to hold their nature stuff, which looks very nice as well!

I had someone recently ask us about our schoolroom, I plan to post more photos soon of the rest of the room.

Happy Nature Adventuring!

This is definitely our most favorite nature craft we've done yet!  The clay nature prints turned out beautifully!  This project took us a couple of days to fully complete, but it was WELL worth it.  My original inspiration for this craft came from The Artful Parent.

We started by setting out on a nature hunt to collect items that we thought would make good prints.  The items we collected were:  piece of a wild fern, a few miscellaneous leaves we thought were pretty (such as a wild violet leaf and a couple dried leaves from the fall), a half a walnut shell, an acorn top, a dandelion, and wild garlic.  We also chose out a couple of pretty seashells from our family's shell collection.

Next, we took blocks of Sculpey Clay, and cut them in 1/2" pieces.

We rolled them into nice even and smooth balls.  We chose to start with our wild violet leaf and placed it flat on the table (it was very important to have it very smooth and flat).  We centered the clay ball on top.  Next, we pushed down very evenly on top of the ball using the palm of our hand, until we new that the leaf was covered sufficiently.

After turning the clay back over, we took tweezers and removed the leaf from the clay.  We were so thrilled with how beautiful these were!!

We continued one by one doing this same procedure to all of our nature collection items, placing them on a large cookie sheet as we completed them.  We used a straw to poke a hole in the tops of them because we had plans for hanging them.  This is optional depending upon what you would like to use them for.

Now it was time for baking.  We baked ours for approximately 45 minutes at 275 degrees.  You can read the Sculpey Clay packaging for directions.  They baked up nice and solid.

Now here's where you can make a decision of whether to proceed.  These are truly beautiful just as they are without the straw holes, OR you can be like us and decide to experiment a little!

We thought I wonder what these would look like to give them a light watercolor wash (mixture of tube watercolor paint and water).  So Hannah got out her paints and brushes and we gave it a go!  We choose the dandelion print and thought it would be neat to make it yellow of course!

From the first brushstroke, we knew they would be gorgeous!!

Absolutely stunning!  I loved the way the watercolor settled into the indentions and made the prints stand out.

So we went crazy mixing colors and watercolor washing all of our prints.

This was one of my favorites, the wild fern.  Isn't that beautiful?!

Now again, I think if the straw hole weren't in these you could leave them just like this and they would be so neat to just have them sitting about upon your nature table, on a  window sill, hmmm you could even attach a heavy duty magnet to the back and have a very pretty refrig. magnet!  That's what I liked best about this craft I think there's many different ideas that could be done with these.

But, here's what we decided to do...we took some twine (found in the Target dollar spot just this weekend), and tied long pieces (sorry I forgot to measure) to the prints.

We continued working on these until they were all tied to twine. They are NOT tied together at the top, that's just how we were holding them.

Next, we took a piece of branch, we had also found on our nature walk, and began to tie the prints to it.

I did NOT worry about them being even, that would have took forever.  Besides the variety made it look more organic.  Here is the final product:

I also attached a piece of twine to the top of the branch in case I want to hang it from something.  I haven't decided yet if I'd like to hang it from a plant hook from the ceiling in our schoolroom, OR just hang it like a picture on the wall.  What do you think?  Oh, also, we talked about eventually taking a very fine tip sharpie marker (probably brown) and printing on the backs of them what the prints are of.

This week as part of our Green Hour Challenge, which I'll be posting about tomorrow, we collected a basketfull of nature items. This included moss, twigs/branches, rocks, briars, and small leaves.

I found an idea for using our collected items from our Good Earth Art book.  However, I improvised and changed it a bit to work with what we had.

For this project we used our nature walk collection items, thick pieces of cardboard, glitter glue, and a glue gun (lots of extra sticks!). The book suggested we use a flat piece of log for the ground, however we weren't able to find a suitable one, so we tried working on a flat rock, but the glue wouldn't stick to it.  So we settled upon using thick pieces of cardboard.

The kids got right to work!  They really loved this project!  I let them design whatever scene they wanted, whether it was a scene from our nature walk, or something from their own imaginations.  I simply was responsible for the glue gun work.

Even my son, who is not usually the craftsy type really got into this and spent more time than usual coming up with his creation!  He used a small stick and moss to create a tree, moss for bushes, briars for porcupines to sit on the log, blue glitter glue for his creek and pond, green glitter glue and tiny rocks to make little frogs in the water, dried leaves to make a brush pile, and pieces of bark for trees on the floor.

We were so happy with the effect that the glitter glue had; see how it sparkles like real water in the sunlight?

Hannah added lots of animal touches to hers such as a deer, a frog, a porcupine, a little "rock" bluebird in the tree...AND...

....A SNAKE!! (it's a piece of dried vining and had a great resemblance)