Last Friday, one of my friends came over and we did some fun activities with the kids. In preparation for Spring gardening and St. Patrick's Day, we have been studying about Ireland, leprechauns, gold/money, potatoes, and the Potato Famine of 1845 which brought many Irish immigrants to the United States. So naturally...we decided to do some potato carving/stamping.
Jared got a pocket knife for Christmas and is always looking for an opportunity when he could use it so he was thrilled when I said that he could carve a potato. He decided to make a pot of gold with a rainbow coming out of it and a gold coin. I carved a shamrock, a leprachaun derby hat, and a star.
The girls were so excited to get on their paint shirts and create some original Irish art using green, gold, and yellow paint. I should mention that as we designed our garden plan for this year that Jared decided he wanted to plant some potatoes and as I know nothing about growing potatoes I got a bunch of books at the library about potatoes. We've been reading stories about potatoes, folklore about potatoes, gardening books about potatoes, etc. After doing this potato stamping activity, Jared informed me that if he hears another word about potatoes he won't ever want to see another one much less grow them, so...we put our potato stamps in the compost (not trash - remember this was a GREEN day) and haven't said any more about potatoes.
Another GREEN activity that we decided to do was to make our own paper. The idea started when we were reading a book called From Gold to Money and we decided to make our own money. We started out by getting a bunch of paper out of our recycling bin and tearing it into little pieces, which the kids decided was a paper salad. Then we added water to let it soak, which then became a paper soup.
Next we used a paper blender to grind the paper soup into paper mush - yuck. Then we sifted the mush onto a screen, squeezed out all the water and let the paper dry.
Here is our paper drying. It is very colorful, which prompted a discussion about money and the colors and fibers that are used to make sure it is not counterfeit. My friend surprised me with her great knowledge about money and showed the kids how to find things like keys and spiders and magically appearing heads on their money (see Clarissa in the background with the magnifying glass). Finally, the kids designed their own dollars, including disappearing ink watermarks (but I forgot to take a picture of them) and we cleaned up our mess and called it a day, a GREEN day.
Jared got a pocket knife for Christmas and is always looking for an opportunity when he could use it so he was thrilled when I said that he could carve a potato. He decided to make a pot of gold with a rainbow coming out of it and a gold coin. I carved a shamrock, a leprachaun derby hat, and a star.
The girls were so excited to get on their paint shirts and create some original Irish art using green, gold, and yellow paint. I should mention that as we designed our garden plan for this year that Jared decided he wanted to plant some potatoes and as I know nothing about growing potatoes I got a bunch of books at the library about potatoes. We've been reading stories about potatoes, folklore about potatoes, gardening books about potatoes, etc. After doing this potato stamping activity, Jared informed me that if he hears another word about potatoes he won't ever want to see another one much less grow them, so...we put our potato stamps in the compost (not trash - remember this was a GREEN day) and haven't said any more about potatoes.
Another GREEN activity that we decided to do was to make our own paper. The idea started when we were reading a book called From Gold to Money and we decided to make our own money. We started out by getting a bunch of paper out of our recycling bin and tearing it into little pieces, which the kids decided was a paper salad. Then we added water to let it soak, which then became a paper soup.
Next we used a paper blender to grind the paper soup into paper mush - yuck. Then we sifted the mush onto a screen, squeezed out all the water and let the paper dry.
Here is our paper drying. It is very colorful, which prompted a discussion about money and the colors and fibers that are used to make sure it is not counterfeit. My friend surprised me with her great knowledge about money and showed the kids how to find things like keys and spiders and magically appearing heads on their money (see Clarissa in the background with the magnifying glass). Finally, the kids designed their own dollars, including disappearing ink watermarks (but I forgot to take a picture of them) and we cleaned up our mess and called it a day, a GREEN day. 
2 comments:
I LOVE IT! That was very clever to make it a "Green" day instead of just a color green day. I would love to make paper, that's very cool.
How fun....wish we could have come too.
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