Garden Spiral Notebooks

J has been asking me to get back to doing regular projects with him. What's a mom to do when a little boy makes a request like that? He also requests to watch Star Wars and go onto Lego.com regularly, so I have to look like I'm filling his requests in one way or another.

Mom Unplugged has transitioned to monthly projects, and this month's theme is spiral. Boy, did we have to think about this one long and hard. Spiral staircase? The double helix of DNA? And then it hit us. I handed over my graph-paper spiral notebook that J has been coveting so that he could create his very first garden journal. Here's how it went:
I'm pretty sure collage might be one of his favorite types of art to create. We even "laminated" the cover with contact paper. I wonder if the contact paper was his favorite part.
I wonder what he'll choose to do more: create diagrams, sketch plants, or create lists of all the plants he'll add to his dream garden someday when he can buy his own seeds.

Follow-up: "Float"

Finished it.

I slacked off last week and didn't even tell J about the "wrinkle" theme do to another project I was involved it. This week we'll report on this week's Unplugged Project themed "clothing."

We're back.

It has been many moons without posting our projects. Today I start again. I bet you've been wondering what has happened . . .

Unplugged Project--Floating Astronaut Mural and Puzzle

Wonderboy saw right through my idea of a fun "float" project involving jellyfish. He proposed a mural project portraying astronauts floating through the solar system. He worked so hard on this one--he required that I sit near him, but really this was his project. I love it! Here he is pointing out the asteroid belt. It's a good thing that he remembers the order of the planets because I really needed his help in discussing his work today. I meant to ask him more about the astronauts and the unique flags they are holding.

He wondered allowed if the planets are floating in space or if they're "orbitting". He's convinced it has to be one or the other. I wonder if they can do both.

It's a good thing that I snapped the photo when I did. I left the room for a few minutes, and when I went back in I found this! No, that's not a pile of trash. It's the PUZZLE he created for me to assemble. He was serious, too. No excuse was good enough to get out of finishing his project.
So I went to work. He waited patiently, but distracted himself effectively by climbing into Daddy's sweats.
This is what I've got so far.
Good thing he got hungry and removed himself from the sweatpants. He'd still be in there if he waited for completion. I'm determined to get this thing together, though--he giggles everytime I mention that it's challenging.

I wonder why my "neat-and-tidy" projects (you know, ones that people on an assembly line can do) are so uninteresting to him. I'm always amazed at what he comes up with when I give him ownership over a project. We end up far from where I had originally intended to visit, but I learn new things about his abilities to create.

Weekend Adventure: Wheat Celebration at Howell Farm

Howell Living History Farm near Lambertville, New Jersey is definitely one of our favorite destinations for fun. Run by the county park system, it is a working farm open to all who are interested in learning how farms were run at the turn of the last century. I love going there for the quiet, and I think Joshua likes the mud and the rocks. But the animals and setting are fun parts of our visit. This weekend they had a celebration of wheat--we played the "Help the Farmer" game visiting a station for each stage of wheat planting and harvest. Here are some pics as promised.

I didn't get a good a good shot at the first spot--I was a little sidetracked by the enormity of the Belgian draft horses that were being used to plant the winter wheat. So onto station two:
The reaper-binder. This beauty of a machine was pulled behind three horses who were hooked up that long tongue. That contraption features a a long sharp blade, a conveyer belt, and a big paddle wheel that moves the wheat onto a fork where the wheat is gathered a bound. All of that is done with the power of the moving horses alone! After that someone went through the field and stood the sheaves of wheat upright so that it could dry for a few days, laying one sheaf across the top in case of rain.
Next stop: wheat threshing! One hundred years ago at this time of year big steam engines and threshing machines would rumble through the valley, stopping at farms to thresh the wheat crop that had been drying in barns for the last couple of months. Threshing involves removing the wheat grain from the stems. You can't see the engine or the thresher well, but they make for a very loud duo as wheat is thrown in, chopped up, sifted, wheat is gathered, and the stems are blown up into the barn with a fan.
Station 4: Feed Grinding! Here's Joshua hard at work. He also loved feeding the chickens with the wheat he had cracked for them. Station 5 was the Winnower. He loved this, too. Winnowing is the process of separating the chaff and dust from the wheat berries.
Finally we stopped at their working kitchen to churn some butter and sample the wheat bread. I should have snapped a photo of the butter churn that screws onto the top of jars--I seriously would love to get one for myself.

Unplugged Project--White Kitchen Creations

Unplug Your Kids Theme of the week: White! Our has just a little bit of yellow. Each time we make cut-out cookies my kitchen turns white, but I really should do it more because he loves it so much.
Today's lesson: sometimes cookies break. I'm wondering why rolling out cookie dough has to be so hard for a child! The stick-to-the-pin factor was so frustrating as a child. Good thing we can get over it, eat cookies, and take silly pictures.

Unplugged Project--Sandbox Plans

I have such a backlog of posts of make! Here's a recent project we did for Unplug Your Kids. The theme was "sand" so we headed to the local park one evening to measure and diagram our favorite sandbox in the area. I love this thing--it features seating for mom or for the child who needs a break, and it has plenty of space of digging, bulldozing, etc. Someday I'll build one, but today we had fun using the measuring tape, shouting out numbers, and then, of course, we had to dig a little.