Green Options

You can make play dough a gazillion kabillion six million ways. Trust me—I have made play dough from laundry lint, and thusly I know my stuff.

As the packrat/eccentric lady/aficionado of bizarre craft projects and art experiences, I am the designated inheritor of a myriad of passed-down recipes for homemade art materials from both sides of my family. And having two little girls with a lot of time on their hands and a love for anything messy and hands-on, we have taken it as a project to make pretty much every recipe at one time or another. For my next few posts, I’ll be sharing with your our favorite and most unusual of the recipes we’ve collected.

First up: Do you have any sawdust?

Earthworms are child-friendly. They’re accessible in any good patch of dirt and they neither bite nor run away. An interest in earthworms can boost any kid’s interest in a number of other useful subjects, from biology to science to ecology, and be a part of any number of hands-on, experiential learning activities, including environmentalism and organic gardening.

It’s also a good time to expose a kid with an interest in anything they find in their yards to the wide world of information gathering–you want your kids to understand that whatever they want to know about, there is information to be had and they are capable of either finding for themselves or interacting with those who can find it for them.

In other words, whenever a kid has an interest, barrage her with books. Even a subject as prosaic as the lowly earthworm is the star of any number of storybooks, nonfiction books, reference books, poems, songs, books on CD, web sites, audio programs, and documentaries.