Green Options

My girls are at ages in which they really, REALLY love matching games. They own everything from dinosaur matching games to My Little Pony matching games to this crazy phonics matching game that even I have trouble with, but their favorite matching games to play with tend to be the several sets of handmade games that we’ve made together.

And of these handmade games, there are sewn matching games, matching games using photos, matching games made from paint chips, and matching games that utilize my girls’ own artwork.

This is a fun and personalized project that can incorporate even the youngest child’s scribbled art. Here’s how to create it:

And no, I’m not talking “old-school” like when you were in school, I’m talking “old-school” like Ma Ingalls.

Paper dolls have always been an exercise in upcycling and creative re-use. You think Ma Ingalls bought special fancy paper to make dolls for Laura and Mary? Or cut their paper dolls out of a Dover paper doll book?

Hell, no she didn’t! Seriously, this is the same woman who had her kid carrying around a corn cob wrapped in a handkerchief as a doll.

My kids are pretty gullible, but I don’t think even I could pull that one off. However, after finishing reading Little House in the Big Woods together (one chapter a night, followed by one episode of Meerkat Manor on Netflix, followed by me sitting in the dark and goofing around on the Internet while streaming Bright Eyes on Pandora until I hear two sets of snores), the girls and I have been on a huuuuuge paper doll kick, and although they can sucker me into breaking out the scrapbook paper once in a while, we generally kick it old-school with the following SWEET recycled papers:

My girls and I are homeschooling a unit on art right now, inspired by the Artist Trading Cards they’ve been making and swapping with other kids around the country. We’ve been doing a lot of art in a lot of media, looking at a lot of art books and books about art from the library, and visiting some art museums within a reasonable drive from our home.

Two problems, however:

1. We live in Indiana, so we’re not exactly rife with art museums over here.

2. My girls are VERY young, and when we do visit an art museum, we’ve got an hour, tops, before we need to move on either to another activity or a double meltdown.

So how can a couple of little Indiana kids utilize an entire world’s offerings of art?

Especially coming on the heels of such a celebrated presidential inauguration, Presidents’ Day is a good day to carry on the festivities. And with many school-going kids also experiencing a school holiday today, Presidents’ Day can also be a fun way to spend a little extra together-time with the kiddos.

We’re having a presidential-themed day at our house today, celebrating with a mixture of the following fun activities and games:

You and your kiddos have some green Obama souvenirs, right? Well, even if you don’t (and even though my four-year-old voted for McCain), there are some fun, educational, and eco-friendly ways to help your kids celebrate our upcoming inauguration–by celebrating this inauguration, in particular, but any inauguration, you help your kids understand the ceremonies that are meaningful to our society and help give them a sense of history and their particular place in it. By making your celebrations thrifty and eco-friendly, you help them learn how to live full and generous lives while honoring your family’s ethical beliefs.

Some of these activities below will require a little prep time and some won’t, but all can be participated in by kids from very young to very old:

One of my guiding philosophies, which I try to model for my children, is that we try to create for ourselves instead of buying: we make some of our clothes, we do some of our own gardening, and we often make toys and games instead of purchasing them.

To do these things, however, requires a set of practical skills that we as parents may not have learned when we, ourselves, were young. It was a painful process to teach myself how to sew on a hand-me-down sewing machine, for instance, I feel there’s a lot I don’t know about gardening even though I’ve read a LOT of books, and learning to knit from a youtube video? For me–impossible.

In previous generations I wouldn’t have had to teach myself how to cook, or make my own soap, or even breastfeed–I’d have had an entire community to teach me from childhood as part of the local culture. And that’s why, even though I try not to support most big-box stores with my money when I can instead shop at an independent store, there is one aspect of both big-box and local stores that I wholeheartedly support:

I have this weird thing about math, which isn’t helped by my tendency to do complicated-to-me quilt block calculations at 10 pm (A 4.5″ quilt block has a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides. How many blocks will I need to cut to have a finished 40″x60″ quilt? I want to put a heart-shaped applique on every other quilt block on this quilt, NOT including the border blocks. How many applique hearts do I need to cut out? Yawn…).

Of course, I earned my math aversion by doing decades worth of really, really boring, irrelevant, and repetitive math worksheets in school, so that now I have difficulty doing relevant, interesting, not really that complicated math as an adult. It’s my goal, then, to keep math super-fun for my little girls. There are only so many games of Uncle Wiggly or 1-25 BINGO that an adult can play, however, so I’ve taken to DIY-ing my kids some math activities out of recycled materials. I made them an arithmetic matching game, and now I’m going to make them a fractions pizza game. Here’s how:

Voting in the Presidential election is one of America’s grand traditions, and now your children can participate!

Kids are invited to vote in their very own Presidential Election at CurrClick! Educate your kids about the election process and make a statement about the powerful voice of the children!

Polls open on October 1st and will remain open until November 4th.

I checked the tally so far, and McCain is the leader by a big margin. Help close the gap by voting for the candidates that are focused on greening our country and waging peace!

Kids love to make things.

My daughter is always asking me “Papa, what can we make? Let’s do a project together.”

Messing about with wood is one of my favorite hobbies. I learned the basics by working with and watching other men build, but even if you’ve never built anything in your life, you can do homeschool woodworking projects together. Here’s a list of online resources to get you started.

Home school is always in.

When we first began our oldest daughter’s homeschool education, we thought that we needed to have a full curriculum and study guides and other “teaching” materials before we could really “teach” her at home.

We borrowed a friend’s homeschool curriculum and started exploring what that meant. The materials consisted of teaching guides for different subjects (math, english, science, history), instructions for games that inspired cooperation, materials lists, workbooks, and so on. School stuff, right? You need school stuff to teach, right?

To a non-teacher like myself, it was daunting to look at this pile of material and think that we would need to read ahead, prepare every lesson, and to have to actually know all of this stuff. And only then we could we teach it to our kids.

I was way off base.