I’ve already been inspired by this week’s Unplug Your Kids project theme - wood - and I thought I’d share our impromptu creations from craft sticks today, a little early. Some weeks, I don’t even think about the theme until I see other projects posted on Monday, but other weeks, like this one, I keep the theme in the back of my head all week long. Must be high-tide homeschooling!
This morning, as JediBoy was eagerly creating a spaceship from a disposable foil pizza pan and asking for more materials for his creations, I remembered the unplugged theme of the week and took out our shoebox-sized bin of wood pieces - clothespins, craft sticks and a few wooden odds and ends. He asked how he could build a house, and I reminded him of the classic, Lincoln-log style building method.
Make a square, use glue on the corners, build a stack house. Easy-peasy. You can also see his pizza pie spaceship on the right - and notice it’s SHINY.
He really got into his house making, and decided to use some of our smaller craft sticks to fashion a door on one side. But the glue made his pile slippery and he soon declared that it would be a SMALL door, because this was a house for snakes. He asked me to make some snakes (I had been using a permanent marker on other sticks to make “babies” for BabyGirl to play with) so I drew two baby snakes and two adult snakes. They soon slithered into their new home, which had a log pile to hide in and a partial roof for shade.
Once we had snakes and a snake house, he asked for snake food. At first, we were crumpling up small squares of tissue paper (see his spaceship, above!) to make tiny white mice and green frogs. But then he did that kids-will-amaze-you stunt of coming up with a factoid you’ve never heard. “There are some snakes that can eat antelopes. Mom,” [do you see what’s coming?] “will you make me an antelope?”
So I free-cut an antelope from brown construction paper. He used a crayon to make the red bite mark on it, and slithered his two adult snakes right on up for some lunch. Then he asked, “Who would be snakes’ predators?” We talked about that for a while and he decided on a heron, since one of his favorite stories is The Magic School Bus Hops Home, the first Magic School Bus book he ever had, where the frog is in danger of being eaten by a great blue heron. So I cut a heron (okay, it looks more like a blue penguin) and he made a pond and some weeds. Then he said, “Herons also eat lizards,” so I made a lizard and he made it a rock to hide beneath. About half an hour after we started, we had produced a construction paper and craft stick diorama!
But then he declared that “Horned lizards like to lie on rocks in the sun.” Since the lizard I’d cut looked more like a salamander, he demanded a horned lizard. He made it a smaller brown rock to lie on and a yellow shark for the pond.
JediBoy and I had a great time making all this, talking about the different animals and predator and prey relationships, habitats and the slipperiness of glue. BabyGirl played with paper, markers and craft sticks contentedly in her high chair for about ten minutes, and was happy to eat piles of dry cereal for the rest of our crafty time.
I just want to point out, because I think it’s important, that all of this was JediBoy’s idea. All I did was get out the craft sticks and suggest he could use them. From that point, I answered his questions and helped him make things, but the ideas - the house, the snakes, the prey and predators, the habitats - they all came from him. If I had set out the craft sticks and glue and construction paper and TOLD HIM to make a habitat for snakes, and QUIZZED HIM on the predator/prey relationships, the whole time would have been a flop and a struggle. It would have been like School. So while I am inspired by your crafty and fun ideas, and I try to incorporate them into my life when I can, when I share our creations I’m not trying to give you specific instructions to duplicate our project, but general inspiration for the fun of the theme! Enjoy what unfolds.
