Pen Block

This is a fantastic and inexpensive home made gift for a two to five year old. We use pen blocks like this at home and at school. They help kids to keep track of their pens and caps, make markers last longer, and are easy to carry from table to floor to easel.

I've been meaning to post a detailed tutorial on this for a while, but I thought I'd just show it to you today, in case you want to figure it out on your own.

You will need:

A well-sanded block of wood (2x2 or 2x4 are great)

Fat washable markers

A drill with a 1/2" bit (if your pen caps are 1/2" across!)

A wood-burning tool or permanent marker (optional)

I just looked through my photos for a picture of our pen block, but then realized that one of our artists-in-residence was using it just five feet away. So this is a picture of our home version with all of the pens in a row right at this very moment:

Some quick tips:

My holes were all 3/4" deep and at least 1 1/4" apart.

I hammered the caps into holes. In order to do that without damaging them or the pens, I put an old dried out marker in the cap, and hammered the end of the old pen. No glue was needed.

Personalizing or putting shellac on the pen block can make it fancier, but even a plain one made in an old scrap of wood will be loved for years.

A Freezer-Paper-Snowflake-Stencil-T-Shirt

We love decorating our front window with paper snowflakes, so today we decided to try decorating some t-shirts with them. With just a little adult supervision, this is a great gift that a kid can make for his cousin. (You can stop reading this now, Anna.)

If this is your first time using freezer paper stencils, there is a good tutorial here.

And, here is a great place to learn how to cut some six-pointed snowflakes.

Ruben Yesterday

Feathers on the Felt Board

Did you know that little, downy feathers stick to felt?  Yesterday, I overheard Julio talking to himself at the felt board, "I wonder if this sticks here. Yep. It does."  He left a small blue feather stuck on the board.  Today, I put a jar of feathers by the felt board and the kids took the idea a bit further.

This was a fun fine-motor activity.  The feathers require some delicate placement or else they easily fall off or blow away.

Julio and a friend worked on this tree earlier today, and then Diego and I added some more to it this afternoon.  When we were done, Diego blew lightly on the feathers and we watched them all flutter without blowing away.  It gave the tree a cool animated effect that we normally don't see on the felt board.

This feather and felt combination has some great potential, and I can't wait to see where they go with it next!

Photocopied Toys

Yesterday, while I was printing out some pages for the boys to color, I thought that it would be fun to surprise them by making photocopies of their favorite soft toys.  Our printer has a built in scanner/copier on top, so I made some quick low quality black and white copies of their most beloved stuffed animals by laying the toys directly on the glass of the copier.  They were so surprised and happy about these prints!  They really did look fantastic.  Ruben wanted to color his in, so we got out some watercolors, and he set to work.

After he painted it, he drew some thorns and a cape on it, but eventually he cut it out without these additions.  It is now on the wall by his bed, and I'm looking around the house and thinking about what else I can photocopy for them.

It might be fun to copy some other toys, or to do these soft toys again enlarged at 200%.  We haven't even started copying hands and feet and faces, but I have a feeling that soon we will have a LOT of fun doing that!

Strange Characters

I think I've mentioned a few times that our boys like to dress up.  We've got an overflowing bin of capes and scarves, homemade Halloween costumes and strange antique dress-up bits (wigs! cowboy vests! lederhosen!!!).  They often disappear for long stretches, shouting "DON'T LOOK!" every few minutes.  When they reappear, they're wearing something like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Diego was the designer of all of these wild get-ups, aren't they amazing?

More Fun with Superhero Paperdolls

Do you remember this post from a long time ago?  It turned out that it was just the beginning of our continuing adventures in paper hero-making...

We keep coming back to this project over and over.  The kids do love to play with these figures.  Since they are all laminated, they have withstood quite a lot of heroic crime-fighting action.  And, as we all enjoy making them, we now have quite a collection!

Here are a few (easy to make) special add-ons and accessories that have made our characters even MORE fun to play with:

As you can see, the boys have learned to draw some of their own, relying on me for just a little help with cardboard cutting and laminating, and that has made some of our characters even more weird and wonderful.  They have fantastic names, too, like: Dr. Eye-Distance, Star Chest, Thumper, Glow, and Captain Red-Flash Thunder-Side.

These two were added last weekend:

                                                                                   "Glow" by Diego, and "Robot" by Ruben

You can go back to the original post here, for the basic instructions and a printable template.  If you do make your own, please link to your pictures in the comments.  I'd love to see them!

Wooden Robot

Ruben and I made this lovely toy robot last week:

After building some robots out of blocks, and then taking them apart to move them a few times, Ruben asked if I could help him glue the blocks together.  He had some specific ideas about how he wanted them stuck together, pointing to each joint and telling me, "Hot glue here and here and hinge this so it swings like this and hinge this so it bends like that..."

I love it when we make toys together.  While he drew on the face and body, I figured out how to make the joints that he wanted.  I drilled some holes and threaded elastic through them. 

This would probably be a lot prettier if I had attached the elastic to some buttons or something like that, but we were on a roll and wanted to play with it as soon as possible.  I tied some sloppy knots, and it worked just fine.

I got the idea to wood burn Ruben's drawings onto the blocks from this post on Made by Joel, and I think that this is the best part of all.  It was so easy, too; he drew on the blocks with a pencil, and I carefully traced his lines with the wood-burner.  (If you have a chance to do this with a child's drawings or handwriting, please do it!  It looks so good, and I'm sure it will age beautifully.)

Ruben and I are both so proud of this spontaneous project!

Collecting

Are you a collector?  When I was a kid, my three brothers avidly collected: comic books, bottle caps, license plates and banana stickers. 

Look at what I found in the "secret compartment" of Diego's special pencil box:

I've always seen myself as more of an accumulator than a collector, but now I think I'll start collecting these:

So, what did you collect when you were seven and a half?

The Monster Game

Here's a simple family art game that we think is so much fun:

1.  Get a piece of paper and a pencil for each person who wants to play. 
2.  Sit so that you can't see each others' papers. 
3.  Take turns giving drawing instructions by naming monster parts for all players to draw on their papers. 
4.  When you are all done, show each other your monsters!

Here are some examples of drawing instructions: Draw a square head, add striped horns, make a mouth with as many teeth as you like, draw a long neck, make a fuzzy body, give it feet but no legs, add six arms, draw some eyeballs.

Here are three of our monsters (Diego's, Ruben's and mine) from the same set of instructions:

So far, we have only drawn monsters, but we enjoy this game so much that I'm sure we'll try it with other themes in the future.  It could be fun with castles, cities, animals, robots, or anything that the kids are loving at the moment.

The idea for this game was inspired by a lovely post on The Artful Parent.

A Chalkboard in the Hall

This simple project  has been on my to-do list for years.

And then, moments after I hung it on the wall, Ruben wrote his first sentence.

I bought a piece of decorative molding that had a ledge big enough for holding chalk and catching dust.  I rubbed some mineral oil on it, let it dry, and screwed it directly into the wall studs.

I painted a thin sheet of MDF with chalkboard paint (three coats with a smooth foam roller, and light sanding after each coat with 250 grit sandpaper).  I waited three days and then "seasoned" it by rubbing it all over with the side of a piece of chalk and then washing it.  I mounted it on the wall with drywall screws and finishing washers.

It has seen a lot of action all week.  Julio has become an expert at drawing 7 and 8-pointed stars.  What?  Your two-year-old can't draw an 8-pointed star?

I'm kidding, of course!  He just loves scribbling on everyone else's drawings.  And we all love this new chalkboard.

Fighting!

The other day, I stopped a very angry Julio from pinching Ruben by asking him to draw a picture of what he was feeling.  He looked at the paper and crayons and then asked me to draw it for him.  Before I could answer, Ruben eagerly offered to help, and the two of them sat down on the floor to make this:

Of course, I love this drawing.  Isn't it expressive?  Julio drew the little dark cloud on the left, and Ruben made all of the faces.  That is Julio on the left with his arm out trying to pinch.  Ruben is at the top, and Diego on the lower right.  Julio sure looks mad, and it was a pleasure watching Ruben draw him, as Ruben kept looking up at Julio's face to get the details right.  It's on an 18"x 24" paper, and was done with those wonderful beeswax block crayons.

I love the actual fighting a bit less.  Over the past few months, they've had a lot of time to practice getting along with each other (including learning some shockingly colorful insults and hand gestures).  I think they resolve their frequent conflicts more quickly now than they did in the beginning of the summer, and they don't always need my help to work things out, but my boys are LOUD and physical and expressive, and right now I'm ready for some quiet. 

Summer vacation is almost over, and very soon we will not be spending all day together.  In spite of the fighting, I think I'll miss it.

Paper Toys

Here are a couple of paper toys that Ruben made today:

He's been making these kinds of things for a few weeks.  He'll draw and cut, and then say something like, "Now I need to add an ear," or "Oh! I forgot the boots."  Then he'll draw and cut some more and then tape all of his pieces together and play with his finished work.  Most of them are paper figures like the lion and the Batman above, but there are also ladders, buildings, axes, brooms and trees, which sometimes have sticks held on with lots of tape that add support to the structure.  He is figuring it out as he goes, sometimes with some frustration, but mostly with pure have-to-stay-up-late-so-I-can-finish-this excitement. 

I love watching this explosion of creativity.

Weaving

Small Canvas

A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
                                                                      -Charles Dudley Warner

                                                                                                          Ballpoint on brother, 2011

Playdough Plus

The boys got very enthusiastic when we added some feathers, sticks and beads to our playdough.

This is Argus Panoptes or Argos, according to Diego.  (For those of you who don't happen to live with a 6 year old, Argus is a mythological Greek monster with 100 eyes):

I loved this creature that Ruben was making:

It just kept getting better...

...and better!