Letter A-make your own colored sand

A was for art-make your own colored sand. Maybe it should have been a is for Are you ready to make a huge mess? Poor Heather! I feel that must be what she is thinking right now!


I feel bad because Heather's boys did the colored sand craft and they colored themselves. I think when Demi adds water to her sensory box of colored sand she might turn herself rainbow colors. I spent a little time thinking about this and how to solve this problem after the children went to bed tonight. I started thinking how children's paints will run when they get wet. I know this because I use that method to make my children paint dots to paint pictures. I started thinking that maybe my craft acrylic paints would work. I got out a small yogurt cup of sand and added a small squirt of paint and mixed with a plastic spoon (one I use for crafts). I ended up with wet purple paint. It felt sticky wet and did get on my fingers. I let it dry and it ended up clumpy (you can see a lot of clumps in the picture). The clumps broke up very easy in my hand and when I put some purple painted sand in water the color did not run, come off, or make any type of mess on my hands. I did have some mess in the cup I mixed it in and I had to set it out to dry the paint but if I did this outside in the sun on a warm day I wouldn't have any worries with large messes. Using acrylic craft paints gives a lot more choices of colors but I wouldn't do this if I had children who like to eat sand. My two older children don't eat sand (anymore) and my baby isn't old enough to get into our sensory table. Using food color I think would work wonderful if you have dry sand, dry hands, and want to do sand art in jars, bottles or sprinkle on spots of glue on a paper. I think it would work well if you layer sand in a small glass jar and add a small candle in the center (for gift giving). Using paint I think will work well if you like to use wet sand to play in and have children that don't eat sand. If you try this please share with me how it works for you! I would love to know how it works for others! When I do this with my 2 year old I will have her put the sand in an old plastic bottle and I will add the squirt of paint. I will help her put the lid on and let her shake it up to mix the color. I will pour it out of the bottle and put on a tray to dry. I will make sure the tray is out of her reach because the painted sand could make a large mess if a 2 year old plays in it when it is wet! Heather, I feel so bad knowing I got your children all messy with food dye! I should warn everyone I hardly ever look up directions on how to do crafts. Most of the time I try out things to see what happens. I don't spend much time thinking about what I need or what might go wrong. I do have lots of crafts that flop or make large messes! Did you all notice the large mess on my table with the dyed rice and flour glue? I am still finding some rice on my floor and I have cleaned it up several times already! I don't rent and we live in a very old farm house so it is OK when messes happen in our house. I save all of Travis's old worn out/stained play shirts for painting/crafting tops for Demi so she doesn't ruin all of her clothes with all the crafting we do. My house has no carpet so crafts are easy to clean up. I hope I didn't cause a ton of parents and children to cover themselves in food colors!

Letter A-make your own colored sand

A is for art.

Our art project this time is making our own colored sand.

A few weeks ago I saw on TV a lady color sand (maybe it was salt) in a glass and then stuck a tiny candle in it to make a decoration for the house. At the time this show was on I was trying to put the baby down for a nap so I wasn't watching it close enough to know if it was sand or salt she was coloring. I didn't hear what she used to color it. I am trying to remember, I think she might have put a spoon of paint in the cup of sand and stirred it with a spoon. It was a show on the DIY channel but I am not sure what show it was. I know it must have been one on in the late afternoon (after out school day is over) because I don't watch TV early in the day. Anyway, after seeing that I decided to give a try at coloring sand . I figured I had nothing to loose I have lots of sand (2 sandboxes full). I have food colors and paints. I use food colors to dye things a lot so I thought first I would try food colors and if that didn't work I would try paint. We poured some sand in bottles and added some food coloring. We used about 1/2 cup of sand and 10 drops of food color but I am sure less food color or more sand in the bottles would give lighter colors and more food color will give darker colors. I used 1/2 cup because that is the first measuring cup I found and I used 10 drops because it sounded like an easy number to remember. LOL! After adding sand and food color in the bottles we put the lids on and shook. We ended up with some very colorful sand. Our sand was NOT white sand. It was natural tan colored play sand and I had no problems getting it to change color. I was very happy with how simple this project was!


Here is Travis making yellow sand.

Demi making purple sand (we used neon purple food coloring).

Zee always looks so interested in what her brother and sister are doing.

Picture of our sand. We made pink, blue, yellow, green, and purple so far.

Poor Zee! I wouldn't give her sand because I knew she would try to eat it. Next time we do this I will make sure to have an extra bottle of sand for her to shake. |We did this late at night and I never did this before so I didn't take the time to think of including Zee.

Here is a picture of them all at the table crafting nicely together. OK Zee is playing with baby toys but soon she will be involved with all our projects. Can you see Travis holding up his project? I think Travis caught the crafting bug (maybe he is a bit like his mom)!I was brave and took video of us trying this project. I thought it would be neat if it worked and my children responded with a WOW. The WOW response didn't happen but it will show family and friends a small clip of our day. It will take me most of tomorrow to upload the video clips. I will share them soon as I get them uploaded to you tube.

Letter A

A is for Art
and Amazing friends!

A friend stopped over to visit today. The children all did some sand art together. I put some colored sand (stuff I got from the dollar store) in a container and gave the children caps with some glue in them and q-tips to paint the glue on small cards (card stock cut in quarters). They painted with the glue then sprinkled color sand over the glue and shook over the tray to take off the extra sand.

Vicky gave me permission to post picture of all our children crafting together. I am so excited about this! I think it is wonderful that I can share some pictures of my children doing things with other children that are around the same age they are. I worry our family members that live out of the area might think our children are never with other children because they are homeschooled. Vicky is also a homeschooling mom she has 4 beautiful, kind, and wonderful children.

Aren't her children cute?





This one below reminds me of when I was in elementary school. I remember my art class having short round tables, glue, and colored sand to work with. See it is just like school only it is in our living room. LOL! LOOK! in this picture every child is working hard on this project.
Below is a picture of some of the finished projects. Vicky if you are reading this I have your children's pages. I put them up on the kitchen table to dry and keep Demi from messing with them but then I forgot to give them to you before you left.
I love it when my children get to do things with other homeschoolers! I took the camera outside when we all when out to play but I enjoyed sitting on the porch visiting with Vicky so much I forgot to take any pictures.

This sand craft looked like it worked well for all the children. I like crafts that can be used for little and older children. If you don't like sand in your house you might want to do this outside. I never care if we have sand on the floor so it isn't a problem for me but I thought I should write to let everyone know some sand will spread out on the table and floor.

letter A

WATCH OUT! The letter A ants are hungry!

I left the room to give Travis a quick grammar lesson this morning. When I came back in the living room I saw this!

WOW! Our ants are BIG eaters! Demi has such a good imagination! She went into her playroom and gathered a bunch of her play food and staged her ants to be eating the food. Travis and I both laughed when we saw this,


Here is something else I wanted to share. Last night I gave Travis a wallpaper book. I told him it was his and he could use it however he wanted. He spent an hour or so before bed cutting, pasting, creating, and painting. Below is one of his creations. In the last 24 hours I think he has made around 10 pieces of art. He told me today that he likes creating crafts with wallpaper books. He made up a bunch of cute cards with the golf theme wallpaper pages (for his poppy who plays golf) but I am too lazy to go take pictures of them right now. I just wanted to share with you all that Travis is starting to like "crafts".

Letter A

A is for Ant!

I am happy to say not real ants. We do have several real ladybugs and boxelder bugs around the house but I rather not think about that right now. Here is our army of ants.

I wanted to make an ant stamp so Demi could stamp ants all over her A page in her alphabet book we started yesterday but my ant stamp didn't turn out. I will try again to cut one out later tonight after all the children go to bed. If it turns out OK she can do that tomorrow. I think if I make an ant with no legs it will look more like an ant print than trying to cut tiny legs. Anyway, I had to come up with a quick replacement craft for her to do. Egg carton ants was the first thing I could think of. The all black ant is one I made. The 2 partial black ones Demi made. The red ant Travis made. Travis didn't want to make a black carpenter ant he thought a red fire ant would be more fun to make. I am happy he joined us for craft time. Travis often chooses to go outside to play or in his room to build when we are doing crafts.

Picture of Demi painting one of her ants.

I took a picture of Travis working on his. I know the day will come when he decides not to do crafts anymore (he isn't a craft loving child) so I will try to keep snapping pictures and treasure the times he does decide to join in with us.

Oh! I almost forgot! Are some of you wondering the story behind this ant?
You might be saying I have seen black ants and red ants but NEVER a pink ant! Perhaps some of you have already figured out the story behind this ant. Travis and I both had a hard time trying to figure it out. Demi insisted on making this pink ant. She painted this one after she finished her two black ants. She spent about an hour painting this one pink. She was careful to paint it all over. She kept saying it was a special princess ant. Travis and I had never heard of a princess ant. Demi explained it was the mommy ant. Travis and I thought needing a pink mommy ant was funny. She told us like the one on the Magic School bus show, a mommy princess ant. It took me about an hour after that to figure out she painted the princess's mother. I wasn't thinking about how a mom of a princess is what some people call the QUEEN! LOL! Isn't she a pretty queen ant? I guess only two year old princess crazy girls see that a queen ant needs to be pink. After all, she is the queen! LOL! Demi looked so relived when I finally guessed it was a queen ant. She was getting a bit frustrated with us not understanding who the pink princess mommy ant was. Looking back I now I wonder why did it take me so long to figure that out?

Letter A

What do we say when we see two BIG SCARY "A" MONSTERS???


AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Ahhhh! AHHHHHHHHHH! Run away from the two, big, and scary "A" monsters!

Working on the letter A I came up with the idea to make a letter A monster mask. I thought Demi would have fun remembering the A sound by scarring me into saying "ah" (a sound) with her "A" monster mask.

I took an empty cereal box and I cut it into a square (Demi wanted her monster to have a square face). I like to find fun ways to reuse our food boxes once we empty them.


I cut out eyes and put a letter a in the center for a nose (an A monster needed to have an A on it). I gave her some triangles (wallpaper scraps), yarn pieces, cap of glue, and a paintbrush. I let her decorate her A monster however she wanted.



Travis didn't like the idea of making a silly mask or a letter A. After all, an eight year old boy would never want to join in with that kind of baby stuff. Once he heard Demi and I talking about making a scary furry monster Travis came running and said he might want to make his own monster. He didn't think Demi was making hers look scary enough. At first he said he might need to make one to show her how to make a real scary mask. He said 2 year olds don't know how to make things scary like 8 year olds do. He then pointed out how he HAD to make one but it was ONLY so his sister could see that a monster with a big A nose makes the same sound as one with a little a nose (my children are so cute).
This is a close up of Demi's before she got it finished. Look at the sharp triangle teeth!

Here is a close up of Travis's before he finished. LOOK at all the scary fur on this monster!
Travis put a big A nose on his mask. Then we put jumbo pop sticks on the bottom to finish them.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! They scared me again!! Aren't they very scary?

Letter A

Unplug-books

We are happy we (Demi and I) got to do the unplug project this week!
This weeks project is Books. I noticed last week that Demi forgot the sound of the letter A. She was making an eh sound instead of an ah sound for the letter a. I decided to spend some time with her reviewing letter sounds. My idea to use the unplug book project and review letter sounds was to make her a giant letter book. We used an old wallpaper book to create a special letter book.

I tore out all of the small sheets to get to the first large page. I used the small pages to cut out some letters. She decorated the letters with markers. Then I gave her a cap of glue and a paintbrush to glue the letters to the book
Here is her A page. We will add more to it all week. I will try to share a picture at the end of the week.