It’s amazing what my 7 year old Christopher can come up with if I give him a few pasta pinwheels, paper, marker, and some glue…

What do you think?

Good family traditions can increase a child’s sense of security and emotional well-being. Here are a few ideas:

1. Read stories or books aloud together.
2. Film family celebrations or take pictures that help children recall pleasant memories.
3. Place photos in frames or in albums to view together.
4. Tell family stories.
5. Watch movies or television shows together that are educational or that reinforce your values.
6. Set aside an evening once a week when you eat pizza or popcorn and watch a movie or play a game together.
7. Participate in bedtime rituals such as telling or reading a story, singing a song, and/or saying a prayer.
8. Share interests such as gardening, woodworking, singing, baking, hiking, playing an instrument, being active in a sport, etc.
9. Do activities together like taking walks, having picnics, visiting museums, attending sports events, volunteering, or participating in school functions.
10. Prepare traditional foods made for certain occasions (see “Is Family Mealtime Important?”).
11. Work together making meals, setting the table, cleaning up, etc.
12. Use a special dinner plate for a family member who has a reason to celebrate:  for example, for a child who won a blue ribbon, sang a solo, or for a parent who received a promotion.
13. Make a sign to welcome a family member home after a trip.
14. Commemorate birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and holidays together in your own distinctive way.
15. Use balloons, crepe paper or other traditional decorations for special occasions.
16. For a birthday celebration, take a photo of the child with his/her  birthday cake.  Through the years display the pictures together to record the child’s growth.
17. Encourage kindness.  When your child does a good deed, acknowledge it in some way.
18. Bake items or make handmade cards to express caring for others.
19. Ask your children to suggest new family traditions.
20. Have family meetings to discuss concerns, happenings and to set goals.

What are some of your favorite non-holiday family traditions?

Have fun making a dry ice bubble that will grow and grow as it fills with fog. This experiment is a great one for adults to do with kids. Add water to the dry ice, cover it with a layer of soapy water and watch your bubble grow, how big will it get before it bursts? Give it a try and find out!

What you’ll need:

Instructions:

What’s happening?

Dry ice is carbon dioxide (CO₂) in its solid form. At temperatures above -56.4 °C (-69.5 °F), dry ice changes directly from a solid to a gas, without ever being a liquid. This process is called sublimation. When dry ice is put in water it accelerates the sublimation process, creating clouds of fog that fill up your dry ice bubble until the pressure becomes too much and the bubble explodes, spilling fog over the edge of the bowl. Dry ice is sometimes used as part of theater productions and performances to create a dense foggy effect. It is also used to preserve food, freeze lab samples and even to make ice cream!

An egg sinks to the bottom if you drop it into a glass of ordinary drinking water but what happens if you add salt? The results are very interesting and can teach you some fun facts about density.

What you’ll need:

Instructions:

What’s happening?

Salt water is denser than ordinary tap water, the denser the liquid the easier it is for an object to float in it. When you lower the egg into the liquid it drops through the normal tap water until it reaches the salty water, at this point the water is dense enough for the egg to float. If you were careful when you added the tap water to the salt water, they will not have mixed, enabling the egg to amazingly float in the middle of the glass.

One of the most fulfilling activities I have done with my children is to plant a garden with them. What a great lesson on reaping what you sow! Planting and raising a garden can teach your brood planning skills, responsibility, along with a good dose of patience.

Plan upfront to involve your kids in all steps, just shorten the time span of each step. A kid garden should be partially made by the kid. Though children’s attention spans are shorter, they’ll get the most out of the project if you start a kids’ garden from beginning to end letting them contribute to every step of the way. So plan to shorten the time some of the steps take, and avoid letting them off the hook for any of the steps in an effort to speed things along. As well, don’t spoil the kids by giving them only the fun parts while you do the weeding, and conversely, don’t do the fun parts yourself such as choosing what to plant and harvesting the first ripe cherry tomato, and make kids do the weeding.

Plant in wide-row, raised beds, and make them small. For each individual kid garden, postage stamp-sized plot works the best, with as little as six square feet for the younger ones to 100 square feet for older kids. Wide raised beds almost eliminate weeding and allow you to construct a garden in a day with kids’ help and no tilling. Typical raised beds are four feet wide, but go to three feet wide for the youngest kids.

Choose and plant kid-friendly garden plants. Start a kids’ garden planting day by presenting a variety of garden crops that are both fun to eat, feel, sniff, or otherwise have high interest, and where the majority have a relatively short time until harvest. This makes an ordinary garden truly a kid garden. Try for a mix of vegetables they can actually eat, herbs with great scents, and flowers that sprout and blossom quickly. As well, when possible, combine planting seeds right in the ground, starting plants early in a window sill, and getting finished starts from a nursery. For schools or community gardens, a truckload of garden starts for choosing can be brought in, for families, you can visit the nursery together. Favorite kid vegetables are red, orange and yellow cherry tomatoes which ripen sooner than larger tomatoes, baby round carrots, Easter egg radishes, sugar snap peas and lemon cucumbers. Favorite flowers are marigolds that can often be purchased already blooming in nurseries, quick and beautiful nasturtiums with large seeds great for planting right in the ground, giant sunflowers which grow fast and provide food for birds and people, and quick growing multi-colored bachelors’ buttons. Great herbs include the spaghetti herbs (basil, oregano), lemon balm, and chocolate mint, which really has a hint of chocolate aroma.

What are some of your favorite things to grow with your children?

How do you hold the attention of a child when it come to learning their spelling words? Have them write their spelling words in sand! This can take the boredom of just writing them down on paper.

My 3 year old just flips over this project!

“For the youngest kids, art is really about the tactility of the materials, what they feel like,” says Abbey Hendrickson, a former educator at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts. We can’t think of a more tactile experience than squeezing and pressing designs into these sealed bags of colored cornstarch. For an interesting light-table effect, tape a bag to a low window and let your child use his fingers to draw patterns while the sun shines through.

Materials:

• 1 cup cornstarch
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 cups cold water

• Food coloring
• 2 gallon-size ziplock bags
• Duct tape

Easy instructions:

1. Over medium heat, combine the cornstarch, sugar, and water in a saucepan, stirring continuously.
2. Once the mixture begins to thicken, remove the pan from the heat and stir for another minute or so until it thickens to a pudding like consistency. Let it cool for 30 minutes.
3. Spoon the mixture into two bowls, stir a few drops of food coloring into each (we used red and yellow), then divide the colors between the ziplock bags. Seal the bags with duct tape and let your child mix and mash the colors (they’ll keep for up to a week).

In printing, mono means “one of a kind,” which is a perfect description of this easy introduction to color mixing, texture, and spontaneity. The only rule here is to have plenty of paper on hand — because printmaking can be habit-forming.

Materials:

• Washable, nontoxic tempera paint
• Cookie sheet

• 2 large pieces of paper
• Cotton swabs, plastic utensils

Easy instructions:

1. To start, ask your child to squeeze blobs of washable nontoxic tempera paint onto a cookie sheet.
2. Lay a large piece of paper on top of the paint and have her smooth it down with the palms of her hands. Lift off the paper, then lay the print flat to dry.
3. Next, encourage your tot to make designs with her fingers, a cotton swab, or a plastic utensil in the smooth surface of the paint that remains on the cookie sheet. Lift off additional prints on clean sheets of paper. You can add more paint as desired.

Where do you like to show off your child’s artwork? On the frig or somewhere else in the house?

My kids love making this cute bird feeder. We have a tree right outside my toddler’s window where we can sit and watch a variety of birds come to feed!

You will need:

• 3/4 cup of birdseed
• 1 tablespoon flour
• Water
• Cookie cutter
• Oil

• Foil
• Cookie sheet
• Straw
• Ribbon

Easy instructions:

1. Our recipe makes two 3-inch biscuits (one is shown here) or a single 4-inch biscuit. Mix together the birdseed, flour, and 2 tablespoons of water.
2. Spray or wipe a cookie cutter with oil and place it on a foil-covered cookie sheet. Pack the mixture into the cutter, inserting half a straw near the top to create a hole for hanging.
3. Bake the biscuit (with the straw) in a 170º oven until the biscuit is hard, about one hour. Let it cool.
4. Remove the straw, thread a ribbon through the hole, and hang it outside in a sheltered spot.

What type of birds do you have in your neighborhood?

Today’s recipe inspiration comes from one of my children’s favorite books: A Frog in the Bog. Written by Karma Wilson, illustrated by Joan Rankin.

Here is an Amazon review:

You may already know an old lady who swallowed a fly, but you’re about to meet her chief competition: “a frog on the log in the middle of the bog.” Author Karma Wilson (Bear Snores On) teams up with illustrator Joan Rankin in a delightfully bouncy, rhythmic jaunt through the culinary exploits of said frog. Young readers will quickly get the hang of the story, as the amphibious protagonist swallows most of the insect population of a bog. Starting small (“He flicks ONE tick/ as it creeps up a stick”), he quickly works his way up: “ONE tick, TWO fleas, THREE flies (Oh my!),/ FOUR slugs (Ew, ugh!) in the belly of the frog/ on a half-sunk log/ in the middle of the bog.” As the greedy frog’s belly grows, we are treated to a hilarious view of the claustrophobic quarters within. Is there any hope for these hapless bugs, or are they destined for digestion? Rankin’s watercolors are both beautiful and comical, appealing to readers of all ages. Highly recommended! (Ages 3 to 7) –Emilie Coulter