Blowing Glass, Nature, Cooking July 15-21

The kids and I worked on a Waldorf style bunting baby for the youngest.  Kid helped me cut up an old felted wool sweater to save some of our more expensive wool for other projects.  During this time, it came to him that my fabric scissors were working much better than his safety scissors, leading to a discussion on how scissors are made for certain activities. 

This week, I came across a very interesting video showing glassblowing.  Of course, that was a teaching moment!  http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2013/glassblowing-in-technicolor/?ref=fp_blog_post

 While on one of our walks, we found a five lined skink.  Originally, we thought it to be a salamander but learned about skinks thanks to this beauty!  The kids loved how it is "rainbow colored"! 

 During the same walk, we found a caterpillar.  Then, another.  There were caterpillars all over our neighbor's yard.  They were falling from this tree with webs on some of its branches.  Last Summer, we found several webworm moth caterpillars but never found the webs they came from so this was exciting.  Not only do we now have more caterpillars to watch grow, we also got to see the webs and how they migrate from them!  Knowing that they fall from the trees is one thing but seeing them crawl off the branches was very exciting for us all. 

Have I mentioned that our walks are full of nature even though they're around the same area in our neighborhood?  During this same walk, we stopped for a conversation with a neighbor who is quite the gardener.  She gave the kids some black-eyed Susans and a gardenia flower to take home and hang to dry.  We left after a gardening lesson and a promise to start a gardenia trimming for the kids to bring home and plant.  This neighbor is from Puerto Rico so she's always encouraging the kids to work on their Spanish, too.  She hails them in Spanish every time and they always leave her street asking for more words to learn. 

Kid was very interested in cooking this week.  With so much going on, there wasn't enough time to let him help as much as we'd both have liked but what he got to do was pretty interesting to him.  We made almond butter from dried almonds and discussed how the fruit releases its own oils during the process.  There was a gluten free coffee cake that was to be breakfast the next morning but didn't last an hour after it came out of the oven!  Then, since the kids really like different packaged trail mixes from stores, we made our own mix.  They enjoyed the process, which made me happy, and them want to eat the mixture more.  Kid was surprised at watching the mix add up.  He started out telling me I wasn't adding enough of each ingredient but then saw how a little can add up.