paint cut paste

i just found a batch of bloggy photos that i forgot to blog about earlier this summer – bean sprouts! (oops.) this was such a fun, satisfying, educational activity i remember from my own preschool days, so i thought it’d be fun to do it with N at home.

we picked up some baby lima bean seeds while at whole foods one day.

we soaked a paper towel with water, put it into a ziploc bag, and dropped in a buncha beans. we taped the bag to N’s bedroom window, where she gets full afternoon sunshine.

about a week later once they’d sprouted some roots, we tried two different things with them (because i couldn’t remember what to do next. i’m not a green thumb, people.) we planted half of them into some potting soil to see if they’d sprout green shoots from there.

N even made a cute phoenetic “lima bean” sign for the plants.

but nothing happened to this batch at all. (yes, i shoulda googled this, admittedly, but it’s all about the experimental method, right? no newfangled internet shortcuts.) meanwhile, the ones left in the sunshiny wet paper towel bag grew all sorts of greenery.

we planted these into a pot in our backyard and nurtured them to grow throughout the summertime….

and they were great, until our snail friends ate them.

N and i just enrolled in a local parent-child art class (is this redundant for us? perhaps, but we love to make art together.) the theme for today’s class was musical instruments. the art teacher had some fun ideas, so i wanted to share hers and one of ours, too.

N really enjoyed watercoloring on wooden castanets, so she can make plenty more noise at home. (watercolors on wood is one of my personal favs… check back near the holidays for more on this medium!)

painting castanets

let's flamenco!

we also made shakers out of household objects like paper plates and beans. just fold the plate in half, staple around 3/4 of it, and let your little one put dried beans inside. (we used pinto beans.) then your kiddo can decorate the shaker with any sort of paints, crayons, markers, glued objects you have around. (N opted to make painted dots and then play “connect the dots” with a crayon on hers.)

polka dotted pinto bean shaker

once we got home, N wanted to continue making musical instruments. she said she really wanted a drum. i noticed that our raisins were pretty low, so we turned a cardboard raisin box into a tissue paper mod podge drum…

thinking on my toes to find drum supplies

so we can still see paul newman through the tissue... oh well

maybe later this afternoon we’ll put on an artsy concert for daddy. if you don’t wanna make art, but you want to make music, melissa and doug always got your back: