Got rain? Make rainbows! ~ 3 Rainy Day Activities for Kids

We wrapped up a unit on colors and rainbows a few weeks ago and I blogged about it in a Living the Lutz Life post yesterday. I wanted to expand on the activities a little more and give directions in case you wanted to do these fun projects with your own kiddos! Since today is rainy and much colder than the low 80s we had yesterday, I figured it was the perfect day to share some rainbow crafts!

These activities would be a great way to tie in the Bible story of Noah's Ark, where after 40 days and nights of rain...God sent a rainbow as a sign that the flood was over and of His faithful promise to Noah and his family.

Color Mixing
To show the kids how two primary colors can mix together to form secondary colors, I filled up several jars with water and red, blue and yellow food coloring. I used glass canning jars, but you could use any transparent container. I will warn you that I filled and refilled these jars at least 3 times, because they loved it and wanted to do it again and again.

We did this activity on the opened door of the dishwasher, to minimize the mess. I placed a couple towels under the door, for any splashes or spills and had them wear old paint shirts. You will want to provide a few large, empty jars or containers for them to mix the water and create new colors. We had fun trying to make a musical xylophone by varying the levels of water in the jar to make different "notes" and tapping the jars with a spoon.

When all your playing is done, pour out the jars of water onto the lid of the dishwasher and slowly close the door. Use the "drain" button on your dishwasher to empty out the colored water. You may want to pour a few jars of clean water onto the door and repeat the process to wash away all the colored water.

Paper Rainbows
To prepare this activity, cut one inch strips (lengthwise) from red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple construction paper. Give your preschooler or lower elementary child a ruler, scissors and a pencil. Measure the pieces and cut accordingly:

Red ~ 10 inches
Orange ~ 9 inches
Yellow ~ 8 inches
Green ~ 7 inches
Blue ~ 6 inches
Purple ~ 5 inches

After all of the pieces have been cut, stack them so that the red is on the top and the purple is on the bottom (rainbow order). Line the pieces up at one end and staple them. Take all of the loose ends and make them line up on the other side, forming an arc. Staple the second side. Voila! A free-standing rainbow AND a math lesson. Cool!

Recycled Rainbow Swirl Crayons
This is a perfect way to repurpose all those broken crayons you might have stashed away somewhere! Gather up all your old, broken crayons and peel off their paper. Break the crayons into smallish pieces and spread evenly among paper or foil baking cups. Place the baking cups into a foil-lined casserole dish or cookie sheet. Make sure cups are at least 1/3 full. Bake your broken crayons in a 250 degree oven for about 8-10 or until most of the crayon pieces are melted. Some of the crayons may be unmelted, but they should look mostly flat on the top. Allow to cool completely and room the baking cup wrapper. Enjoy using your new rainbow swirl crayons!

Living the Lutz Life: Jackson's Surprise Party, Easter and the Midwest Homeschool Convention

We are in the middle of April and I feel like I am just now recovering from the whirlwind of a month we had in March. I lost my camera for a few weeks and my husband just recently found it hiding in our van. (Love that man!!) Needless to say, there wasn't a lot of picture taking going on there for awhile. 

I fell into a bit of a "funk" at the beginning of April (or was I simply recovering from March?) and my motivation, even for blogging, completely tanked. I got the Fresh Food Deals posted each week, but that's about it. I am finally back in the game and I've been posting up a storm this week. Here's what our family was up to during the last half of March and the beginning of April. 

For kindergarten, Jackson did a unit on colors and learned that "God makes our world beautiful". We sorted Crayola crayons by color families and graphed them, made our own recycled rainbow crayons, learned about the colors of the rainbow, mixed colored water in glass jars (on the dishwasher door) and measured/cut strips of paper to make construction paper rainbows. We continued to work on reading and writing short vowel words, addition and telling time.



Jackson wanted a surprise party for his 6th birthday, so that's exactly what he got! We invited family to come and surprise Jackson and he was so shocked that he almost cried. He had a great time with his cousins, loved the Bowser's castle cake that I made for him and was thrilled with all of his new gifts. It's hard to believe he is already 6 years old. Time seems to fly by more quickly with each passing year.

Our church held an amazing Easter egg hunt the Saturday before Easter and the kids had a BLAST! 50,000 plastic eggs stuffed with 100,000 pieces of candy...let's just say we had more candy from the egg hunt than we got last Halloween!

The kids helped me make a resurrection garden for our dining room table and Bill and I tried to put the Easter focus on Jesus as much as we could (and minimize the bunny). One night we made resurrection rolls out of jumbo marshmallows and some leftover pizza dough. I got the biggest giggle out of Charlotte biting into hers and exclaming, "Oh NO!! Where my marshmallow go? We need make new ones!"

Bill and I were able to get away by ourselves a couple weeks ago and went to the Midwest Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati. We sat in on a few workshops, including one from Ruth at The Better Mom and another from Crystal at Money Saving Mom. It was extremely nice to have two whole days where we could be Bill and Ashley instead of "Daddy" and "Mommy". I enjoyed browsing the gigantic vendor hall--filled with every homeschool curriculum, manipulative, workbook, game or supply you could imagine. It was fun running into a few friends from church while we were there, too!

What has your family been doing now that spring has finally arrived?

10 Fun Family Activities for Celebrating the Resurrection

I grew up thinking that Easter was a day to celebrate the coming of spring. A day to wear a new frilly dress and hat, to have dinner with extended family and to hunt for brightly colored eggs among the new green blades of grass. Easter always seemed "empty" to me. We didn't go to church growing up, so celebrating Easter just left me confused. Would someone, anyone, please tell me why are we getting baskets full of candy and worshipping a giant bunny who lays eggs?

Fast forward to 2013. As a mom of two young children, I desperately want to put Jesus Christ back into Easter. My husband and I want to impart the true meaning of Easter to them at an early age. The fallen world...the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross...His death and resurrection...the promise of eternal life. I don't know about you, but that seems like an overwhelming responsibility to this mom. Especially in a world filled with enormous chocolate bunnies, baskets as big as a small child and no sign of Jesus anywhere.

In searching for ways to share the true meaning of Easter with my kids--I came across some great ideas for craft projects, edible object lessons, and scriptures about the events leading up to the resurrection. Here are a few of my favorites!

Egg Ideas

 

 

Mommy Savers has the coolest idea for putting small glow sticks or glow bracelets (get these cheap at Dollar Tree!) inside of your plastic eggs and holding an indoor or outdoor glow-in-the-dark Easter egg hunt! You could tie this into having the light of Jesus inside of us and shining God's love for the world to see.

 

 

Head over to Family Volley to find out how to make an Easter egg garland with a simple piece of ribbon and some plastic eggs. Add a small object (such as a piece of bread, a few dimes, a nail, etc.) and Bible verse to each egg to tell the resurrection story. Find the list of objects and scriptures here. Alternately, you could have the kids hunt for the story eggs or display them in a basket as a centerpiece on your table.

 

 

What about turning all of those colored eggs from the hunt into an opportunity for prayer and praise? Using this idea for Easter egg prayers from Our Family for His Glory assign each color egg its own theme (praise, confession, thankfulness, etc.--check the link for all the details!). So if your child finds, say 3 yellow eggs, they tell God 3 things they are thankful for. If they find 2 blue eggs, they might confess 2 sins. Isn't that a fabulous way to turn an ordinary egg hunt into a way to bring praise and honor to our Father in heaven?

 

 

Want to share the Good News of the resurrection with your kids' friends or your neighbors? Get your older kids involved in this project! Have some fun "egging" the neighborhood, by placing a dozen candy-filled plastic eggs in the yards of families who would enjoy their own personal egg hunt! Leave a note like the one above that says "Don't be discouraged when you find the empty egg. It's a simple reminder of Jesus' empty tomb--for He is RISEN!" {I absolutely love, love, love this idea and we are going to "egg" a couple of houses on our street and share some of the abudance of candy we got at a church egg hunt last weekend!}

 

 





Edible Lessons

Catholic Icing shows you how to make these cute resurrection cookies using part of a chocolate donut, a chocolate sandwich cookie, coconut "grass" tinted green and a graham cracker. Cute!

Make these creative Crown of Thorns cookies on Good Friday, using a sugar cookie (or apple slice cut crosswise), peanut butter (or other nut butter) and broken pretzel twists. Talk about the broken pretzels and our broken, sinful world. Share the story of Jesus being arrested, beaten, mocked with a crown of thorns and hung on the cross to die for our sins.

Impress Your Kids shows how to use crescent rolls, butter, cinnamon/sugar and a large marshmallow to create hollow Resurrection Rolls to represent the empty tomb. I also saw on Catholic Icing where their family tried out this technique using colored marshmallow Peeps instead of the regular marshmallow, leaving hollow rolls that were colored on the inside.

These Easter Story Cookies over at Women Living Well, might be my favorite! Using ingredients (broken nuts, vinegar, spices) that each represent a different part of the Easter story, you mix up the cookie dough and then the kids seal the "tomb" (oven) closed with tape and guard it like soldiers. After the cookies have baked, you leave them overnight (imagine what it was like for Jesus' friends to leave his body in the tomb that day) and in the morning you open the door to the oven, revealing your hollow cookies! Awesome!

Resurrection Gardens

Ann Voskamp, who blogs at A Holy Experience, shares how she and her daughter made an Easter grace garden. I absolutely LOVE her idea to place a tea light on one of the seven stones of the path, each night between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Then on Good Friday, they leave it completely dark. On Easter Sunday, they place a butterfly on the top to symbolize the resurrection of Jesus.  

My friend, Kate, made this adorable garden with her girls. She told me that she found the large terracotta tray at Hobby Lobby (check their website for 40% coupon you can print or show on your phone) and painted it a bright, cheerful color she already had at home. They used a clay pot on its side (you could also paint the inside black or brown) for the tomb and rocks from the yard. The sticks are hot glued to form the crosses. Kate said she saw artificial moss at both Jo-Ann's and Hobby Lobby. This type of garden would be something you could store and reuse year after year.

Mustard Seeds, takes this project a step further by using wheat berries to sprout "grass" for the hill of Calvary. She also suggests having your family write some sins on small flat stones--because the path to the cross was paved by our sins. I really like her idea of putting a clothespin wrapped in white cloth, into the tomb on Good Friday to represent Jesus. She has her family put their sin stones into the tomb as well. Then on Easter morning, she discards the stones (our sins are forgiven--gone) and the clothespin ("He is not here. He is alive!") and leaves only the white empty cloth for her children to discover in the open tomb. Sooo cool!

Do you like these fun Easter ideas? Which is your favorite? I would love for you to share this post with your friends!

Making Math Fun ~ The Parking Lot Game

Parking Lot Game

Age range: 3 years--2nd grade

Learning objectives: shape recognition, number sense, reading numerals, basic math facts, sight word recognition, alphabet recognition
Prep time: 10-15 min.
Activity time: Totally flexible! Play for 5 minutes or an hour...it's up to you!
Supplies needed: computer paper or poster board, tape, sticky notes (optional), marker, ruler, cars or ponies (the parking spots could be "stalls")

Making the Game Board

You could make your parking lot on a sheet of poster board (which we didn't have at the time) or tape four sheets of computer paper together down the seams and flip the papers over to draw your parking spaces.

On a hard surface, like a table, use a ruler and a marker to mark off parking spaces every couple inches (I didn't really measure this part--I'm guessing about 2.5 inches is what I used per space). I also wrote the words "Parking Lot" in the middle. Cut your sticky notes in half if they are bigger ones (so that each piece has a sticky place on it) and place one on each square. This way the skill you want to work on can be replaced with a new skill and you can use the same board each time. 

Some ideas of what to write on the squares: 

pictures (or clip art) of shapes (2D--square, circle, triangle, etc. 3D-sphere, cone, cube)

numerals (I did a variety between 1-100, but you could do larger ones like 425,000 if you want!)

numbers in written form (twelve, thirty-five, six)

equations (think "3+5" or "10-4")

letters/sounds

sight words

states or capitals

Let your imagination run wild!

How to Play the Game

Call out the answers or words that go along with the sticky notes on your board and have your child race his/her car (my son needed 3 cars! Ha ha!) to the appropriate parking space. For example, if you were working on numerals you would say, "Mater...go to number 65!" or "Lightning McQueen....park on number 99!" or "Orange car...race over to 42!" The child would have to scan the board and find the right spot to park their car. Or have ponies ride into their stalls! To make this game easier, do not fill each spot with a sticky note OR tell your child all of the answers will be on the top row (bottom row, sides, etc.). 

My son decided this game would be more fun if we switched roles and I let him tell ME where to park the cars. This is such a great idea, because it lets the child have the opportunity to practice reading the parking spots instead of just looking for them. It also gives him/her a power trip, telling you what to do! (Sometimes I would mess up on purpose and let him tell me I was wrong because it showed that he knew the correct answer!) This is an excellent game for dads to play with the kiddos, too.

How to Store the Game
A game board made of paperfits perfectly into a file folder, when folded into fourths. You could also roll it and store in a mailing tube or wrapping paper tube. A poster board game could be stored under the couch, in a closet, behind a hutch or between the fridge and a wall/cabinet.


I hope your kiddos enjoy this game as much as my son does! I'd love to hear your feedback or other ideas you have for using this game board.