September 2: Spiral Snakes

The kids are always up for painting, and I wanted something fairly simple to do today.  That resulted in Spiral Snakes from familycrafts.about.com.  Each kid painted a paper plate on both sides...even Brielle got into it!  The tough part with projects like this is waiting for the paint to dry before finishing the project. 

Once the paint was dry (a few hours later), I cut the plate into a spiral, we added some googly eyes and a red tongue, and the spiral snakes were complete!  Brielle thought hers (pictured below) was great!  She loved shaking it and playing with it!  Koen, who doesn't like snakes, decided to make a puppy face instead.  I'm not sure how that's coming, though.  He may just have had fun painting since his plate is still sitting on the counter.

August 4: Boulder Ridge Wild Animal Park

Since seeing the advertisement on grkids.com, I've wanted to visit Boulder Ridge Wild Animal Park.  The ad has been up for a while but the park just opened the last weekend of July.  The kids and I really enjoyed the Wild Animal Park!  We went on a beautiful day -- almost a little cool after sweating it out in the humid      90-degree weather we've been having.  The owners have so many unique creatures, and each one was easy to view up close!  We also took a wagon ride around the park looking at more animals.  I learned a good deal about the different animals but am embarrassed to admit I can't even remember all the names of the animals we saw!  The park is home to animals mainly from Africa, Asia, and Russia. 

Koen, Tysen, and their friend Ian check out some snakes in the Reptile House.

A tortoise, Tysen, Me, and Brielle.

 

A lemur (also known as a "move it, move it guy" from the Madagascar movie)...one of our favorite animals to watch!



This emu "growled" at Tysen!  Yikes!

Brielle checks out a baby chick.

Tysen gently holds a chick.

Feeding the parakeets:  You can purchase bird feed on a stick and feed the parakeets in the bird sanctuary.  Tysen wanted to do this, but changed his mind as soon as he stepped into the sanctuary and the birds mobbed him!  I helped him hold the stick, but it was still a little intimidating to have all these birds flock to you and swarm around you.  Tysen apparently wanted revenge for being scared...can you see him in the middle of this picture?  His foot is raised because he tried to stomp on the little birds.  Fortunately, he missed, but I still made him leave the bird sanctuary immediately.

May 25: Find that Animal!

Each Wednesday I suggest games to Ty and he's just not that interested in them.  Today, though, a "game" just kind of happened.  Brielle had a doctor's appointment today and of course, Ty was there, too.  While we were waiting for the doctor to come in, Ty noticed the wallpaper in the room.  It was based on the Noah's Ark Bible story and had pairs of animals portrayed...but in a more abstract form.  He initiated the game by asking me if I saw the elephants.  So we took turns asking each other to find different animals.  Some were familiar like the elephants, giraffes, birds, etc., but I was surprised to find that Ty knew ostriches and other more not-as-common animals.  Sometimes it's the child-initiated, on-the-spot fun that beats any plan I may come up with.

May 6: Animal ABC Book -- part 3

We spent 15 minutes gluing some animal pictures in Ty's ABC book so we're not near finished.  He's sick of the project, though, so I suppose we'll take a break from it for a while and finish it another day.

Brielle had a fantastic time playing with the (unopened) glue sticks!

April 29: Ty's Animal ABC Book - part one and two

When Koen was 3-years-old we made an ABC book for him.  We took each letter and had a scavenger hunt around the house looking for items beginning with each letter.  Then we took pictures of the group of items (Koen was really interested in photography at this time) and labeled each item (A is for...etc.)  We place each photo and card in a 4x6 photo book and still look at it once in a while.  This book took a l-o-n-g time to construct as Koen would lose interest in it after a letter or two.  I think we took a whole summer to complete it. 

Koen's ABC Book



I decided it was Ty's turn to create an ABC book of his own, but I didn't want to do the same thing with him.  Enter the HUGE stack of magazines sitting on bookshelf in the boys' room.  They have subscriptions to My Big Backyard and National Geographic for Kids, and I've been saving them.  For one, I'm too Dutch to just recycle them, and also they have beautiful pictures and great activities for the kids.  Of course, the boys don't look through them like I thought they would, so I decided to use them to create an animal ABC book for Ty.  He L-O-V-E-S animals so I'm hoping he loves this book!  



Ty's Animal ABC Book



My scrapbook supplies provided us with different color cardstock for each page as well as animal print letters for each page.  Part one of this project was simply pasting the letters on the pages.  Tysen sang the ABC song at least 40 times while we did this...no joke!  I'm now 100% confident he knows his alphabet!!!  Not only does he know the song, but he was able to identify the letter needed and glue it on the page.  I have a surplus of page protectors in my home office, so we used those as our pages, placing each piece of cardstock in its own sleeve.  Learning from my experience with Koen I knew this wasn't going to be a one-day project so we just glued the letters on the pages.



Creating the cover.




Gluing letters on the cardstock.



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When Koen learned that Ty was making an animal ABC book, he naturally wanted his own.  Fortunately, we have enough magazines that I'm pretty sure we'll be able to find enough animal examples for each of their books.  On Sunday afternoon we worked on part two of the project...just paging through the magazines and finding animal examples.  The National Geographic magazines even have tear-out cards in each issue which provided a number of examples for us to use. 

I'm pretty sure I'm more excited about this project than either Koen or Tysen.  I thoroughly enjoy researching, and I actually learned a number of things about animals while searching for animal pictures to use.  Tysen liked looking at the pictures but wasn't too excited about cutting them out.  I ended up cutting most of them out, but I did rip some pages out with the hope that he'll be more in the mood to practice his cutting during part 3 of the project later this week. 



Koen searches for his next animal.




Ty browses a National Geographic for Kids.





February 18: Heart-y Animals

Still in the spirit of Valentine's Day week, I chose to do a craft involving hearts today.  About.com had a suggestion called "Heart-y Animals" where you could make a number of different animals out of various heart shapes.  Ty was looking over my shoulder and was really excited about making the elephant he saw, so that's what we did!  He didn't really care that we were using hearts to create our new friend, he just liked the elephant.  Ty chose green paper for his, and declared that his elephant must have googly eyes! 

It was a bit tricky for me just free-hand cutting out the hearts, but they turned out OK I think.  I was fortunate that I had a small heart punch so I could quickly and easily cut out all the little hearts used for the trunk.  While it turned out pretty cute, and Ty was thrilled with it, I was disappointed because it turned out to be a mostly-mommy project.  Ty did help me glue things down, but if I had really thought about it before starting, I would have realized he wasn't going to be able to do much of this craft by himself. 

July 20: Anderson & Girls Orchard

During our camping trip, we took a day for an excursion to the Anderson & Girls Orchard.  This place is AMAZING!  Our friends, the DeBoers, had found it a year ago and had told us about it, but it's in Stanton, MI, which is a bit of a hike from our house.  It's much closer to the campground we were using, so we took part of a day to head out there.

This place is wonderful!  First of all, it's TOTALLY FREE!  Love that!  They have amazing animals for kids to see:  reindeer, emu, camel, zebra, sloth, kangaroos, parrot, and warthog, just as examples!  Then, kids can play on an old firetruck, use the ski boat sand box, slide down the tube-slide, feed the goats (and other animals...just be sure to take your quarters to buy the food!), and touch the pigs, bunnies, and sheep. We could have spent more time there than we did simply because we went on a hot day, and everyone got tuckered out after about two hours. 

They do have a store on the property, but we didn't make it in there so I'm not sure what that holds.  We did, however, treat ourselves to some ice cream from their ice cream shop after our picnic lunch.  They have $1 cones for soft-serve ice-cream...what a deal!  Of course, Koen needed to have the Superman ice cream (not on the $1 list), and Ty just mooched off from Mommy and Daddy's ice cream. 

(Below pix:  The slide & Ty in the firetruck)

I wish this place was closer to our house as it'd be fun to go back with other family and friends!  I'm sure we'll get there again someday!

(Can you see the kangaroo in this pic?)

July 9: The Zoo!

It was a beautiful day for our whole family to visit John Ball Park Zoo.  It'd been a year since our last visit so the kids didn't remember it much and were excited to go check it out!  As of June, the zoo is home to a HUGE alligator, Big Mike, who weighs over 800 lbs. and is 13 feet long -- impressive to see! 

Koen's favorite thing at the zoo was watching the monkeys, while Ty liked the bears best.  I liked the petting zoo where the kids could pet the goats.  In the reptile house, one of the zoo volunteers had a snake out and Ty and cousin Evan were brave enough to touch it!  I know there are other opportunities at the zoo to hear talks and learn about the animals, but we kept it pretty simple with little kids in tow. 

We were at the zoo just over 2 hours and saw about everything...the perfect amount of time for an outing made up of young kids and their parents.  I'm glad we went in the morning when it was slightly cooler as it was getting pretty hot and sticky as we left.