Ideas For Gifts
For week two of summer camp at home we had Science and Exploration week. Here are a few images from our activities. Our Field Trip was to the Arizona Science Center.
Each week has a different theme filled with activities, crafts, food and field trips related to the theme: Here is Week One.
Junior Explorers
Homemade Slime
Homemade Silly Putty
Home Grown Crystals
Homemade Soap
The Science of Baking
Science Experiments
Homemade Glow-In-The Dark Jello
Mentos and Diet Coke Geyser
Two Liter Tornadoes
Paintings with Milk, Food Coloring and ‘magic’ tooth picks
Static Electricity Experiments
Shadow Projection
Shadow Projection
Field Trip to the Science Center
I had an over abundance of Kale recently from our CSA, Chow Locally, and so I baked some into delicious kale chips.
Raw kale with olive oil and sea salt
Baked kale chips - ready to eat
KALE CHIPS
Ingredients
- 1 bunch kale
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, divided
- 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
- 1 pinch sea salt, to taste
Directions
- Preheat an oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C).
- Cut away inner ribs from each kale leaf and discard; tear the leaves into pieces of uniform size. (I made my pieces about the size of a small potato chip.) Wash torn kale pieces and spin dry in a salad spinner or dry with paper towels until they’re very dry.
- Put the kale pieces into a large resealable bag (or use a bowl if you don’t mind getting your hands oily). Add about half the olive oil; seal and squeeze the bag so the oil gets distributed evenly on the kale pieces. Add the remaining oil and squeeze the bag more, until all kale pieces are evenly coated with oil and slightly ‘massaged.’ Sprinkle the vinegar over the kale leaves, reseal the bag, and shake to spread the vinegar evenly over the leaves. Spread the leaves evenly onto a baking sheet.
- Roast in the preheated oven until mostly crisp, about 35 minutes. Season with salt and serve immediately.
I was inspired by the simple pattern of the Little Dresses for Africa project. So I made a pillow case style dress for the project and I made a ‘dress up’ dress for The Short One using scraps I had around the studio. It was a fun weekend project and hopefully made two little girls happy. The directions are HERE.
Here is the dress up dress I made from scraps
The short one recently celebrated her 6th birthday and asked for a soccer themed party with a twist of girly to it. So I added in touches of pink and flowers. It was a hot dog cook out at a local park and was a big hit! The vases were sports drink bottles shaped like soccer balls, the green underneath were FLOR carpet squares in grass colors. To create to chip bowl covers, I found square bowls at the dollar store and topped them with 12 x 12 paper to look like grass with paper soccer balls and white paper with black stripes created out of colored masking tape, plastic whistles were glued to it to look like a referee. The cupcakes were all strawberry flavored with pink or white frosting, topped with plastic soccer balls from the cake decorating store. The invitation was pink paper with a pink soccer ball on it and pieces of fake grass at the bottom.
We wanted to bake for Saint Patrick’s Day and the short one was asking about the history of Leprechauns and after sharing with her she said “oh so they are sort of like fairies then?” Yes, I guess they sort of are. So for Saint Patrick’s Day we made a green fairy cake. You can’t see the actual fairies, only their clothes because you know they are invisible after all and the idea is to try to catch them.
