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By Mom Unplugged, August 29, 2008 8:42 pm

Unplugged Project Special Edition

Now that my camera cable is back, here is our project for trees. Better late than never I suppose!

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I was fairly uninspired for the Unplugged Project theme of trees. It needed to be simple since we were in Albuquerque for the weekend, away from any supplies beyond crayons and paper. No one had ideas, then I suggested making trees out of our hand outlines. The idea was met with very little enthusiasm, but my oldest daughter and I decided to give it a go.

First we traced our hands:

Then we cut some small branches off some trees that needed a bit of pruning anyhow. We took the leaves off the branches to stick them on our handprints:

What started off as a rather dull project quickly became exciting when one of the leaves I was stripping off a branch suddenly hopped onto the countertop and began walking around!

He was amazingly similar to the leaves I was using and none of us had seen him, even up close, until he jumped off.

We all ooed and aahed and squealed with delight as our surprise visitor crawled on our hands and showed us that he knew how to fly.

After we had all had a very gentle turn with him, we carefully returned him to his tree.

Here is a photo of him in the tree to show you how well camouflaged he was (if you are having a hard time spotting him, look for the brown spot. That is him pooping - much to the delight of the children):

After that bit of unexpected excitement, we finished our projects with new enthusiasm!

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This was an Unplugged Project “special edition.” Be sure to check back on Monday morning to see what everyone comes up with for this week’s theme of insect.

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By Mom Unplugged, May 4, 2008 8:25 pm

Green was the theme for this week’s Unplugged Project. When I thought of green, I was planning on being clever and doing a “green” (ie. recycled) project, instead of one involving the color green. I had a plan…but I won’t divulge it, we’ll just do it another week.

The weather was so lovely today that the children wanted to take a “kids’ walk” (a short walk that I let them do by themselves down our quiet road and back home on the golf course cart path - total time en route: about 5 minutes). Rather than keep them inside for a project on a day like today, instead I suggested they bring along the camera and take pictures of everything they saw on their walk that was green.

Kids love cameras and digital cameras are perfect for kids. Children armed with cameras take lots of pictures and most don’t come out too well, but there are often a few great ones in amongst the blur. Even if you buy an inexpensive disposable camera, why pay for processing a bunch of fuzzy photos? Especially when very simple digital cameras are so inexpensive nowadays.

If you do buy your children a camera, I have one word of advice (learned from experience): buy one with a rechargeable battery. They will take LOTS of pictures, forget to turn it off, etc. Most cheap kids’ cameras have regular old batteries that will last about half an hour under such conditions. This could either turn into a very expensive proposition, or you’ll never want to let your kids use their camera because of the cost of batteries! So - spend a tiny bit more for the camera and get one with a long-lasting, rechargeable battery they can actually use.

End of digression.

Here are the best results of their green scavenger hunt (7 out of 25 photos a success - see what I mean about the value of a digital camera for kids?). Because I realize that my kids’ photos of pine needles may not be quite as fascinating to the general public as my children might like to believe, these 7 pictures are in slide show format that you can choose to view or not. The point is, that a Photo Scavenger Hunt of any kind, can be great fun for children, especially outside on a lovely day!

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If you took part in this week’s Unplugged Project then please put your link in Mr. Linky (plus comment in case we lose Mr. Linky for some reason) .

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme will be:

Newspaper

I hope to see you all next Monday! What can you do with the theme Newspaper?

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Comments (13)

By Mom Unplugged, April 27, 2008 9:10 pm

My two oldest each had lengthy birthday parties to attend this afternoon. So although I had an art project in mind when I chose birds as this week’s Unplugged Project theme, my children’s busy social calendars precluded anything too complicated.

Instead of art this week, we decided to do something I was meaning to do anyhow: put out some nice spring nesting materials.

While most people know that putting out food and water for wild birds is a great way to attract them to your yard, another often overlooked additional method is to provide nesting materials in the spring. As long as you have some good nesting locations (requirements vary by type of bird), giving them handy materials can encourage them to nest in your yard where you can watch the action for several months.

All you’ll need are some empty suet feeder cages, or a few of those nets used to package oranges or potatoes in bulk. We used a big net from some oranges and a few small Baby Bel cheese nets.

We have some high class, five star nesting material: leftover alpaca fleece from Dempsey, an alpaca at our local alpaca ranch!

If you don’t happen to have a local alpaca ranch or any spare alpaca fleece lying around your house, you can also try putting out any of the following:

-dried leaves and twigs
-human or horse hair
-pet fur, sheep’s wool
-dry grass
-plant fluff (ie. cattail fluff)
-feathers
-yarn or string (cut into 4″ to 8″ pieces)
-thin strips of cloth (1″ x 6″)
-cotton batting
-bark strips
-pine needles
-shredded paper
-moss

But don’t put out drier lint (stays soggy, dries hard, can contain chemicals from laundering).

You can prepare the household materials together, or go on a nature hike to collect suitable natural materials.

Place the materials in the nets or cages and hang them around your garden on trees, or deck railings. You can also push loose material into tree crevices or between rocks, and drape yarn and string over bushes. Heavier items that won’t blow away, like twigs, can be put out in small piles around your yard.

Then simply sit back and watch to see if there is any interest in your spring gifts!

For more about this (and my source for much of this information), please see: Attracting Birds With Nesting Material from the fascinating Cornell Lab of Ornithology website.

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If you participated in the birds project this week, please put your link in Mr. Linky below (also be sure to leave a comment in case Mr. Linky malfunctions).

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme will be:

Green

Please join us!

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Comments (22)

By Mom Unplugged, April 6, 2008 10:28 pm

The theme for this week’s Unplugged Project was books.

I confess to having had a bit of a hard time with this one. The choices seemed endless. Of course the kids could make books, write books, read books, organize their books (I always like to get them organizing their stuff!), make bookmarks, make bookends… nothing seemed quite right though. So, since the weather today was so lovely (windy, but beautiful), we decided to go for a walk/bike/scooter adventure, during which we collected leaves and other natural things that we might be able to use for a project (when in doubt, nature is always a good place to start).

When we got home my 5 year-old son wanted to make a nature book for his treasures. My 7 year-old daughter wanted to make book marks. I had been vaguely thinking of the old iron-the-wax-paper trick and suggested we try that for the bookmarks. This is what we came up with:

The “nature expedition:”

Bookmarks:

Our materials:

First we cut out rectangles of wax paper:

Then we arranged our nature finds on one half of the wax paper:

Next we folded the wax paper over to make a “sandwich” and I ironed it.

There are no photos of this step since I (the photographer) was doing the ironing. I will say though, that it did not work as smoothly as I remember it as a child. The first try did not stick. Then it seemed there was a sticky side to the wax paper, then it seemed that both sides were sticky. Weird. Is it because our wax paper was “microwave-safe?” Hmm…. I never did figure it out. Next time I would probably use clear contact paper instead.

After the ironing process, we made construction paper frames to hide the edges, punched a hole and looped yarn through the hole for a tassel.

We got off to a rocky start with the wax paper dilemma, but we ended up having a lot of fun and produced four bookmarks!

Nature Book:

My son stapled three sheets of construction paper together and stuck his finds on to the pages with tape, glue, and staples. He was quite happy for at least an hour, just choosing his natural objects, and attaching them.

Here is the final product:

For another book-related idea, please read my post A Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear.

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Did you join in our project this week? If so, then thank you! Please leave the link to your project in Mr. Linky as well as a comment, since sometimes Mr. Linky doesn’t work well and I have to take him off.

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme is:

Food

(doesn’t have to be cooking…what else can you do with food?)

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Comments (12)

By Mom Unplugged, March 16, 2008 9:12 pm

This week’s Unplugged Project theme was wood. Our project began with a snowy trek through the trees on our property in search of twigs and small branches. The winter winds had knocked down many pine branches, so they were easy to find. We gathered a few pine cones too. The plan: Fairy Houses!!

We’ve done this before in the summer when more materials were available (leaves, moss, petals, etc.) which made for quite luxurious accommodations. But since there was snow today, these will have to be rather austere, winter fairy houses.

As you can see from the photos, the dogs did a wood project too…romping through the wood-s.

Here are our gathered materials:

Plus some cardboard bases, some string, and a hot glue gun.

My husband was happy to operate the glue gun and glued whatever needed to be glued. I was the string expert and helped tie string.

Here is the process and result:

My daughter then placed the fairy houses in the garden for the fairies to enjoy.

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What did you do for wood? If you joined us, please put your link in Mr. Linky (and a comment in case I have to take him off - so we can still find you to visit). If you didn’t join us but are simply lurking, why not “delurk” and put your link in, either this week or next? If you don’t have a blog, you can still join in…read about the non-blog options at my Unplugged Project page.

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Next week’s project:

Eggs (for Easter, or spring/birth if you don’t celebrate Easter)

Please join us with your ideas for eggs!

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