Valentine's Day Crafts

Valentine's crafts were fun! Iyla and I made some salt dough heart shapes the night before for painting. Iyla loved that table, I think she painted 10. Oh and lets not forget the sparkles! Anyone elses magnets not stick because of sparkles?
I loved the heart flowers personally. I have them in my window sill, they are so retro looking. I should post a photo of the few that we made. I got the idea from maya made, I have a link under my links list, check it out. I brought back the beads and pipe cleaner because who doesn't love a heart shaped beaded pipe cleaner? And thanks to Henry and Faye's dad we learnt that you can make a skateboard out of beads and pipe cleaner too.
I got crafty and made some potato heart stamps which worked great! I loved the look of the texture they left behind. I also set up a table full of heart collage. That was a pretty fun table full of sparkle glue, heart cut outs, ink stamps, and markers. I personally really liked the look of the newspaper hearts, something about the unplanned look of the cut out. Iyla and I had a great time preparing and creating the Valentine's day crafts!
Hope everyone has a great, happy Valentine's day and will see you all next week.
Becky & Iyla
PS A big congrats to Max who is now a BIG brother to his new little sister Linden. So exciting!

EGYPT!!!!

I am going to Egypt in March for 2 weeks!!!! My best friend is teaching grade 7 there at an International school. I will be visiting her during her spring break which happens to fall on the last 2 weeks of the program, March 5th and 12th. I want to move the last 2 weeks of class ahead to March 26th and April 2nd. If these new dates do not work with your schedule please let me know and we can workout something that works for your family.

I will be moving the start dates of the spring schedule. Does anyone have a different day that they would like to have the class on? I am at the stage where I feel like I need to set ages to each class and time, as well as, a more defined program guide.
I am still hoping for a space to help with all this growing.

Please feel free to email me with any questions and/or suggestions.
Thank you
Becky

Valentine's Day

Last week was my first week without Margret and can you believe it, I didn't get any photos?! I thought that I would try beading, lacing, weaving, sewing. It was just not messy enough for me!! This week is a couple of days before Valentine's day so we are going to create some Valentine inspired arts. Lots of sparkles, hearts, glue, and paint.

Thinking about changing the set up of the class. I have been tossing around the idea of, instead of having the whole class as a theme, having each table dedicated to one kind of material and each week using that material differently. That way if a child likes paint, there will always be paint. Or if a kid likes glueing there will always be a differrent glueing project. After next weeks class I am going to give this new set up a try and see how it goes. I would also like to end the class with an interactive story or song which will maybe help with the last 15 mins.

See you next week
Becky & Iyla

The Creative World of String

Did you know that such a world existed? Well it does and we are going to explore it this week! Weaving, lacing, stringing, hanging, painting, sparkleing, glueing. String madness!

Sculpture day fun

An interesting mix of play dough, tin foil cruppling, plaster - MESS!!!, and ice sculptures. I spent all week trying to freeze ice outside but had no luck at all, did anyone know that it isn't freezing outside? So I managed to get some smaller sizes of colored ice frozen and put the ice and salt theory to the test. It worked kind of. I think maybe those experiments work better when it is outside with still freezing conditions? In the end we had a lot of colored fingers!
I also thought that by putting plaster in zip lock bags and molding inside the bag would be awesome for mess and for those kids that do not like the feeling of mucky stuff between their fingers. BUT my plaster mixing techniques are not the best and well majority agreed that paper plates, plaster, and sticking things inside worked better.
Play dough was a hit as always. Who doesn't love playdough?
I also had a table filled with different things that the kids could stick into a flower arranging foam. That was a pretty big hit with the kids. The am group stuffed their foam blocks with as much as they could. The pm kids cut their blocks up with scissors and made animals out of them. Very cool.
I tried a few other ideas that were just interesting to see what would happen. Thanks again to everyone for coming out and sculpting! Hope to see you next week for some more silly fun!

Big thanks to all parents!

Dear Becky: Thank you very much for your generous donation to the No. 6 Mine Heritage Park. The money has
been placed in the park account and earmarked for playground equipment as requested. As we are a volunteer group working under the supervision of the Village of Cumberland any capital projects or expenditures must be pre-approved by the Village before they are purchased and placed in the park. I had just submitted a list of projects for the new budget year before receiving your donation. However at our committee meeting tomorrow we will bring up the topic of new playground equipment and then hopefully submit a proposal to the Village for their approval.
As we discussed before the park is increasingly being used by more parents and their younger children and some new playground equipment would certainly prove exciting for the children.
I will keep you posted as to our progress......and once again many thanks for your assistance.

I will also put your idea of a Sunday afternoon children's concert on the agenda. Personally this shouldn't be a problem as you would just go through the regular booking procedure with the Village office as the other user groups currently do.

Sincerely: Ron Bannerman
Chair: No. 6 Mine Heritage Committee

All kinds of brushes

This week we explored different types of paint brushes. We tried, feathers, string, cars, actual paint brushes, rollers, sticky hands, and straws. The tip of the ice berg as far as what you can use to paint with. We also explored black and white paint with black and white paper. It was a busy class and the smocks sure came in handy with all the paint flying around!!!

This week coming is the wonderful world of SCULPTURE!!! I am very excited for this class, we are going to build things, paste things, mold things and arrange things. It will be a busy morning, I am, as always, looking forward to it!

An update on money raised for the Miners Park thus far is $43 dollars!! That makes $203 to date.
Thanks everyone and hope to see you this week.
Becky & Iyla