reggio inspired

Halloween the best time of the year

| poppypeach

For the last four weeks my daughter and I attended a Girls Leadership workshop at the school I worked at last year. The new art teacher had set up a lovely area for knitting and fibre arts with an invitation for the kids to enjoy when they are in the hall, the weaving was made from two branches with hooks and string and designed so the kids can add their finger knitting to make a pattern – a very cool idea!

The workshop was empowering for me but hopefully, Missy will get something out of it eventually. Being 10 years old is difficult and if your friends are not so keen the influence rubs off and its all over, so she found it boring. Whereas I found it enlightening with using the tools below to help with kiddo conversations.

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I think these skills are universal especially with my kids who are 10 and 13 and sometimes there is a power struggle with wanting independence, I highly recommend these workshops for anyone who has girls.

On Wednesday it was my favourite time of the year – Halloween! I wore my owl costume from last year which earned me the costume prize at my dance class, which was cool 😀 My teacher went as a sailor lady and it was so fun to see everyone dressed up and dancing. I thank Joan’s class for the excitement of getting dressed up for Halloween as it was encouraged year after year and once I finally scored a sewing machine that’s when the magic happened!

Missy was a hummingbird for Halloween as you can see in the wings, she did not want a mask or a beak. We made the skirt and she glued on all the sequins and she helped sew the wings onto the blue top. Here is a barn cat from the ranch where the chickens live, one of the other kids told us this cats mama was killed by a coyote so this cutie is all alone and the humans are super protective of him by locking him away in his cage when they have completed their farm chores.

Finally, the time was right for trick or treating in the evening and we went to my daughter’s friends place where they were playing a bunch of videos on a loop such as Thriller, This is Halloween, Macarena and a song from The Greatest Showman. The kids scored a lot of candy and I even scored some for Ash who was away in Yosemite for Halloween, thanks so much G’s family!

Thursday we had our second week of Arts Focus and had decided to limit the direct instruction and just get the kids working after their big night of eating sugar and staying up late trick or treating. We managed to get these cool yarn octopuses made and the kids just loved making them but I had to make a new tutorial video due to the difficulty of following the YouTube vid we had found. Check out our new one and make your own.

School is almost over…

| poppypeach

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I am counting down the days of my work as my kids are already on summer holidays as they finished for the next 11 weeks – yep 11 weeks holiday! And in just 19 days we will be spending over 4 of those weeks in Australia, I am getting excited!!! I will be finishing my work gig as it was a substitute position for the school year and next year I will be spending more time at my daughter’s school as it is her last year there and we will be moving back home to Australia, so it is going to be BIG!!

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Last week was the culmination of our Bee Play for the Kinder class where the kids made their wings out of a coat hanger, tulle and sewed the lines/veins with black yarn. We attached them to their body like a backpack with a crossover back with elastic and put felt around the elastic and the joined coathanger to make it smooth. It was quite a fun little project to work with the kids – they all enjoyed the sewing part! I would have to say the tricky part was stapling the tulle onto the wire coathangers which took up a fair amount of time after school! The kids dyed their white t-shirts with our art teacher and later painted black stripes on them.

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Here is the play on the chapel stage complete with a backdrop the kids painted – I was switching out the backdrop from the meadow to the hive and the sun was stuck on there when it stopped raining. It was a super fun production! There is a farmer in the hat and the beekeeper is somewhere on stage too.

 

I am enjoying the last few times I will be visiting the church at Ventana – it is just beautiful inside, the stained glass is spectacular.

The 1st-grade kids I work with were weaving with sticks to make these really cool art pieces with our super art teacher Jess. She has these really long yarn needles and the kids made a warp tension across the sticks and then weaved in some coloured yarn, I will have to try some of these over the summer holidays as I have yarn and we can go in search for some interesting sticks when we go for bike rides.

There was a lot of fun with yarn too with the Kinders and the kids played this game of throwing a yarn ball across the closing circle to make a star. Afterwards, they had to roll the yarn back up remembering who they had sent it too, tricky but it was super cool fun.

 

Thursday I went out with my friends for an early summer birthday to Amber India which was so good to catch up. We had some delicious cocktails and the dinner was tasty with okra and roti and many curries. We will catch up again after summer to share our summer adventure stories.

 

Summer is here on an off and I did an early Saturday ride and it was so beautiful and still, I captured Hangar 1 in reflection and saw some beautiful bunnies on the trail and here is my amazing dinner from Friday of okonomiyaki with fresh basil, tomatoes and salad – yummy!

I was so happy to see Saturday as it was time to get into my final draft of my last paper for University on Contemporary Perspectives of Learning and Development for Early Childhood. It was a reflection, an education philosophy with the idea of writing this for a potential employer about what educational approaches I am interested in. Of course, it is Reggio, PBL and Waldorf-Steiner – all hands on with a focus on community.

 

Finally, Saturday afternoon came, after a day of editing my paper I got out to the park to the ice cream social with the neighbourhood. The fire truck sprayed water on the crowd on a 33-degree day which was super cooling. While I was enjoying a nice vodka cocktail with my friends. The kids were getting painted by my friend Susan (who was also my ceramics teacher), she was kept super busy for her time there and Missy wanted a bobcat and it looks amazing.

Some good times are ahead this summer!!

 

Little bit of this and that!

| poppypeach

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There has been some good food around of late and the day I really love during the week is Taco Tuesday with the easy meal of opening a box of frozen fish putting it in the oven, getting some tortillas on the grill and making a quick slaw with the food processor grating attachment. They really save me on a Tuesday when I have come home from work and have exercised and I am starving. So my diet is now officially over after 90 days to tone my body and I feel fit and healthy, my recovery after exercise is way better plus I know how to eat to feel full and that is to eat every 3 hours. For a healthy snack, I eat whole foods such as Greek yoghurt and fruit and for lunch a protein, grain and salad – I discovered that whole grains are not the enemy they keep me sustained for a period of time. My pants are looser and I am sleeping very well, especially with the addition of golden milk (which I found in Australia a couple of years ago!) to help with sleep. It has been great to get into a routine each day of work, exercise, cook dinner and study/catch up on chores and bed. Sometimes exercise can be so hard, but it is so worth it as it makes me feel so much better and able to handle whatever weirdness is going on around me.

 

At work, the kids in the Kindergarten class have been studying bees and they had a visit from the legendary beekeeper Deb from Girlzwurk it was wonderful to meet her and give her a hug for all the amazing work she is doing with rescuing bees! She said she has around 3 million bees at her property up in the Saratoga hills – amazing! It has been an incredible experience for the kids to learn about bees and this week they will be presenting their information in a play for the school to enjoy!

 

This is artwork from the 1st-grade class that was created with our art teacher Jess – the children were inspired by what they made for the village project. Each piece has turned out beautifully!

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Finally, over the weekend we got to enjoy some summer heat and be out in the garden and I found some of these flowers growing on the fence with a huge stash of little passionfruits growing on the vine and it looks like a bumper crop this year! They are such amazing flowers, it is the perfect attractant for bees.

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While I have been writing my reflection for my 3rd and final assignment for this teaching period, my daughter and my hubby were making Pusheen doughnuts in the kitchen and this is how they turned out! They had a fun time making them but I somehow feel that you need that thin synthetic chocolate to coat these things, the melted chocolate became weird as my hubby learnt a lesson about putting water into melted chocolate as it thickens it up! Still, I think this is a good effort for the first time of making fancy doughnuts 😀

Teacher appreciation week

| poppypeach

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A very quick post this week as I am meant to be writing a paper at the moment and I have so much to do! Teacher appreciation week was last week and it was just wonderful to feel so appreciated by the children. We enjoyed breakfast and lunch and each day there was a surprise organised by our caring parents. It really is such a treat!

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Here is our breakfast table looking so good with fresh fruit and quiche and all sorts of yummy goodness. The salads were just divine with fresh mozzarella, basil and tomato.

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This is dry collage on a light table with beads from a beaded curtain that my co-teacher carefully cut out and the kids sorted by colour. Such an interesting way to create patterns.

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The kindergarteners made salads for the teachers from their pea plants in a little restaurant they created and here they are in a pretend play restaurant with the chef hats they made for the kitchen.

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My daughter’s school organised treats for her teachers too, we also had a last minute potluck on Thursday which made the week quite full. Here is their gratitude tree which makes music in the wind.

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Our weekend was jam-packed full of a yard sale, visiting friends and out to dinner plus finalising my first draft of assessment 2 – so time to get into gear so I can submit it on the weekend. This is a pic of an Alexanders Patisserie Matcha dessert which was just like a Swiss roll, with delicious meringue – I love the colour of this dessert and it was perfect with a peony tea.

Bit of a busy week!

| poppypeach

So I am supposed to be writing a paper at the moment, but it is so hard to get anything done with the week I had! It all began with a stuffed animal sewing workshop with Kinder and 1st-grade kids at my work as an auction prize. Here are a few of the animals made by these first-time sewers and I was really impressed with their perseverance and creativity.

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After the workshop, we had a call with our architect in Melbourne (our friend) who completed the design drawings for our house, and we absolutely love it! Our block is not huge so we are using the space very effectively. We just love the addition of colour and the skylight to bring in light to the addition at the back of the house. The front is a cottage that will be the master bedroom and downstairs bathroom. The extension on the back will be the living and dining all open plan – which I love! And the upstairs is the kid’s bedroom and their bathroom. I am so happy about this house and am so looking forward to seeing it built! Waiting patiently is hard, but I know it will all be worth it.

Thursday we had an open house at Stevenson Elementary for our 4th grader and saw her beautiful artwork and stories on pioneer times from her trip to Fort Ross. This week they are off again to Coloma for the gold rush overnight field trip with other parent chaperones which she is looking forward to doing, away from her parents :/

Friday night was Missy’s birthday, so we went out for sushi together as a family for her choice of dinner. Afterwards, I had a date with some friends to celebrate a March birthday with lots of cocktails, delicious Mexican food and dessert – check out the volcano cake from Agave.

At work we created a lovely craft for the kids to do with an invitation to write a personal narrative about their family using various materials, they crafted them to discuss experiences, their family and pets and it is such a great way to encourage writing through art.

Saturday was the big party for the 10-year-old! We were lucky we had beautiful sunny spring weather – the plan was a sewing felt animal picnic at the park but the kids really just wanted to play together, which was fine! The cake was a vanilla bean bundt cake with sprinkles inside to make it the funfetti version. I had made a funfetti cake a couple of years ago with natural sprinkles which did not really work and I realised what the secret was – it is the sprinkles from Safeway that are unnaturally brightly coloured.

We set up the craft table for the kids to choose their cat or dog – Missy had asked her friends beforehand so we knew what to cut out and they were ready to go! What ended up happening was the parents were sewing and drinking, and the kids were playing – so we had to call them over to stuff their animals so they could take them home as their party gift! I love the button eyes on the dog with the multicoloured floss.

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And then Sunday was Easter day, and the kids had their egg hunt inside the house as the garden was a mess from the chicken sitting.

And to come to full circle to the end of the week, we have another open house for the middle school tonight, and this is where we see what the mysterious tweens get up to at school! We showed our appreciation for the teachers and the communication they share, as the kids are not very good messengers!

I really love the quilling of Victini the Pokemon, and the owl – the scary teacher pic at the bottom is a bit dark for me. So it makes me happy that my son is finally doing art and over the summer I have signed him up for a How to draw Manga camp, and I am looking forward to seeing what he creates there. I need to get him ready for the arts and cultural hub of Melbourne!

Now a big breath and onto research for my paper – whew what a week!

Farewell Arts Focus for another year!

| poppypeach

Last week it was our final week of Arts Focus with some very talented sewers from our school. I was really impressed with this owl fleece hat – I think this student has set the bar high for the next session! The quilt we made was given to our school principal as a gift for her baby, here is a detail of it – embroidered by one of the students.

This 2017-2018 session we brought in some new projects such as the yarn octopus and felt emoji. For the second session, we introduced the button tree to fill in some time as we had a lot of older grade kids (5th grade choose what class they would like to do as their final class). My co-lead also made the kids get fancy with their pillow making which is always a plus to see the kids stretch their creativity. The pipe cleaner doll and embroidery on the bottom left was made by a kinder girl who sewed such beautiful stitches. A favourite of mine is the platypus embroidery sewn by one of the 5th-grade girls in the class.

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At the school where I work the students have been busy making a dollhouse for the auction coming up this weekend. The kids started with making little dolls of themselves and in true Reggio fashion, it evolved into something magical – this dollhouse. With some help from their science and art specialists, this all came together. I am helping them with pipe cleaner dolls this week to give away with the house when it goes up for auction this Saturday evening. Tomorrow we will wrap the yarn around the pipe cleaners and define the bodies of all these dolls lazing around in the playroom of the house 😀

It was back to University over the weekend and what better way to get the brain going on this clean eating diet I am currently on is to have grilled sardines over sauteed kale and roasted garlic topped with watermelon radish and tomato – very tasty with a dash of sriracha.

The annual Holi celebration my friend celebrates each year was a lot of fun on Sunday. We were very lucky to have the sunshine and warm weather after our all out splash of colour followed by buckets of water.

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To add to this weeks collection of food I am looking at lentils as a high protein food so I needed to discover new recipes to eat them and this came to mind after enjoying lentils in Melbourne last year.

Black Lentils with Grilled Asparagus topped with watercress and goat cheese salad

1 cup black lentils (cooked)
1 small onion (cut finely)
Olive oil
1 cup diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon Smoked paprika
1 tablespoon miso mixed in a small amount of stock (a thick consistency)
Salt and pepper (to taste)

Bunch of watercress
Tomato
Goat cheese (as much as you would like!)

Method

  1. While waiting for the lentils put the asparagus in some oil on the grill.
  2. Simmer onion on a skillet in a little oil until transparent, add lentils.
  3. Mix onions and lentils and add diced tomatoes.
  4. Mix through miso and stock through the lentils and add salt and pepper to taste.
  5. Finish with watercress, tomato and goat cheese.

Nothing like a holiday!

| poppypeach

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Now we are on holidays and it is so good to sleep in and catch up with so much stuff that has been waiting to be done such as getting rid of stuff for our move! So far I have cleaned out the sewing room but I still do not have a cupboard’s worth of fabric, hey I could be here up to another year so I have to keep some fabric to keep me occupied in my spare time!

Yesterday we did a coop clean out with another 4H family and we came home covered in dust. It was so much fun to see the chickens again, Ruby even got to go on a walk with a chicken leash 😀 Now their coop is super clean complete with an indoor dust bath made from play sand and diatomaceous earth to help keep the feather mites at bay.

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Saturday I went to yoga after weeks and it was a brilliant start to the weekend with my idea of cleaning my house I may as well cleanse my body too with some hot yoga! The spring flowers are starting to pop up but with the current weather with overnight lows of 2-4 degrees, I only see it in the sunshine during the day.

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These lovely watercolour pictures are created with salt on the watercolour to create the sky in the background. This was a discovery for me as I have not had much experience with watercolour. Our art teacher worked on planet paintings with the kids and these were my favourites with the bottom on looking like Salvador Dali.

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Wednesday we had wandering time in the chapel and the kids worked on an exercise of what feelings arise when you look at particular colours and this is what happens when you give a 1st-grade girl the colour brown.

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These made great gifts though next time I will wrap them individually on cardstock so they do not tangle plus they need to be made long so the string can get over the child’s head. In the end one was so small it went on one of the kindergartens stuffies!

A quick little Valentine gift

| poppypeach

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With Valentine’s day around the corner, I had a bit of a task on my hands to make last-minute valentines for my Kinder and 1st-grade students. So here is a quickie tutorial on making these cute little wooden bead heart necklaces.

Supplies needed: a stash of wooden beads – 25mm (about 1″), watercolour paint, brushes, skewers, a tall mason jar, sharpie, concreters string (from OSH) and Mod Podge.

Paint your beads all the colours of the rainbow using a watercolour wash on each bead, use a skewer to hold the beads in place. When the paint is dry draw a heart with sharpie and seal with mod podge on aluminium foil. The beads are ready to be strung and given to the kiddos as little Valentine gifts from their teacher! A super cool and somewhat quick project, I did have help with quality testing from my 9-year-old daughter – lucky!

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This is a super cute kinder card my co-teacher came up with using tissue paper squares, glue and then cutting the card to make a card for their parents.

These are observational watercolour drawings made by the 1st-grade class for a card for their parents – such beautiful watercolours created.

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This was another kinder card using sequins, a sticker and a heart doily – I really love seeing what the kids make when given the opportunity to craft.

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This is an invitation for making the paper plate heart sewing with yarn craft for the 1st-grade class. All you need is some yarn, paper plates prepped with a heart shape and a hole punch and yarn needles. This is the perfect craft to practice sewing with a large needle and ready punched holes.

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And sewing last week with my volunteer class at Stevenson Elementary was making felt emoji keyrings – featured is one make by a 5th grader. We precut the circle and the kids can embellish whatever emoji they like from our emoji poster for ideas or create their own.

And I thought last week was pretty quiet with the 100th day of school – the Kinders bought in 100 of different things like coins, seeds, Perler beads, pom poms and these two with beads and little tiny felt houses. I remember when I did it with my kids it was 100 buttons stuck on some cardstock, maybe I was too overwhelmed with the two kids to be super creative at the time 😉

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Again the amazing ramen recipe from Minimalist Baker and this time with a poached egg and seaweed – an absolute favourite at my place each week, especially in the winter.

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This is the Japanese Pizza from 101 cookbooks with a watermelon radish salad with a side of chanterelles and homemade miso mayo drizzled over the top – such a divine meal for the mushroom lover.

And I thought last week was pretty quiet – checking over all of this it seemed like quite a busy week for me, oh and I got some sewing done on the weekend too as I was inspired by some love bird fabric I found at FabMo. It is so good to sit at my sewing machine again 😀 we have a break from school/work next week so time to organise the study/sewing room and do some sewing.