Valentines Made by the Boys

Both my boys need to make homemade Valentines for their school friends.  We headed off to the local craft store but could only find materials in the usual pink or red...with lots of frills.  Those things definitely weren't going to work for my boys, despite the fact that they know that pink was considered a masculine color back in the Colonial period!

So, we revisited an idea that we've used in years past to make a more gender-neutral Valentine.  We bought coffee filters and cut them into hearts.  Then, the boys put food coloring on the filters to turn them into various shades of red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple....and sometimes brown, if the boys got a little heavy-handed squirting food coloring everywhere!  After the hearts dried, we glued them onto brightly-colored card stock.

The Valentines look great!

God's Eyes

My youngest son has become enamored with God's Eyes.  He learned how to make them at school and they have become his special art.  We have them hanging from most of our windows; it's become a good thing that we don't have any fabric "window treatments"-- his art is all the treatment these windows need!  Joy, our cat, likes to sit up as high as she can and look at them all.  

Photography with Children

One of my favorite ways to get my kids out and about in nature is to hand them a camera.  It totally cuts down on the whining factor that occurs when I say that we are going on a hike.  Granted, that sometimes means that a camera gets dropped in a swamp and then ruined....but still, I'm sold on the idea. It's always a lot of fun to get home and compare photos -- we take such different things!  My eldest son is still  figuring out the basics of the camera, but he has definite ideas on what he likes and what he does NOT like.

This past fall, we went on a photo walk to the American Horticultural Society, one of the most beautiful places around.  I ended up taking the following photograph:

My son carefully took this one:

This is a beautiful photo, but I probably never would have taken it.  In fact, in all my photos from AHS, I never have.  I simply don't see the way my son sees.  That's what makes art so special.  And, because I went on a photo walk with my son, we have photos of both perspectives.