Book Review--Bo and Eddie

Bo and Eddie, by Olivier Dunrea, are two board books we picked up at the library a couple weeks ago. I found out later that they're Dutch translations of the English books BooBoo and Peedie from the Gossie and Friends series. I love the illustrations. So simple, so bright, and so much charming character!

As far as the text goes, I'm a bit torn. They're very simple and repetitious, which is great for preschoolers. My son loves them, and I think I love them too...but only in Dutch. I was able to see the English text of one of them on Amazon and I wasn't very impressed. There's a rhythm in the Dutch version that makes it almost poetic, and I didn't sense that in the English. Also, "Bo" is cuter than "BooBoo", "gansje" is cuter than "gossling", and there's just something about "Bo is een gansje. Een klein bluaw gaansje..." that makes me smile :-) I wish I could find a way for you to hear how it sounds.

As for the story lines...

Eddie forgets things. He forgets to come in when it rains and he forgets to eat sometimes (too busy balancing grain on his bill, apparently :-) He loves his red cap, but one day he forgets where he put it and goes searching for it.

Bo loves to eat. He goes around eating things and saying they were yummy. Then he eats a bubble and...well, you can read it for yourself :-)

And here's testament to the fact that they're popular around here! They're so easy to draw and my son was so into them that we now have our fridge covered with Bo and Eddie. Final verdict: we'll be looking for more when we go to the library next week.

Tall, Painted Ice Cream Cone

So after lots of rainbows (including a pastel one) we decided to try our hand at something else. This is one we like to do on the chalkboard sometimes, and it translated great into the marker outline/tempera paint format!

It was fun to make something so tall (two pieces of paper taped together), and it was a great way to introduce how tints (pastels) are made. He sure enjoyed all the mixing! And this one he painted in all by himself.

On the culinary side...the green is pear flavored, the yellow scoops are lemon and banana, the peach is peach and when I asked him what came after the blueberry scoop he informed me that they were pinkberry and purpleberry (of course!)

I don't have a book for this one...you really don't need one to get excited about ice cream ;-) But I've found lots of other fun art projects with ice cream--here's the one that made me think about ice cream being in pastels. And here's a crayon and water color version of the tall ice cream cone that I found and tried last year.

And in closing...Romans 10:12 says "The Lord is rich to all who call upon Him." Someone once helped me appreciate the word "rich" by using ice cream as an example. You don't just take a little lick of ice cream and walk away. You enjoy the richness by continuing to eat it! Every taste is so good and satisfying! Calling on the Lord's name is like eating ice cream.

Big, Painted Rainbow

Big, painted rainbows have been one of our favorite projects recently. It started as an impromptu way to dive into our brand new bottles of tempera paint. We had so much fun with it that we've done it 3 or 4 more times in the past few weeks!

We started by taping four sheets of regular paper together to make a nice big canvas. Since rainbows have been popular around here for a while (thanks to the book, What Makes a Rainbow?) I decided to make a simple outline with black marker and let him paint it in. I gave him one color at a time and washed the brush in between colors. Mixing the orange and purple was one of his favorite parts (green never comes out right, so we bought a bottle of green.)

I've heard a lot about art projects at this age being more about the process than the product, but we had fun working on this together and having it come out with clean, bright colors. He wanted me to do some of the painting, and I was impressed with how he carefully copied how he saw me use the brush.

After the rainbow was done, we mixed some white and blue to make the sky and started learning about tints (i.e. pastels). After this one we made one with a "mint sky" as he calls it :-)

Book Review -- Henry the Explorer

I found Henry the Explorer, by Mark Taylor, while browsing around at Amazon. It only had 6 reviews but they were all 5-star and the illustrations and story line seemed right up our alley. It's one of a series that was written in the 1960's and then went out of print. They're in the process of being released again (in a very nice hard cover format) and two of the four are now available.

So it came in the mail a couple weeks ago (via my mom--thanks, Mom :-) and after the first couple readings my son and I were both hooked. It's a simple story of a boy who reads a book about explorers one night while in bed during a blizzard. He gets inspired to go out the next day with his dog, Laird Angus McAngus (we love saying that name) and go exploring. Basically, reading + outdoors + (mild) adventure = a great book!

Oh, and the flags...

He, of course, has to begin by making flags to claim all the things he discovers. This sparked some book inspired exploring of our own! We decided to go with green for our flags, and my little guy did a great job of following the pencil lines to make his E's. The next day we taped them to wooden skewers, packed them in a bag and...

He spent the whole morning going around the house claiming things (the heater was a particularly worthy find as you can see.)

We also spent time looking for a mountain to sit on and eat lunch, just like Henry. We even ate our real lunch on the top of the mountain (i.e. a blanket in the middle of the living room.) I love the view in the picture above as he sits on his mountain with Laird Angus McAngus and his sack of flags.

After going into the woods and discovering a cave (with bears, no less), he comes out to find that it's night. The colors and composition in this picture are so simple, yet it's done so skillfully that you feel like your standing right there about to walk out into that big, wintry world...it's breathtaking!

And here they are finding they're way back home. Isn't the night sky beautiful?

Here's another review I just found that conveys even more. We're definitely looking forward to getting the other three books in the this series!

Milk Jug Butterflies

A big thanks to all my family and friends who wrote to help me not feel homesick. You all are great :-)

Now, for the butterflies.... It was so much fun making these little guys for our window:

I've had the idea bookmarked on the computer for weeks now, but it calls for a plastic milk jug and our grocery store only sells cardboard cartons. We finally made a special trip to the grocery store further down the street to get some milk in a plastic container. The beauty of this project is not only in the end result, but also in the simplicity. All we did was print out some butterfly shapes, tape a piece of plastic over them, and color them in with permanent marker! My little one did the bright colors first and afterwards I used a black sharpie to trace over the butterfly lines that showed through from the printout below. I cut them out and put rolled over scotch tape on the back and he put them up on the window.

 We've been enjoying a book recently that goes along beautifully with this project. It's called "I am a Bunny" and it's illustrated by Richard Scarry. Check out this page:

After making our first three butterflies that came on the printout, we picked out three more from this page to do freehand. Now we just need to go look up the names for some of them! The rest of the pages of this book have similar beautiful drawings full of things in the meadow where the bunny lives...daffodils, summer rain, fall leaves, snow. My favorite is a page filled with dandelion seeds flying through the air. Nearly every page is worthy of being framed!

Here's a link to the original idea. About halfway down the post you'll find the pdf file that has the three butterflies you can print and trace.

Flower Petal Suncatcher

Here's what we've been enjoying on our living room window the past couple days:

They only last a few days, but they're so fun to make and so pretty! I taped a piece of clear contact paper to the window, sticky side out. Then my son carefully placed flower petals and leaves on it that we had collected from outside: impatiens from the balcony, a sort of purple flower from a bush, some pretty little buttercups from a walk we took earlier in the day, and some rose petals from a bouquet. Then we put a matching piece of contact paper on top to seal it.

Mandarin Boats

My son and I think mandarin slices look like boats. We decided to take it one step further and add a sail:

A toothpick, a triangle of paper, and a piece of scotch tape was all it took to make snack time fun the whole week long!

Star Cookies

Earlier this week my son decided that we needed to make star cookies with sprinkles. He loves to help in the kitchen and I love the time with him and the math and fine motor skill practice he gets. What I don't love is the cleanup involved! I can still hear my mom's words in my ears, "I don't mind if you use the kitchen, but please clean it up when you're finished!" Maybe that's why my son had to mention the cookies so many times before I was willing to do it.

I'm learning the secret to keeping the house clean is to do it with the Lord. He's so much more faithful and detailed than I am. I was listening to a message from the latest Christians on campus conference in Texas and the speaker mentioned that the disciples must have known that Christ had resurrected when they looked in the grave and saw the Lord's cloth folded up. He had probably been neatly folding his bedding every morning since they had been with him. What a sweet, normal, human testimony!

So, we enjoyed our cookies and the table got a good scrubbing afterward :-) 

Traditional Sugar Cookies

3/4 c. butter

1 c. sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

2 1/2 c. flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

Cover and chill at least 1 hour. Heat oven to 400 (or 205 C if you're in Holland!) Roll out the dough 1/8 inch thick on lightly floured surface. Cut into desired shapes. Bake on ungreased baking sheet 6-8 minutes until very light brown.