Turkey Tracks

Since I'm still trying to convince the little guy that Halloween has come and gone - we have adjusted our focus to Thanksgiving (the next big holiday!)  So our craft project involved turkeys and animal tracks (one of my little man's favorite topics!)

To start things off - we first made a turkey hat!

 You will need your turkey hat (of course!), paint, paper plates (one for each color), pictures of turkeys (fancy coloring is optional), turkey feet (made from wire hanger in the picture) and a plastic bag for trash (read - this is MESSY!)

 First we hung the turkeys in the trees....

Then we poured the paint into the plates and dipped our turkey foot in it.  We used a wire hanger to make a foot but I would recommend something flatter such as popsicle sticks to make better tracks...

Then we simply made tracks over to each of the turkeys in the trees!  It was a lot of fun...and quickly evolved into making little boy foot tracks too!

It was a lot of fun!

Here's a picture of the little guy - all business in the front - and a turkey in the back!

Enjoy :-)

Painting with the Rain

So my little man has a case of the "three year olds".  His answer to everything is "no" or "I don't want to" or when given choices "I don't like those".  So regardless of the fun I create for him - he is opposed to enjoying it unless if it was his idea first.

We have been slowly working on this - making sure that he has lots of things that he is in control of and helping him develop the choices he is given.  Additionally, he is ofter told "no" too or "in a bit" when I think he can tolerate it so that he develops the ability to handle not getting what he wants :-)

We also have an incredible amount of work to do around the farm.  There are apple trees to care for and flower beds to ready, not to mention the trim work and the mowing and the large number of leaves!  We also have a high energy dog that needs hours of running after sticks to be able to function.  This means that every morning - we need to get outside and that can be hard with a strong willed three year old and cooler temperatures.

In talking with my little man the other day (which is the most amazing thing about a three year old - the fact that you can TALK to them!), we decided that he would like to do more activities.  And we agreed that I could plan these "fun things" and we could do them together in the orchard (where most of my time is spent right now).

So - this is the first of our activities!  Although it didn't go exactly according to plan due to a contractor coming and the rain, it was a success!  So - here is what we did!

We added a little bit of powdered paint to a cup (I let my son pour it in and then I just put some back to adjust the amount).

We then collected rain water (from the trees, from the porch railing and from the sky!)

Once we stirred it around we were ready to paint!  Since we were interrupted by a contractor - we ended up painting inside but originally we had planned on painting in the orchard :-)

We traced our hands and painted these turkeys!

Then we painted our hands to create turkeys:

We had a great time using rain to paint!

Enjoy :-)