2011

SUMMER OF FUNNER 2011

SUMMER OF FUNNER 2011 ARCHIVE

Ten Weeks: What are we doing here?

Brainstorming the Calendar: Spending a few hours organizing your summer can make for a Summer of Funner. Tips for how to plan the weeks ahead.

Yesterday Books: Helping kids design and decorate the cover-art for a journal they can draw and write in all summer long.

Clay-dough aka Canada Day: Simply clay crafts and a post-fireworks movie party.

Strawberry Day: Painting with strawberries as our brushes, baking strawberry hand-pies, making strawberry jam.

Mustard Tastings and Turtle Talk: A visit to the Evergreen Brickworks delivers inspiration for more summer projects.

Pomme Day: Making prints with potato stamps, apple sun-tea, and apple-and-candy robots.

Sketch Day at the AGO: What happens when you bring your own paper and coloured pencils to the Art Gallery.

Chocolate Day: Baking chocolate donuts, making chocolate lollipops and lootbag animals.

Sketching (Again) at the ROM: Bringing our sketchbooks back downtown to investigate ancient civilizations and canadian wildlife.

Pizza Day: Painting colour-wheels, grilling pizzas, and practicing fractions.

“Save the Riverdale Farm” Sketches: Sketching farm animals and learning about local politics.

Marshmallow Day: Making marshmallows at home, building tooth-pick and marshmallow structures,  and having a backyard party: ’smores on the grill.

Just a Bit of News: An update on this journal and plans for the future.

The Day in Condiments:  A special day of home-canning with the kids. Making pickles, mustards, relish, and spiced blueberry port jam.

Library Day: T-shirts and a Rob Ford Protest Song: Making “I Love My Library” t-shirts and writing the lyrics of a song to protest our mayor’s attempts to cut city services.

Crazy Fruit Day: Playing the Name-That-Crazy-Fruit game, blind-tastings, making a still-life drawing and painting of our exotic fruits, gathering herbs from our garden and canning up a special lemon balm and verbena jelly.

Protest Posters Inspired by Ghosts of Gone Birds: Inspired by the artists of Ghosts of Gone Birds, we made posters protesting our mayor’s proposed cuts to city services.

Postcards from the Falls: A chronicle of our vacation to Niagara Falls with our two favourite aunts.

Egg Day: Science experiments with eggs including: floating eggs in salt water, passing boiled eggs through the mouth of a bottle, and building a vessel to drop a raw egg safely from a second-story window. We also make egg-carton owl puppets, egg self-portraits, and a Chocolate Souffle.

Hands for Jack: Hand-print paintings in memory of New Democrat Jack Layton.

Egg Update: What happened to that egg we bottled in vinegar 3 days ago…

Jelly and Ice Cream Day:  Sumac Jelly turns into Chai-Tea Jelly, Tin Roof Ice Cream goes Chocolate Chocolate Peanut.

Comic Strip Days:  How to make a comic strip. A long-weekend workshop that takes the kids from inspiration to full colour print.

Why We’re Not Taking Stock of our Summer of Funner: Our reasons for looking forward instead of behind.

Follow, Follow, Follow…:  See you next summer. In the meantime, look for us over at The Lunchbox Season