We promised something for you yesterday, didn’t we? Sorry it’s late. We were having technical difficulties. No. We were ditching school! The main problem with starting off our Summer of Funner a little early this year has been that the kids aren’t really out of school yet. How to deal with that? A ditch day, naturlich. […]
Last year’s 101 Things to Look for at the Art Museum was such a hit with the kids that I thought I’d come up with another free printable Scavenger Hunt for our next trip to the Royal Ontario Museum. I derived our list from the holdings of several large Natural History Museums in Europe and […]
This weekend, we finished Our Big Summer Project – Our Outdoor Mural! Here’s how we got from point B to point Z, with a DIY recap at the very bottom of the page. Generating the Final Design Come up with a final sketch (or use an existing image) and print it in both colour and black and […]
August 13, 2012 Last year, we traveled to Riverdale Farm to sketch the farm animals, not knowing if the city and its mayor would pull financial support from the farm or if it would remain open to the public. We called these our Save the Riverdale Farm Sketches. With the farm saved from the chopping […]
Tuesday’s installment for our Summer of Funner Film Festival happened to be another Wes Anderson movie, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The kids were particularly interested in the amount of underground digging performed both by the animal protagonists in flight and by the big three farmers in pursuit of them. They were also dumbfounded by the […]
July 18, 2012 Each summer, the kids create and fill up their “Yesterday Books” with pictures and stories of their Summer of Funner adventures. Sometimes, these are illustrated journal entries, and others, fantastic fictional histories. So, each July, we start off our Summer of Funner by choosing notebooks and decorating the covers, transforming them into our famous Summer of Funner Yesterday Books! […]
July 9-13, 2012 We might have to reclassify these first two weeks of July as a “Prelude” to our Summer of Funner proper. First, we had a week-long family visit. Then, the kids spent a week at day camp at the Toronto Zoo. So, despite the humid weather, the Summer of Funner hasn’t really heated up […]
WE CAN’T BELIEVE IT! OUR SUMMER OF FUNNER 2011 IS NEAR TO A CLOSE! Of course, we’re going out with a bang…Over the last two days, for instance, Blaise has been holding a cartooning workshop with the kids, teaching them about how comics are designed and produced and helping them create their own comic strips. Yes, […]
August 30, 2011 Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange Perhaps you were not expecting such language at the beginning of a post entitled “Jelly and Ice Cream Day.” But, you see, as we come to the end of our Summer of Funner, Ariel’s song from The Tempest becomes more and more applicable […]
I’m strictly tourist But I couldn’t care less When they parlez-vous me Then I gotta confess…That’s for me! – from Funny Face August 18, 2011 Got in the car with aunts Peggy and Dori and headed to Niagara Falls. We’re the honorary tag-alongs on their delayed honeymoon. On the road, Peggy told us an hour and a […]
August 17, 2011 Today we made Rob Ford Protest Posters inspired by the artists of the Ghosts of Gone Birds! _____________________________________________________________ This morning, I received a tweet from @GoneBirds with a link to a brand new poster advocating for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper. You can also find this picture on the Ghosts of Gone Birds Facebook […]
July 27, 2011 Today was supposed to be a day in which we played simple tourists, tooling around the city on a double-decker bus and taking photographs of Toronto landmarks and attractions with our purple and orange kid-safe cameras. But, this just didn’t seem right. We’re not tourists. We’re Toronto residents. And, our city is […]
July 20, 2011 I hadn’t meant to spend two weeks in a row with the kids sketching at a museum in the city. We were supposed to photograph landmarks this week! During our trip to the AGO, however, the kids caught the sketching bug. In order to get him to take a lunch break from […]
July 6-11, 2011 My new strategy for entertaining out-of-towners: try something in the city that you’ve never tried before! This week marked the first of several visits from family and friends. First up were California grandpa and step-grandma. We had a busy few days playing t-ball, starting swimming lessons, learning to play video games, and trying out new […]
