So, here’s the little slip of paper the kids found under their doors this morning! That’s right! Today, we challenged the kids to learn to play enough guitar to accompany themselves while singing a cover song. We didn’t give them a set rules about how they were supposed to accomplish this, only a command performance […]
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 […]
Following up on last summer’s fantastic viewing of the Canadian Stage performance of Macbeth in Toronto’s High Park, we knew that returning for more Shakespeare in the Park would be a high priority on this summer’s Love-to-do-List! So, on Wednesday night, we took in a performance of Titus Andronicus. We had such a great time, and […]
This week, we are going to take another tour of the Art Gallery of Ontario, this time, with a specific emphasis on the body. I’ve noticed that when the kids have a specific thing to look out for or focus on, they have a better experience of the exhibits. For example, Toby was not really […]
The kids’ first Toronto Tuesdays outing with Papa took them uptown to Yonge & Eglinton. They headed up Yonge past the Yonge-Eglinton Centre to the Postal Station K at the corner of Broadway, a beautiful old building with carved lions and unicorns on the facade. A sign said that they’d find a Canada Post Kids […]
As part of our summer reading and writing project, I wanted the kids to understand what the terms Utopia and Dystopia meant. This led to a fun exercise that we’ll continue throughout the summer and, likely, into the fall… ILLUSTRATED DEFINITIONS What is an Illustrated Definition? A handsomely written word, a single, kid-friendly definition, 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 […]
August 9, 2012 If Bea had Soap Making on the top of her Summer of Funner 2012 wish-list, the one thing that Tobes wanted to do was to “smash Skittles” [the kids absolutely love Skittles] and “make them into potions.” The kids’ idea of backyard “potion making,” however, isn’t very productive. They tend to take food or flowers […]
2-5 August, 2012 On Thursday, we canned double batches of our newly jazzed up recipes for Bread & Butter Pickles and Sweet & Tangy Pickle Relish. As we were waiting for our veggies to brine in the fridge for a few hours, the kids, remembering the fun labels we created last year, used coloured pencils and oil pastel crayons to […]
Several years ago, decades ago, as the case may be, my husband and his parents painted an outdoor mural on a piece of plywood and installed it at the back left-hand corner of their garden. Whenever I even think of going over to their house, this is the image that comes to mind: a large face or mask, […]
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 26, 2011 For Pizza Day, we created colour wheels, learned about fractions, and made cheesy pepperoni pizzas on the grill! Colour Wheels Nothing says pizza more than a colour wheel….? When the kids objected to my idea of making a crust-less fruit pizza for breakfast (they were too hungry to wait!), I decided to […]
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 13, 2011 Today was our first “culture” day. I’m not sure why I came up with such a stupid name for the days of the week in which we go do something creative downtown, but there you have it. We transferred at Broadview and took the Dundas streetcar all the way west to the Art […]
