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Sarah, I love you and your blog and reading about your family and your beautiful daughter but seriously lady - you give me The Guilt like no tomorrow. I currently consider my day a rousing success if I am actually able to SEE one of my babies for more than ten minutes. It’s a high national holiday if we wind up snuggled somewhere reading a book. I think I am going to go cry in a corner of my office for a few minutes. ;)
Hope Miss C is feeling better today.
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Lauren - No, no, don’t feel guilty! Everybody has different situations. I’m a stay-at-home mom, I have all the time in the world with my baby, and she takes very long naps and goes to bed early so I have plenty of time to plan these things out and find poems and stories that follow her interests. You’re a working momma! And you have three littles! That’s alot more on your plate than on mine. You’re doing a great job =)
Annie - Adobe InDesign. SO MUCH EASIER that using Microsoft Word. We own CS4, but I’d never used it before. I still only know how to use about one feature on it, so hopefully as I get better with the program I’ll be able to cut down on the time expense!
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Sarah - first, I have been out of the loop! (moving and finals will do that to you!) I am so sorry about Charlotte, you and your family are in my thought and prayers! (I know you’re secular, so I hope you don’t mind.) But, I’m so glad that she’s starting to feel better. Keep up with the tropics temps in your house.
Second, this is amazing. I’ve started a file of stuff for me to start working with Maggie on (I’m stealing your homeschooling binder idea) this summer, and I’m putting this PDF squarely in it. I look forward to these!! You continue to amaze me - and I’m so glad we’ve met. :)
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I love reading about this stuff on your blog. The way you teach and interact with your daughter is so neat. I love that you are giving us a little more insight into what you specifically do.
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Sara - Thanks! Let me know when you start your binder; I can’t wait to pester you about what you put in it! Especially if you guys participate in that homeschoo co-op =)
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dude, this is AWESOME !!!
good job, and thank you ! -
My favorite part of this is how your strive to keep her art projects unstructured. Matthew loves crafts, so I frequent a lot of kid-crafting blogs (that I also love, don’t get me wrong..) but sometimes they can focus a little too much on an end result that’ll look cute in a photo for their blog. The adult ends up putting most of the creativity into it and the kid just ends up placing a few cotton balls in the right places.
We do totally unstructured craft time every other day now that Matt’s capable of weilding scissors and a hole punch without dismembering himself. And even though they don’t usually turn out very pretty (lol), he’s SO proud of them. He’ll hand me like a big piece of bent-up birthday card with glue-y pipe-cleaners sticking out every which way, and leaves coming out from the bottom with a thousand little slivers of chopped up supermarket ads glued everywhere—but he’ll be like, “and this part is the stern of the ship and this part is a whale that got stuck on a rock and this is the captain trying to rescue him, and this is the captain’s sandwich!” lol.. They are always super cool.
I think it’d be really neat to start seeing some of Charlotte’s artwork on the blog somewhere. Especially because over the course of the next year or so you are going to be amazed at how capable she becomes with her supplies, and how different her projects end up looking.
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Alicia S - What a great idea!! I hadn’t even started to think about that, but it would be kind of fun to look back on her artwork and see how her projects have evolved. Thanks for the idea - I’ll definitely start doing that!!
I couldn’t agree with you more about the unstructured projects. The example I always use with people is that when someone gives Charlotte pipe cleaners and tells her to glue them to a paper plate to make a spider, that’s what she tries to do. She dips them in glue and puts them on the plate - and then if someone wants it to look like a spider then they have to rearrange the legs. Where is the creativity or the self-expression or even mere exploration of materials in that? She didn’t come up with the idea and someone else made it look like a spider! But if someone gives her pipe cleaners and says “do with these what you will” and gives her paper and glue and glitter, Charlotte invariably runs outside, plants them in the dirt and says “I PLANTED SO MANY TREES, MOMMA!“ She makes a whole little pipe cleaner forest! She comes up with the idea herself and does it on her own. It makes me so proud to see it!
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Haha! That is literally the cutest thing I’ve ever heard!
By on December 15, 2011
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing these. I’ve been saving them for next year to help with our tot schooling. What program did you end up finding to help with the layout?