After our beginning studies this morning, I started one of our unit studies with the kids, called Butterflies Flutter By. It’s not available quite yet on our website but stay tuned, it will be shortly; along with a big announcement for why it’s so special.

We had a wonderful general overview lesson on butterflies and caterpillars, some of which was review but I did kick it up a notch to learn some new things. Then we grabbed our notebooking page, identification guide and butterfly net and set outside to the meadow in the empty lot beside our house.

We took a couple of detours, checking our garden to see if the birds had left us any strawberries. As usual we found a bloom and the beginnings of a fruit, but no delicious ripe ones.

As we headed out into the meadow we found the biggest white clover we’d ever seen. This may sound strange, but if you’ve never smelled the white clover with pink trimming on it, you’re missing out. Seriously, they smell like sweet cherry Kool-aid. And this one being so large was more fragrant that we’d ever smelled.

Ok, focusing back on butterflies, we saw several different kinds whizzing past us: a Monarch, lots of Cabbage White and Clouded Sulfur Butterflies, a Pearl Crescent, an Eastern Tailed Blue, and a Pipevine Swallowtail. Hannah tried and tried to catch each butterfly, chasing them round and round, and just when she’d about given up, victory was hers. The Pipevine Swallowtail was generous enough to hold still long enough for her to get him in the net.

We placed the Swallowtail into an observatory and watched the generous butterfly for a long time. We tried to get good photos, however the poor thing was quite panicky and fluttered about senselessly. We did manage to get the following one. Pipevine Swallowtails are quite beautiful, however this one was very tattered and torn, probably encounters with birds.

After enjoying him for a bit, Hannah was ready to set the “poor thing” free.

Back inside we reminisced by reading a favorite poem by Christina Rossetti, Caterpillar.

Which made us remember an art project Hannah did years ago, I suppose when she was about in second grade. So we dug out her art portfolio and sure enough found it. She had divided the page into fourths and drew scenes from the poem.

After reminiscing, we created a fun butterfly art project using the “stained glass” effect. I adapted this lesson from the Usborne Book of Art Ideas.

For this project you will need plain paper, thin oil pastels, and watercolor paint. Starting with a blank piece of paper, fold it in half, creating a crease. Open the paper up and lightly pencil in half of a butterfly on one side of the crease in the paper. Put in whatever details you would like the butterfly to have. After you have penciled it in, go over the lines with a black oil pastel, pressing heavy to make a thick outline. Next, refold the paper and use the edge of a ruler, or something else hard, to press the imprint down. Upon unfolding the paper you should have a symmetrical print on the other side of the crease.

Use the black oil pastel to go over and make the imprinted lines darker.

Next, use watercolor paints (mix with a little water first) to paint the butterfly. Hannah decided to cut hers out, while I left mine on alone.

Because of the water used with the paint, it makes the paper slightly translucent and they are perfect to hang in a sunny window!

We love blueberries!  We love to eat them fresh and bake them in homemade blueberry muffins.  And now, we love to paint with them too!

Once again, I owe this idea to my daughter Hannah.  She had taken some frozen blueberries and rinsed them off to eat for lunch one day.  When she was unable to finish all she had in her bowl, next thing I knew I saw her with a paintbrush and paper in hand.

She first created an outline with pencil and then filled bits in with blueberry juice.

She liked this project so much we tried it again just today.  This time I measured out about a 1/2 cup of frozen blueberries and added a 1/4 cup of hot water and used a potato masher to mash the berries up.  And this time Gabby got in on the fun.

We experimented with adding some crayon first and washing over it with blueberry juice.  We think they turned out really neat!

Mom’s Masterpiece

Hannah’s Masterpiece

Gabby’s Masterpiece

After I was finished painting mine, I headed inside to work on the computer.  Suddenly I heard Hannah yelling for me saying, “Mom, Gabby is eating the paint!”  A little artwork and a healthy snack…all in one.  Happy blueberry painting!….and eating!

She was careful to choose a very comfortable spot for her fairy house, nestled in amongst the roots of a large tree on the hill by the creekside.  The living area is protected by small sticks all around the perimeter.

In the center, you’ll see her kitchen table, fashioned from small sticks stuck in the mud, and a bark table top.  Her table is decorated with little, dark pieces of bark for plates and torn leaves for salad.  Straight behind there, you’ll notice hanging ferns which she attached to the wood with mud.  This is the clothes changing area.

Next, we go to the comfy couch area.  The couch is made with a bed of soft green moss with a leaf for a cover and the tops of four Philadelphia Fleabane wildflowers for pillows.  And two beautiful ferns in the background for visual appeal!

And to the right of the home, nestled in amongst the tree root, you will find the bedroom.  Equipped with soft moss for a bed and a leaf for a blanket and a lilac sprig for a pillow.  And a lovely stone vanity (attached with mud) and a bark mirror.  And one tiny acorn cap hat to wear.

And last, but certainly not least…one must have a fairy broom in order to sweep up all that dust.

Pretty nice place if I may say.  Hmm, I think I’d might like to live there.

Here is a link to some other ideas for a Fairy House.

We started by setting out on a nature hunt to collect items that we thought would make good prints.  The items we collected were:  piece of a wild fern, a few miscellaneous leaves we thought were pretty (such as a wild violet leaf and a couple dried leaves from the fall), a half a walnut shell, an acorn top, a dandelion, and wild garlic.  We also chose out a couple of pretty seashells from our family’s shell collection.

Next, we took blocks of Sculpey Clay, and cut them in 1/2″ pieces.

We rolled them into nice even and smooth balls.  We chose to start with our wild violet leaf and placed it flat on the table (it was very important to have it very smooth and flat).  We centered the clay ball on top.  Next, we pushed down very evenly on top of the ball using the palm of our hand, until we new that the leaf was covered sufficiently.

After turning the clay back over, we took tweezers and removed the leaf from the clay.  We were so thrilled with how beautiful these were!!

We continued one by one doing this same procedure to all of our nature collection items, placing them on a large cookie sheet as we completed them.  We used a straw to poke a hole in the tops of them because we had plans for hanging them.  This is optional depending upon what you would like to use them for.

Now it was time for baking.  We baked ours for approximately 45 minutes at 275 degrees.  You can read the Sculpey Clay packaging for directions.  They baked up nice and solid.

Now here’s where you can make a decision of whether to proceed.  These are truly beautiful just as they are without the straw holes, OR you can be like us and decide to experiment a little!

We thought I wonder what these would look like to give them a light watercolor wash (mixture of tube watercolor paint and water).  So Hannah got out her paints and brushes and we gave it a go!  We choose the dandelion print and thought it would be neat to make it yellow of course!

From the first brushstroke, we knew they would be gorgeous!!

Absolutely stunning!  I loved the way the watercolor settled into the indentions and made the prints stand out.

So we went crazy mixing colors and watercolor washing all of our prints.

This was one of my favorites, the wild fern.  Isn’t that beautiful?!

Now again, I think if the straw hole weren’t in these you could leave them just like this and they would be so neat to just have them sitting about upon your nature table, on a  window sill, hmmm you could even attach a heavy duty magnet to the back and have a very pretty refrig. magnet!  That’s what I liked best about this craft I think there’s many different ideas that could be done with these.

But, here’s what we decided to do…we took some twine (found in the Target dollar spot just this weekend), and tied long pieces (sorry I forgot to measure) to the prints.

We continued working on these until they were all tied to twine. They are NOT tied together at the top, that’s just how we were holding them.

Next, we took a piece of branch, we had also found on our nature walk, and began to tie the prints to it.

I did NOT worry about them being even, that would have took forever.  Besides the variety made it look more organic.  Here is the final product:

I also attached a piece of twine to the top of the branch in case I want to hang it from something.  I haven’t decided yet if I’d like to hang it from a plant hook from the ceiling in our schoolroom, OR just hang it like a picture on the wall.  What do you think?  Oh, also, we talked about eventually taking a very fine tip sharpie marker (probably brown) and printing on the backs of them what the prints are of.

This week as part of our Green Hour Challenge, which I’ll be posting about tomorrow, we collected a basketfull of nature items. This included moss, twigs/branches, rocks, briars, and small leaves.

I found an idea for using our collected items from our Good Earth Art book.  However, I improvised and changed it a bit to work with what we had.

For this project we used our nature walk collection items, thick pieces of cardboard, glitter glue, and a glue gun (lots of extra sticks!). The book suggested we use a flat piece of log for the ground, however we weren’t able to find a suitable one, so we tried working on a flat rock, but the glue wouldn’t stick to it.  So we settled upon using thick pieces of cardboard.

The kids got right to work!  They really loved this project!  I let them design whatever scene they wanted, whether it was a scene from our nature walk, or something from their own imaginations.  I simply was responsible for the glue gun work.

Even my son, who is not usually the craftsy type really got into this and spent more time than usual coming up with his creation!  He used a small stick and moss to create a tree, moss for bushes, briars for porcupines to sit on the log, blue glitter glue for his creek and pond, green glitter glue and tiny rocks to make little frogs in the water, dried leaves to make a brush pile, and pieces of bark for trees on the floor.

We were so happy with the effect that the glitter glue had; see how it sparkles like real water in the sunlight?

Hannah added lots of animal touches to hers such as a deer, a frog, a porcupine, a little “rock” bluebird in the tree…AND…

….A SNAKE!! (it’s a piece of dried vining and had a great resemblance)