Preschool Play (or even older kids)-Foam Beads

 
What can you do with a pile of foam beads?  I think these are pretty self explanatory.  It’s another one of those things that is so quick and easy to make a whole lesson/activity with! 

I have cards that are 1-10.  Each kid first had to put their numbers in order.  Then, they put the appropriate number of beads underneath it.

Sort by colors.
 
Sort by size.

Sort by shape.

Match shapes, sizes, and colors.

Patterns are fun!  This one is a color pattern.

Next up is a size pattern.

Last is a pattern by shapes.

In the end let them bead up a pipe cleaner bracelet any way they want.  What a great motor control activity that is!

There are so many other things to do with these.  How about have them make specific stacks.  Or for older children have them add and subtract with them.  What about teaching basic multiplying by seeing the groups?  Use them as stamps in paint and make a pretty picture.  What would you do?

Rebecca

Accessories For Your Backpack

All of that boondoggle that we made this summer is now ending up on my kids’ backpacks!  I think we got pretty good at it this summer (notice the big rainbow block on the right?)!  I’m loving that my kids want to put them on their backpacks so they are now useful, too!

One of my daughters braided up these really long pieces using the plastic gimp from making boondoggles.  She wants to give some of them to her friends at school (you can bet these will be Christmas presents as well).
 
It is fun to let my kids add whatever they want to their backpacks. 
It makes it more personalized, and let’s be honest, what else are your kids going to do with all those key chains that they get!? 
My oldest made the leather Key Fob herself.  The Lego piece was from my Son’s birthday party.  One of the Lego girls was from Legoland and the other from my Nephew’s Lego birthday party. 
I think it’s is also a great way to remember the fun events that she made them at or got them from!
Rebecca

Back To School Accessories

I’ve had so much fun this summer coming up with accessories for my girls’ new school clothes. 
When we shopped for new school clothes I see that accessories are everywhere!  And they are expensive!  So, I sought out to get them plenty of accessories that looked just like the ones in the stores, but for next to nothing (the ones that I made were from supplies that I already had on hand).  I don’t want to have a heart attack when they break or get lost and since I spent next to nothing on these I wont care!
That is just a portion of what my girls have acquired this summer.  Some of the items I picked up RIDICULOUSLY cheap at street fairs. 
Some were given to me (the white bracelet in the middle was made by my little sister for me). 
The rest were made by me. 
I made a bunch of those cute flower clips.  These can be used as a barett or clipped onto a headband. 
I tried to use as many different materials as I could.  There is a green and white braided headband in the above picture.  It was made from nylon weaving loops!  I also used cording, leather, beads, ribbon, and embroidery thread.
Do you remember friendship bracelets?  My kids and I have been making them all summer.  Some of the bracelets are those that my kids have made.  They know about 4 different kinds of friendship bracelets now!
  I went through each outfit and made sure it had an accessory or two (or three) to go with it.  Their outfits are all ready to go, hanging in the closet like this.  The accessories are clipped onto the outfit that they go with.
I really had so much fun coming up with these accessories for my girls.  Next on our list are polymer clay jewelry!  Fun fun fun!
Rebecca

When I Grow Up…

This is a fantastic tradition that was started by Anjeanette!  Seriously, you will all want to start doing this tradition THIS YEAR!  Anjeanette had a post about it last year. 

Get yourself a cute little chalkboard.  Every year on the first day of school have your children write what they want to be on it.  Also have them sign it.  Then, take a picture of them with it.

She wants to be a cat store owner, not the actual store.  But that is half the fun of these pictures.  You will cherish their handwriting, what they wanted to be each year, and even their spelling and phonics type of writing! 

For the youngest you can write it for them, but make sure to let them try their hand at their signature!  Even scribbles will bring a smile to your face years later! ;)

The signature will be fun to have documented each year as well.  In my family, most of my siblings stopped going by their nickname and started going by their full name (Rebecca instead of Becky).  You will be documenting that change as well!

And lets be honest, those hands and nails are amazingly adorable as well!  They, too, will change over the years!

Thanks, Anjeanette, for this wonderful idea.  I am so glad I am doing this with my kids now!
Rebecca

Individual Clipboards

I know you have seen these everywhere.  However, they are such a life saver for me.  I love these clipboards!  These really help me to keep the kids' paperwork accessible and organized. No more losing book orders, class information, class rules, or field trip forms!

I made one for each child.  They hold those papers that are going to linger for more than a day but you need to be able to have quick access to them.

I put not just their school stuff on them but also their information about their clubs and sports.  
I knew that my children and I would be taking these down to use them and so I also made coordinating tags to hold the place of each clipboard when it is in use, to help keep this system organized.

Rebecca

I’d love to hear how you keep organized for school or what things have been problems for you!

Homework Tote

Last year I showed you this homework tote that I made for my children.  We used it all year long and will be using it again this year!  It is such a great tool for getting homework done more efficiently! 


Take one of those drink holders like from Sonic or whatever drive through.  Other items to use for this would be cans, blank notebooks, and office supplies shown above.  I covered everything with pretty matching paper and embellished it a bit!  I was going with the thought that prettier supplies might make homework not so bad?

Here is a view of how it all came together!  Go here to get further instructions if you need it.  However, I think it’s a pretty easy idea to pull together and one that is so useful!

Rebecca

Homework Station

This year I am trying Oh-So-Hard to be better organized.  If you knew me at all, you would understand that this stuff does not come naturally for me.  However, with 3 kids now in school this is a necessity! 

School for my kids starts next Monday!  Crazy! 

One thing I knew I needed was a place for my kids to do their homework.  Last year I made a Homework Tote that worked well for my two older girls.  It had all the supplies that they would need while doing homework.  They would pull this out and bring it to the kitchen table to work on homework.  I found that whenever they had things going on (and really, when do they not) they were in my way while I was preparing dinner. 

Their Dad picked this small table up at a college thrift store.  It is really deep which I love!  I have this dark, corner (thus the dark and grainy photo) between two hallways that really was just a dumping ground.  It already houses an Ikea storage for all the outside accessories (coats, jackets, sports equipment) and musical instruments.  The corner had a little room left over and this table fits perfectly in there. 

I had to sit back and think through how this will work best.  Because it is deep the kids can dump their backpacks underneath it and push them back out of the way of their legs.  I’ve had backpacks on hooks before and the hooks usually break, so I love this idea.

I added a cute little shelf for their homework tote and a few more supplies.  I did not want a big shelf as this is to stay just for doing their homework (or crafting or writing letters or something of that sort). 

I wanted everything up off of the table so that they could all do homework at the same time.  My only exception was a very much needed lamp (because of this weird corner being so dark) and their pencil sharpener.  I got the lamp at walmart and love it.  It has slots for office supplies right in the base of it. 

I’ve already been putting reminders and things to memorize up on the walls right there and they are working like a charm! 

Rebecca

Back To School Week

Here at Roots And Wings Co we are going to have A Back To School Week.  Be sure to come back all week long for tips and tricks on having a great school year!

I’d love to hear everyone else’s traditions, tips, and tricks for Back To School!  You can leave these in the comments all week long and feel free to leave links to great back to school posts on your blog as well!

School for my kids starts next week!  I really love school and want to ensure to create a magical feeling about it for my children.  I have been in school mode getting all the supplies that they need (holey cow, has anyone else’s school supply lists been shockingly long this year?!  Ours were overwhelming!), making fun accessories to match their new outfits, organizing our house to run smoothly, and planning the back to school festivities.  Check back every day and I’ll share some of what I’m doing as well as some traditions and things that we have all done in previous years.

The above picture shows my first tip.  Actually it shows two.  Every year my children get to pick out a new backpack (their old ones barely make it to the end of the previous year).  My kids get so excited about this.  I enjoy seeing what they pick every year as they always fit that child’s personality to a T!  The above picture shows one daughter with a pink camo messenger bag.  She was going through a very tomboy phase, thus the camo, and wanted something different from the average backpack, thus the messenger style instead of a normal 2 arm strap backpack.  The other daughter adores cats, so this backpack was a no brainer!
The other tip I’m going to remind everyone about is picture taking on the first day (or some of us may do it the whole first week!).  I always take pictures of my kids with their new backpacks as well as taking pictures of them in their new clothes.  Here is a list of other great pictures to remember to take:
At home with a sign stating what year they are now in
Showing with their fingers what grade they are in (4-fourth)
With their Siblings
With their Best Friends
With their Teacher
With You!
In front of their school (get the school name in it too)
Going into the school
Outside their classroom (ours always have the whole class listed as well as the class number and teacher’s name)
In their new desk (usually has name strip and more)
In front of any great parts of their classroom (kindergarten rooms are the best!)
Getting onto or off the bus
Coming out of the school the first day

I actually feel pretty ready for school this year and hope it is a sign of things yet to come! ;) 
I hope this helps you to start thinking about school!  I think that most of you have a few more weeks than we do.  Good luck to everyone.  I really love how exciting a fresh new year is!  I am always so excited about all of the things my kids will learn, all of the new experiences they will have, and all the fun they will have with friends.  I hope to instill in them the same love and excitement for school that I have!

What was most important to you when you started back to school?  What traditions did you have growing up?  What do you do for your children?

Rebecca

Feeling Refreshed and Recharged!!

 
Can you guess by this picture where we have been?  We’ve had this trip to Yellowstone planned for a long time!  It was heaven! 
In all we drove around 50 hours roundtrip, making our way through many places and states that we had never been to!

There was plenty of kids getting to enjoy the outdoors to the fullest…

Lots of “way too up-close-and-personal” moments with animals…

Everywhere we went there were so many different kinds of animals from bison, to coyotes, to uinta ground squirrels, to canadian geese, to elk, to moose, to bald eagles, and more!  I have children that want to grow up to be animal rescuers, so this was HUGE to them….

so many beautiful plants that do not grow around us…
 
of course the landscape and views were breathtaking, no matter which way you were looking!!…
 
We actually hiked most of the way to the bottom of that amazing waterfall.  I have 3 pretty young children and was sooo proud of them for doing this difficult and scary hike!  My son told me he was more than just scared, he was, “scared and totally fweaked out!!”  In the end, even he thought it was well worth it! 

We hiked so many trails and went on so many boardwalk paths.  Again, I’m so proud of my kids most of all because they loved it all.  It was not me forcing them into this.  It means so much to me that my children enjoy this kind of thing as much as I do. 

We are trying to visit as many national parks as we can.  They each got their Junior Ranger badges, as they always do, and we got sooo many stamps in our national parks passports!  We love all of the visitor centers and ranger stations with all the history, information, dioramas, and movies!

And we stayed in amazingly cute cabins in the midst of all that beauty!

Our road trip also included a much needed reunion with family, including cousins (and their children that I had never met) that live out of the country, and most of all my wonderful Grandma that I named my daughter after (she’s one of those Grandmas that everyone fights over who gets to name their child after!)! My whole family is super amazing!  I have the most loving and kind Aunts and Uncles, and fun cousins to boot!  I’m so thankful for these wonderful people being in my life!  So much to live up to!

This trip was also partly made with some of my siblings and their families in my car, and caravanning with us!  We have done this so many times and it is always a hoot!  Thanks to Erika’s husband who stopped at all the best places (including an amazingly cute visitor center in such a beautiful setting) and took all the rural roads that made the drive as much of the fun of the trip as the rest of it was!  If you ever need an 11 hour trip to take 16 hours, we’ve got it figured out for you! ;)  I wouldn’t have changed any of it (except maybe my poor nephew who puked, poor guy), and making it longer!  I did not want to leave my family or Yellowstone.

No other vacation or trip could have recharged me like this one did. 

What helps you to recharge and reset your priorities?

Rebecca

Enjoying Summer

Isn’t this summer view beautiful?  Well, I’m going to be taking a week break from blogging to enjoy summer’s beauty!  Mostly that means my three kiddos!   ;)

I’ll be back in a week, so make sure to keep checking as I have tons of fun stuff that we’ve been doing, but my time has been spent with my children instead of putting the fun pictures into posts to share with you all! 

Hope you are all enjoying your summer as much as I am enjoying mine!

Rebecca

Great Summer Activity-Boondoggle

I grew up making things like boondoggle and friendship bracelets in the summer.  I can’t believe I haven’t done this before with my children.  I grew up calling this boondoggle.  However, it is also known as plastic lacing or scoubidou.
This has been an amazing summer for us so far!  I love having so much time with my kids.  Last night I had a house full of giggling kiddos because we had a sleepover.  As a parent, nothing is better than giggling happy children!  LOVE IT! 

Well, I busted out the boondoggle last night and was so surprised that my youngest daughter found it so easy!

Here she is working on her boondoggle creation.  I showed her how to one knot and off she went!  I was just going to have them do the simple square.  However, she saw I was turning in mine and wanted to try it.  She adapted to this with no problem as well!

Here are the four variations that were worked on last night.  I love the color combinations that they each chose!

Here is the basics of how to make boondoggle:
I think that looking at my pictures will be more helpful than my directions! ;)
Cut two long strips of the plastic, which is called gimp.  We chose lengths of 30” and our boondoggle turned out about 3”.
At the halfway point of each strip you overlap them in a +. 
Bring your gimp that was going up and bring it down.  You want to make a loop of it.  Then, take the gimp that was going down and bring it up, again making another loop.  Hold the end that’s at top with your pointer finger and the end that’s now on the bottom with your thumb.  This frees up your other hand to do the next steps.  Refer to the picture above.

Now you will move your sides to the opposite side.  You are going to weave your sides through your loops going over the first loop and under the second one.  This is the same on both sides.  Again refer to the picture above.

Now you can let go of your gimp and pull the knot tight.  I pull two strands in one hand and two in the other.  Then, I alternate the two strands that each hand is holding and pull again.  You want this knot tight. 
Repeat these steps over and over again to finish the whole project up.  For a uniform look make sure to keep your gimp straight and don’t let it have a twist in it.  Also make sure to pull all the knots uniformly tight.  You will see if one section was not pulled as tight as the others.  I have heard you can pull too tight on this plastic and it will break.  However, I haven’t had a problem with this.
    
Are you ready for a variation?  Lets do the spiral now!
You are going to do the same basic thing of making two loops and then weaving in the side loops.  However, instead of making the top (right) loop come straight down and the bottom (left) loop go straight up you are going to make the loops diagonally. 
See the top gimp is to the right of the one going down?  Well when you form the loop bring the gimp to the left of the bottom gimp.

Next, you will take your bottom gimp that was on the left of the top one and when you bring it up to make your second loop you are going to cross diagonally over and to the right of your top gimp. 
Notice they aren’t crossing each other.

You will weave your side weaves the same way you made your top and bottom loops. 
Your gimp on the right side is below the left gimp.  So you will weave your right gimp over and under the loops, but you will want your gimp to end up above the left gimp.  See the above picture.

Now you will take your left gimp and weave it over and under the loops, but you will want your gimp to end up below your right gimp.  See the above picture.
Finish off by pulling this knot tight as you did with the straight square knot.  If you continue this you will have created a spiral design.  You can switch back and forth between knots in your design for whatever look you want to achieve.
     
Here are our two finished boondoggles so far!  However, as I’m typing this up the other two are being finished up and we are starting up some harder designs.  There are tons of different knots out there to try.  I looked through a bunch of kits at the stores and really did not care for their directions.  The best directions for more complicated knots that I have found is at Boondoggleman.   His site has wonderful directions with pictures and a large variety of knots to try!


How cute are they?  My kids love putting things like this on their backpacks so I’m sure this is where they will end up.  We will be going on a big (for us) vacation this summer with the kids (4 days in the car) and I had planned on breaking out the boondoggle for our road trip.  However, I’m so glad that I broke this out earlier as these giggly kids just loved it!  Now I wont be trying to explain how to do this at rest stops on the road!  I’m sure we will come home with lots more of these to show everyone!
I told a few friends that we were making boondoggle and they had never heard of it.  Have you?  I thought everyone grew up doing this at summer camp!  I’d love to hear everyone else’s ideas of if they did this or what are the other activities that they did as a child, during the summers, to keep them occupied!

This was a must do summer activity for us!  All five children from ages 5-12 gave it a thumbs up! ;)

Rebecca

Linking to the following parties:  Life as Lori, KoJo Designs, Fingerprints on the Fridge, ABC and 123,

Old Fashioned Summer Carnival-Great for 4th of July (or 24th of July)

Here are some great activities to make/do at your Fourth of July celebrations this weekend. 

We always grew up having an amazing Old Fashioned 24th of July celebration with our family (this is a Utah/Mormon holiday).  It was truly amazing.  So, last year we put together our own carnival, for our children.
I think you can figure out how to make each of these activities, but incase you can’t you can find tutorials for all of them, here!  This is a post about our carnival last year.
The above picture is a Water Bottle Bowling Game.  It has a super cute placemat that you have to go check out!


Fun action shot of my Nephew throwing the dart at the balloons!  This is a simple game to put together that I love the look of! 

Bean Bag Toss Game.  With homemade beanbags that each have a patriotic word embroidered onto them!  The game itself is made from a box!  Are you getting that we wanted the games to be part of the decoration?
Homemade Rubber Band Shooters!  Remember those from your childhood?  They are super easy to make!   Katrina made enough of these for each cousin to have one!  They are so much fun!  We just shot empty cans and bottles with them.
How about some Cork Guns!  These are made out of wood, pvc pipe, string, and a cork!

Tin Can Stompers are another super easy yet effective activity!
         
Tin Can Knock Down!  We used a ball that you get wet, just to keep water flying around the whole yard!

Hope this gives you some inspiration for old fashioned carnival games you can make yourself, from mostly things that you already have around the house!

Rebecca