Watermelon Crafts You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

We have been waiting and waiting for our first crop of watermelons to come out of the garden and they’re finally here!  In honor of our first successful crop of home grown watermelons, we thought we’d do some watermelon crafts  too!

Enjoy!

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It’s Time To Show Your Stuff… If you want to

Believe it or not, for years I’ve gotten requests to start a new area of either Kid Kid Crafts Magazine or FreeKidCrafts.com dedicated to visitors sending in their pictures.

So… I’ve finally done it!

Over the weekend I set up a new section of FreeKidCrafts.com so that people could stop by and submit their great craft pictures. Now these could be pictures of your child actually doing a craft, a group of kids in the middle of crafting, a child showing off their awesome creation, etc.

I’d love it if you’d tell us a little bit about your craft and how you put it together too!

The idea is to serve as an inspiration to other people who really want to start crafting with their kids and to provide a public place where kids can display their work and see themselves online… a VERY big deal with my kids!

If we get enough interest and participation, we may even start running some contests with real prizes (no monopoly money here!) We’ll just see how it goes.

Anyway, if you’d like to submit a craft picture, click here.

If you’d like to share a great new craft project, click here.

Teaching Children Self Reliance

I’ve always considered it my job as a parent to raise children that would grow up to be healthy, happy, and productive adults… although it’s not always easy.

I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know!

In my humble opinion, teaching children to become self reliant is one of the most difficult challenges a parent faces. When they’re little, it’s just so much easier to do things for them, make all their decisions, and pick them up when they fall. As a parent, it’s sometimes hard to know when it’s time to encourage more personal responsibility. Read more

Back to School Recycled Cereal Box Organizer

Thanks to Martha, you may have already seen this craft… although I remember making these when I was a kid - looong before Martha was doing her thing.

I even helped the kids make a couple of these for Father’s Day a couple of years ago.  We covered them in fake leather that we made from paper bags.

Anyway now that the kids are a bit older and we’re doing the homeschool thing, we are in dire need of organization… so the recycled cereal box is coming back out at our house!  Here’s how to make it…

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We’re goin’ to the zoo, zoo, zoo… How about you, you, you?

My youngest is sooo excited that we’re going to the zoo next week that she keeps singing that song over and over again… bless her little heart.  Sorry if that title was a bit annoying, but I though that if I shared it maybe I could get it out of my head!!!

We’re planning the picnic lunch, mapping out the zoo, planning out each animal stop… you’d think we’d never been to the zoo before.  I think the kids are just excited because we’ve planned our homeschool field trip to be the same day that public starts in our area.

Anyway, I thought I’d post some fun zoo crafts today in case anyone else could use them. Read more

Making Math Fun

As a lot of you already know, I began homeschooling my children this year. In fact, we actually started playing around with some things this summer (before the regular school year starts) to try to figure out exactly where the kids were at academically and emotionally.

It didn’t take very long to figure out where their real weak spots were… Math.

The funny thing is that they’re all actually pretty good at math - they just hate sitting down and doing the work… and nobody does their best learning when they’ve decided that they hate the subject.

So I started getting creative… Read more