Crafting—Mr. Rogers' trees

They aren't exactly rocket science, trees made out of construction paper, toilet paper tubes, and green tissue paper, but they are all the rage in our house this week and we have Mr. Roger's to thank for it. I should preface this entire post by saying that we are not TV watchers. Calvin hadn't watched even a minute of TV, aside from catching glimpses of Michigan football games now and again, until December of last year, and then the only reason we suddenly pulled the TV trick out of the bag was because he was sick, sick, sick (and the show we watched, several times, was "Jungles" from the BBC Planet Earth collection—he still loves it). I have several moral and personal objections against most TV shows and the TV culture as a whole and in general we don't watch it, but that's for another post all together. Instead, I'll just quickly say that since its daytime debut in our household back in December, we have watched classic Sesame Street episodes a couple of times a week and various BBC Planet Earth pieces as well, and just this morning we watched Mr. Rogers for the very first time. What a riot.

With Mr. Rogers we took a trip to the recycling plant, then followed the trolley to make-believe town (I'd forgotten all about that), and then we made a craft—trees, to be exact. Calvin seemed to enjoy all of the half hour show (a perfect amount of time), and immediately after he was determined to make his own paper trees so he could have a forest for his train set. We did so, and now he has one.

Paper trees

Supplies: Pen, scissors, tape and/or glue, paper tubes of any kind (we used toilet paper and paper towel tubes), construction paper in your choice of colors, and tissue paper (preferably in green).

Mark construction paper to the size of the tube. Cut paper along marked line. Adhere paper to cardboard tube. If using glue, allow to dry (we put rubber bands around our tubes to keept he paper in place while the glue dried). Latsly, crinkle up the tissue paper, shape it into the top of a tree, and shove a small part of it into the top of the tube. Done! I also used a dab of hot glue to keep the tree tops inside the trunks so that we could have a perpetual summer for our train setting.

The Korean Cinderella, by Shirley Climo (our review)

Calvin's rehash:
"It's about persons and ox and fruit. It's about Cinderella. They're mean to her. They make her do mean work. But the frog helps her fill the jug, the sparrows help her polish the rice, and the ox helps her pull out the weeds and then he eats them up. Then there's a band and then they're mad all over again. Then a man pulls out he shoe that was missing and he wants to marry her. There's a picture. They're getting married and they have a wedding."
"I love the book because I love the frog and I also love the ox."

My own thoughts? It's a fine book—the illustrations are beautiful and the writing is good. Why do I sound unenthusiastic? Really I'm not a big of most of the old fairy tales, particularly the Disney-fied ones. Cinderella is one of the books Calvin enjoys hearing again and again, and he also has the book on tape (a hold-over from his dad's childhood collection, and one that I'm certain I had, too, only on record), and at first that seemed like a grand thing. It is, after all, from the days of yore, and I tend to like vintage, eh? But the more I listen to the story, the more I am disappointed by it. Cinderella is gentle and kind and never loses her temper, and the story has a happy relatively ending, but it bothers me that she's entirely reliant on the good will of a fictional fairy godmother and an equally fictional prince charming to make it out of her oppressive life situation. Deductive moral of the story? You'd better have a fairy godmother and small feet or else you're up a creek. I'm sure I'm missing the forest for the trees—the moral of the story, after all, is that kindness is rewarded and evil loses out, right?—but something about the antiquated nature of the story line makes me cringe for girls everywhere.

That being said, I'll freely admit that I am likely over-thinking this, and I have no plans to snatch either the book or the tape out of Calvin's regular rotation. Some day we'll just have to discuss the other options that should have been available to Cinderella, like the doors opened by hard work put into a good education.

Crafty Monday (on Wednesday)—kid-made wrapping paper

Monday it snowed. And snowed, and snowed, and snowed. So while we had every intention of spending Monday painting paper (with which to wrap a gift that I finally finished over the weekend, only one week later than its "due" date), we spent a lot of Monday outside in the warm, wet snow. Since that was the craft Calvin desperately wanted to showcase this week, I decided to make Wednesday crafty this week. I reserve that right.

Wrapping paper has been somewhat of a thorn in my side. I know it's not something a good environmentalist would use, but unwrapping a gift is so fun, especially for a kid. This is by no means my own solution to the problem, but something I've seen many, many times before, and when I suggested it to Calvin, he was ecstatic about making the paper to wrap the gift he had been watching me make. This is even double-sided wrapping paper—I always save Calvin's art paper (the ones we don't hang up) so we can use the other side as well, and we made the wrapping paper from some of this second use paper.

In Calvin's own words: "I wrote her name and I didn't want to color over her name, so I put a fence around it. And then there are all the muddy people and they won't walk on the flowers, they will be careful to walk around them. And [the girl with the big purple bandage on her hand] burned her finger at home, so she's going to the hospital."

"Slowly, Slowly, Slowly," said the Sloth, by Eric Carle (our review)

This is another book to which we keep returning on our library visits. I think the first time we read it was around two years ago when Calvin was about a year and a half and was fascinated by the variety of animals.

Here's what he has to say about the book now:

"it's about a sloth who is slowly slowly. Every animal asked him 'why are you so quiet?' 'why are you so lazy?' and 'why are you so boring?' and at the end the jaguar says 'why are you so lazy?' and he thinks for a very long time and when you turn the page [the jaguar's] gone and the monkey thinks that the sloth is talking to him when he answers the jaguar's question slowly, slowly."

Calvin likes this book because he likes the sloth. The sloth is his favorite character, the jaguar is his favorite supporting character, and his favorite part of the book is when the jaguar asks the sloth "why are you so lazy?"

As for me, I'm actually not an Eric Carle fan. I do not like the "What Do You See?" books, or most of his other learning books, but in his rather vast library I can find a handful of titles that I don't mind reading, and this is one of them. I even like the pictures in this one, which amount to a parade of South American rainforest animals, and the use of vocabulary with a hint of comedic timing adds just the right amount of humor. That's why it has become a regular visitor in our house.

Heart banner and table runners

I should probably explain that the crafts we post to the site on Monday are not necessarily crafts we have done on that day; instead, I give Calvin his choice from his finished crafts and ask him to comment on them. Sometimes I get a comment, sometimes I don't, but as he understands more about what we are doing, he takes more and more of an interest. Today's crafts are ones that we finished at the end of last week so they'd be ready for our Valentines party on Sunday.

Heart banner

We used my Cricut to make this one and if you ask Calvin was his favorite part of the craft was, he'll say "using the Cricut!" exclamation and all. He did do all the gluing and writing, though, so the Cricut doesn't get all of the credit.

Table runners

I've always wanted to dress a table this way, with runners across the table, then we got this fabric in a Freecycle find and it seemed perfect for the occasion. This was easy, easy sewing—I cut all the pieces, pinned with right sides facing, sewed all around, leaving a 3 inch space for turning, then finished with a top stitch all the way around. The heart shapes on the plates are just napkin oragami, and yes, that's a poinsettia on the table still.