The Washi tape adheres nicely to glass and is very easy to work with. The girls could rip the tape to the lengths they wanted to decorate their jars.

Next, the girls arranged the flowers into the vases and we set our table with plates of snacks, all the while discussing our book club selection.

Our book is from the American Girl historical doll collection, Felicity’s Birthday. The Felicity books take place in Colonial times.
See our Hands-On History:  Learning with American Girl Dolls page.

Visit our Pinterest boards: Learning With Literature, Hands-On History, and American Girl History Learning.

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One of our favorite parts of the week is Tea Time Poetry Tuesday. This weekly tradition includes a real fancy tea set, a table cloth, special scrumptious treats and a stack of poetry books. We sip our drinks, eat our treats and each child chooses a poem to be read. Even my highly active four year old takes part.

My kids are learning about all aspects of poetry at an age younger than I ever imagined and they love it. It’s been a wonderful addition to our homeschool week and one we plan to continue indefinitely. It was introduced to us by the amazing Julie Bogart of Brave Writer. You can read more about it here.

Here’s what we’ve done to make tea time easy, simple and FUN.

1.  Make an easy tea set cleaning and storage system.  First, we got a tea set via a thrift store. But dragging out the fancy tea set, washing little tea cups and saucers and tea pots and then putting it all away again got old fast. It made me sort of dread tea time. Until I came up with this system: I use a tray. Everything fits on it. It has an absorbent towel over it. After we use our tea set, I wash it and put it right on the towel-covered tray for everything to drain. When it’s dry, I stick the whole tray into a cabinet until next time. Takes only a couple of minutes total. When it’s time for tea again, I set the whole tray on the table and the kids can set everything up themselves.

2. Designate a helper. They get to sample the treats. They love setting the fancy table. If there’s just one helper, they can’t fight with their siblings over who gets to carry the plate of cookies to the table.

3.  Here’s a BIG secret:  You don’t have to actually serve tea. Gasp! None of us actually like tea in our house. I’m a coffee drinker. My kids have tried tea and pronounced it “yucky”.  So this is a time when they get to have fancy ginger ale (a big deal since we don’t do soda) or some kind of fancy juice. You could try lemonade or hot chocolate or even just plain water, because even that tastes fancy if it’s served in a pretty china cup.

4. Give little ones something to keep busy with once the food is gone. Special play dough on a fancy plate is one idea we’ve tried.

5. Vary the poetry books. In addition to the ones we have on our shelves, we always have a couple checked out from the library. Many childrens books count as poetry (Dr. Seuss, for example). Song lyrics are another favorite.

6. Be silly. Just because you’re being fancy, doesn’t mean you can’t be silly.  Jack Prelutsky’s poems are hilarious, as are many of Shel Silverstein’s.  Read poems about underpants, silly (but clean) Limericks or make up a poem using nonsense words.

7. Encourage them to write their own. Write down something you hear them say that’s poetic and suggest they read it at tea time. My daughter illustrated her own little poetry book and dictated the text for me write.  It’s not exactly poetry but she loves it and she reads it often at tea time.

Please follow our Poetry Kids Pinterest board for more learning ideas.

Tea Time Poetry Tuesdays are part of our Brave Writer lifestyle.

Places to find great ideas on decorations and activities for a Minecraft party:

• Keitha’s Chaos
  
• Scrappy Sugar Girl
• Catch My Party – Type “minecraft” into their search feature to see tons of ideas with photos.
• By Hook and Thread
• Gravity of Motion
• Because I’m The Mama
• Housing a Forest

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“Don’t worry, Mom. I won’t eat the cupcakes. I’ll just guard them for you while you take pictures of them for your blog,” said the Creekside Dog.

Find out where the garbage goes.

Take a trip to your local  landfill or waste disposal facility. We learned a lot about what happens to all of the things we throw away and recycle, it was free, and we got to ride on a cool bus (big points with us homeschoolers). There’s a lot of science learning to be found at the garbage dump:  gas, garbage juice, decomposition and much more.

Have a trash clean-up day. Pick a favorite spot close to home: a park, a wooded area, a sports field, and fill up a garbage bag or two or three.

You can read more about our recent trash clean up over at Kiwi Crate, including how we made our own books afterwards about how we helped the earth.

Take a Gratitude Walk to appreciate what the Earth offers to us every single day.

Hop on over to Kiwi Crate and read more about our Gratitude Walk, including the posters we made afterwards.

Earth Day is any day. It’s every day. How will you take care of your part of the planet today?

For more ideas about learning outdoors, hands-on science, crafts, homeschooling and much more, follow Creekside Learning on Pinterest.

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A very simple and inexpensive Fairy House from a cardboard birdhouse found at a craft and hobby store…

I cut a door into the birdhouse with a regular kitchen knife, then sprayed it with a waterproofing spray (also from the craft and hobby store).

Much could be done to decorate the outside of the fairy house, but my daughter chose to simply place moss at the top. She was more focused on the things I gave her to decorate the fairies garden.

Find the fairy garden accessories we used, and many more, at our Amazon Store. (Amazon affiliate link below.)

We dug up moss from another part of our yard to make a lovely carpet for the garden. Pretty stones form a walkway. Large flowers made miniature trees for the fairy garden.

After a few days, look at what she discovered one morning while checking on her fairy house.

The fairies had must’ve visited over night because sparkling fairy dust was all over the house and garden!  So exciting.

Each day, she checks her fairy garden.

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Thank you to our sponsor, Brave Writer.

Draw on a face…

Aren’t they cute?

Then start snipping.

So satisfying! He wanted to keep giving haircuts, so we moved things outside to the yard. He squatted down on the lawn and got to work.

Just another way we are enjoying Spring around here!

Creativity at work:  My niece (age 23) and my daughter (age 7) sat down with a long piece of paper and began to work on one drawing together, adding some of the same elements on each side of the paper:  a deer, a squirrel, clouds, a bird.

I love how they worked together, side by side, each adding some of the same components and then some of their own. When my daughter wanted to add the deer to the drawing but was unsure how to draw one, my niece pulled up an image on her cell phone and they both sketched together while looking at the example.

They turned the paper upside down (as in the photograph above) to add things to the opposite side of the paper.

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Nancy also loves to write with a fancy pen, one that has a feather on top, or as she says, “a plume”. Writing with fancy pens makes handwriting more fun, so we made a  batch of pens for The Bee, including some to share with friends.

These are so easy and simple to make. All you need are some plain pens, some feathers and washi tape (found in a craft or hobby store).

Wind the tape around the pen.

Add a feather at the top as you are taping. Use a bit more tape to cover the pen cap.

Ta-da! You have super fancy pens.

For more ideas for learning with Fancy Nancy…

• Our fancy word wall.
• Our week with Fancy Nancy.
• Our Fancy Nancy Pinterest board.

We used cut up cardboard tubes from paper towel and toilet paper rolls to start our seeds in. You can also use cardboard egg cartons.

My preschooler chose to plant carrots and sunflowers.

He sprinkled the seeds into the dirt and covered them with a little more dirt.

A spray mister allows for gently watering the seeds without flooding them.

More notes on planting with preschoolers…

• We used a large, vinyl tablecloth underneath our planting area for easy clean-up, since it was too cold to plant outdoors.
• We read our books beforehand, then as we planted, we discussed the things we’d learned:  how seeds need soil, water and time to grow.
• We placed our seeds in a bright location.
• We covered them with a clear plastic container, to make a greenhouse.  Large lettuce containers and rotisserie chicken containers from the grocery store are good for this.
• I taught my 4-year-old to mist his seeds daily, including misting the inside of the plastic greenhouse container, which makes it “rain” on the seeds.
• After we finished planting the seeds, I encouraged him to play freely with the remaining dirt, containers, shovels and scoops.

And in a few days time, we saw our first little seeds sprouting!

For more fun with preschoolers, follow Preschool:  Learning is Fun! on Pinterest.