Go away crows...

Our crazy scarecrows are relocating to their gardens to ward off any suspicious looking bird who may even be considering stealing our little seedlings. They are just starting to poke their heads through the soil so we don't want anything to disturb them.

They have been tied, stuffed and twisted, then glue gunned, fluffed up and swathed in scarves and gorgeous hair styles all ready for their new adventure.

I think they will manage to do the job perfectly. It is like their own little village out there complete with Mrs Wishy Washy and Scarecrow Jack Sparrow. We even have a Bob Marley lookalike!

Scarecrows

Scarecrows always remind me of the Wizard of Oz. We had so much fun putting these little creations together. My kids love theirs. There are still some final details to add including their faces and hair but they have turned out really well. Each one already seems to have a personality of their own.

Though I do have to wonder who is the scariest...the scarecrow or the kids!

Group Painting and Planting

Aren't these gorgeous? A child's imagination never ceases to amaze me. Left to their own devices, this planter box was painted by a 5 and 7 year old with no adult assistance. Guidance is always there however it's great to watch and discover where their imagination takes them.

Our vegie garden project is moving along at a rapid pace with loads of concentration, attention to detail and laughter.

Most of them love the camera, if you can get them to break away from what they are doing for long enough to smile.

Or squeal......

While others just smile while they work.

It doesn't get much better than this.

New Thursday Project

With the start of our Thursday project in addition to Wednesday's it was lots of painting and handprints from one end of the room to the other. The Thursday group went back to basics. Little things like learning to wash your brush in between adding colours and going over primary and secondary colours.

It's quite fun to watch their expressions as yellow changes to green or red changes to purple. And having an excuse to put your hands into the paint and mix just adds a whole other element.

There are always the kids that have been undertaking projects for years and just reel off the colours required for mixing and love the freedom in having their own palette to work from. It's amazing to see how competent they become.

Eventually once finished with the artistic masterpiece on the outside of the planters, they were able to plant. What fun that was!

Now I must remember to water...

Seedling trays and labels

With ingenuity we were able to remove most of the plant tags we made from their moulds, some more easily than others. It was then onto sanding with most of the kids unfamiliar with sandpaper.

I think the sanding sent them all a little loopy (or so it looks in this photo) but they loved the flexibility it gave them in smoothing out their tags.

We then moved onto planting our seeds. By planting them at the beginning of the term, they should be a decent size in 9 weeks time. Initially we are putting them into small trays while we prepare the planters over the next few weeks. By then they should be ready to transplant. Just in case we forget what we put where on our trays, the kids all made little labels and for those who couldn't spell, they drew pictures of their vegetables.

The fun part was finding all sorts of things we could use for our seedling trays and deciding whether they would need drainage holes or not. We utilised everything from egg and choc milk cartons through to milk bottles cut in half lengthways and small boxes with one side cut out of them.

Can't wait to see their faces next week when they see that some of their seeds have started to peek through the soil. Stay tuned...

Term One and Vegie Gardens

We have started on our vegie garden that we are making this term. This week we made some of those little tags you have so that you can remember what's been planted. I really should be putting this into practice for my own seedlings. I keep planting them and then within a couple of days have completely forgotton what it was that I planted where.

The kids won't have that problem though. They used all sorts of found objects as moulds for the tags and filled them with plaster of paris. As the plaster began to set, we placed leaves or flowers into the plaster which results in a relief pattern being made. This coming week we will sand off all of the rough edges and attach our stakes while we prepare our containers (kindly donated by our local IGA supermarket at Marmion) ready for planting. I will be sending an email off this week to see if we can get Bunnings to help out with a donation of potting mix. Wish us luck!

Summer Projects - Library Bags

The second Kids Summer Project showed me again just how quickly children pick up new things. Some kids have worked with a sewing machine and to watch them confidently position their fabric and figure out what the different parts of the machine does really is rewarding. By introducing kids to a sewing machine at a young age, those ranging from 7 to 9 have the ability to know how to set up the machine and sew a basic straight stitch all on their own.

Library bags have got to be one of the most versatile bags kids can learn to make. Here are photo's of just some of the finished ones. Not only did they make the bag, they also learnt how to create a drawstring to go through the top and then had enough material left over to put together a smaller bag. When I asked them what they would use the small bag for the response was "small library books of course!"

So much to post

There are so many photo's to add that it's going to take the next few months just to catch up. There's end of year projects, Christmas projects and summer projects. It really is an endless array of talented little people.