A Small Fox in a Big World

Kids Can Make it: Felt Tissue Cover!

Materials

·Felt  ·Embroidery Floss  ·Sewing Needles  ·Fabric Glue  ·Travel Tissues  ·5x7 Templates ·Scissors  ·Embellishments  ·Sharpie Markers

1. Using a Sharpie marker, trace template onto your chosen piece of felt and cut out.

2. To help the kids visualize where they need to decorate, demonstrate how the cover will fit around the tissues by being folded into thirds. Make sure you fold any trace marks to the inside of the cover.

3. Embellish your tissue cover how ever you please. Use ribbon, sequins, beads, google eyes, anything you like! You may sew or glue on your embellishments. If you use glue, let your cover dry before progressing.

4. Using a whip stitch or a running stitch, fold your cover in thirds and stitch together to close.

5. Remove tissues from their travel plastic container and insert into your newly fashioned cover.

6. Enjoy

Third Annual Small Fox Ornament Swap!

It's that time of year again! Time to start thinking about making ornaments for the Third Annual Small Fox Ornament Swap! I haven't felt much in a Christmas mood, but the temps are finally cooling down and I'm beginning to feel the first whispers of ornament inspiration.

Here's how it will work. The first 24 people to email me at paperfoxling @ yahoo {dot} com with their name and address by Friday November 4th are in the swap. (this will round us out to an even 40 participants.) You will then be responsible for making either 5 or 10 ornaments and mailing them to me, along with $5 to cover postage, by November 25, 2010. I'm doing this a little differently than in year's past, to give people the option of making a smaller amount of ornaments, since I know how busy life can be. (Oh trust me, how I know!)

I will then distribute the ornaments, so everyone gets what they put in to the swap, without having to worry about participants who flake out. If you send 5 ornaments, you will receive 5 in return. If you send 10, then you will receive 10. You should receive your ornaments sometime the first or second week of December and then will have the rest of December to enjoy them!

For inspiration, here are some ornaments I've made in the past!

Hope to hear from you soon! I'm so excited to see what you are making!

Sleep well, my friend

Cleo, you were my best girl. I'll miss you for the rest of forever and always. I'm glad that we had that last weekend together and that I can remember you loving me best of all. Be well, baby kitty. Mama loves you.

One World, Many Stories :: Week 6 :: Away We Go! :: Dewey's Amazing Race :: FINALE!

We Read:

Olivia Goes to Venice, by Ian Falconer

 

We Played:

DEWEY'S AMAZING RACE!

000s: Find It or Beat It

Find It: Kids assemble a puzzle of a tourist site

Beat It: One of the coldest inhabited places is Resolute, Canada, with an average temperature of -16 C. Kids must get a toy from the bottom of a bucket of ice water, to see what it's like to live cold!

100s: Logic

Kids must complete one of several available logic puzzles.

200s: Hit or Myth

Hit: Kids have to hit a croquet ball through two arches to pass

Myth: Kids have to play Poseidon and blow a small boat across a tub, avoiding the rocky obstacles.

((Insert video here when uploaded))

300s: Suavities or Celebrate

Suavities: Kids have to practice their manners and deplorment and walk 10 steps with a book on their head.

Celebrate: N'cwala is a Zambian harvest celebration. Do their warrior dance! Hold a stick in your right hand and a shield in your left. Right knee and arm go up, then left knee and arm. Repeat five times.

400s: Verbal vs. Sign

Verbal: Kids must match the word "Hello" in many different languages to the language of origin.

Sign: As we learned in "Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything," the kids must perform Chinese vs. American signs to answer a series of questions.

 500s: To the Moon

Kids drop a clothespin rocket over their shoulder into a wide mouthed container. Two rockets must make it to the moon for the kids to pass.

600s: Eat It!

Kids make a modified Charlotte Russe from Russia. They spread chocolate pudding on a slice of pound cake. Then they top with whipped cream and a piece of fruit!

700s: Fold or Fly

Fold: Kids must create a simple peice of origami. We made samuri hats!

Fly: Kids must fold a paper airplane and fly it into a bucket labled with a travel destination.

800s: Recite or Write

Recite: Kids must recite a poem together. We used Shel Silverstein's "Me and You."

Write: The kids must fill out a mad lib and read it to the judges.

900s: Here or There

Here: Kids must answer a series of questions about their home state. (ie: state name, capitol, bird, tree, flower, rock, etc.)

There: Kids have to find a selection of countries on a world map.

We Were Rewarded!:

One World, Many Stories :: Week 5 :: Arts and Dance :: Aboriginal X-Ray Art

We Read:

Ready to Dream, by Donna Jo Napoli,

Koala Lou, by Mem Fox,

and

The Biggest Frog in Australia, by Susan L. Roth

 

We Made:

Aboriginal X-Ray Art!

AND...

Aboriginal chalk painting!

 

One World, Many Stories :: Week 4 :: Special Guest :: Martial Arts

We Read:

Jojo's Flying Side Kick, by Brian Pinkeny

 

We Watched:

A Tae Kwon Do demonstration!

We Learned:

First form! Special thanks to Shelia Long and her sons for their fantastic Tae Kwon Do demonstration! We all loved it!

One World, Many Stories :: Week 3 :: How We Live :: International Food Day!

We Read:

Everybody Bakes Bread, but Norah Dooley

and

Yoko, by Rosemary Wells

 

We Made:

Tangrams! I love this ancient Chinese puzzle game. I even have a tangram app on my iPod. The kids got a pretty big kick out of being able to make the shapes on the puzzle page I printed out for them too! However, what they all loved best of all was...

 

We Ate:

A LOT! There was: scones from Scotland, coconut macaroons from India, Enchiladas from Mexico, Eggrolls from China, Sopapilla Cheesecake (Greek Mexican fusion), Goulash from Hungary, Chips and Salsa from Mexico, Kringla from Norway, Mango from Chile, Kiwi from New Zealand, Pita chips and hummas from Greece, Quesadillas from Mexico, Fortune Cookies from China, and Lamb meatballs with tzatziki sauce from Greece. I was so fat and happy when it was all said and done! And boy howdy could those kids put away some food! They all said they wanted to do food day every week!

 

We Played:

International games. This picture is of a game called Cat and Mouse, which I believe is from Russia. One child is picked to be the cat and one is picked to be the mous. The rest of the children form a tight circle, which acts as a barrier between cat and mouse. The cat tries to get the mouse. If the cat breaches the circle, the mouse runs out. The kids who are the wall try to help the mouse and hinder the cat. It was pretty fun and hilarious! Once the cat catches the mouse, two new children can be picked!

You Are Here :: Week 1 :: Self

In addition to the children's program, I am also running a teen and an adult program this year. You Are Here is the theme for the teen program. For our first of four activity sessions, we explored the theme of "self." One of the suggestions in the manual was to give the teens prompts and have them write journal entries. That sort of struck me as a big, fat, bore as far as a summer program was concerned, but it did remind me of my favorite journal artist, Teesha Moore.

I showed the teens a few of the instructional videos that Teesha has put on youtube, and then the they got to work. First, the teens painted washes or patterns on their water color weight paper, to create a background. You can get fancy water colors if you're interested in doing this at home, but the crayola ones work fine too. Using magazines donated to us by the physical therapy office (so I wouldn't have to take any of ours out of the collection), the teens then cut out images that appealed to them, in order to create collages on their pages.

One girl decided to make her entire book strange kissing scenes. I'm not going to lie. I kind of love it!

One World, Many Stories :: Week 2 :: The Stories We Tell :: Trickster Tales

We Read:

Jabuti the Tortoise, by Gerald McDermott,

Anansi and the Magic Stick, by Eric A. Kimmel

and

Love and Roast Chicken, by Barbara Knutson. (Love this story! Cuy is such a tricky little Guinnea Pig!)

 

We Made:

Stick puppets so the kids can tell their own trickster tales! At first, I was going to draw animals that were featured in the stories we read, but then I remembered that Jan Brett is the best, and I just decided to use these fantastic animals from her Mitten story.

Have you been to Jan Brett's website yet? It's fabulous, with projects from all her stories, all with her gorgeous illustrations. I've used these animals before when I read The Mitten to my preschoolers, and the kids are always really responsive to them.

This time, I had my mom create a mirror image of the pdf file, so we could have a front and back to our puppets, and then I copied them on to card stock to give them some heft. The kids then colored the animals, matching front to back as they liked and then glued them together with a thin craft stick in between. Instant puppet!

I made a little puppet stage out of one of my dad's old shoe boxes, just to show the kids how they could make their puppet play even better at home. I was very pleased at how hard the kids worked and how, when they had a puppet or two completed, little bits of play popped up all over the room!

 

We Ate:

Sweet Potato Muffins. So fabulous! And easy too! (Says the girl who had her mother-in-law and friend come to the library and make them while she worked the desk...) I saw this snack included with a lesson plan for Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock, and as we were reading our own Anansi tale and sweet potatoes are easily accessible in all the countries our stories hailed from, I thought they would be perfect. And they were. So, so perfect!

One World, Many Stories :: Week 1 :: Global Citizens

We Read:

Peace Week in Miss Fox's Class, by Eileen Spinelli

and

Beatrice's Goat, by Page McBrier

 

We Made:

"Mite boxes" so that the children may save money for our service project. Every year, we do at service project during summer reading program, to teach the children the importance of giving back, and to show them that the world is bigger than they are. This year, we are raising money for Heifer International. As all three of our summer programs (kids, teens and adults) are participating in the same service project, I set us the lofty goal of raising enough money to donate a goat, just like Beatrice received in the story we read. In order to make this more managable for the children, we created these little card stock banks, to give them some place to save all their pennies. Though one child did confide in me that he was planning on saving quarters instead!

 

We Were Visited By:

La Manchan goats! Because I don't do anything by halves, I just HAD to have a goat at the library for this program. How was I supposed to convince a bunch of children that goats were cool, and that they should be donating money for one, if I didn't have a goat to show them?! At first, one of our teen volunteers was going to bring her 4-H goat, but there were scheduling problems. I really wanted to kick off our summer by stressing the importance of being a global citizen and being a giving, peaceful person. And to do that, I NEEDED a goat. NEEDED! So, in the eleventh hour, my director convinced her friend to take off from work and bring his goats! The kids learned a bit about the breed, about donating to Heifer (as the family had done that when they bought their first goat), and about why having a goat is such a wonderful, valuable experience for the people who have them, in foreign countries and at home. And of course, both goats received lots of love and pets from the kids in attendance! Thanks Dora and Freedom! You are two of the nicest goats I've ever met!

 

We Ate:

Apples and peanut butter. I purchased apples of many different colors and used this as a teaching opportunity. I asked them what was different about the apples and they told me that the colors of their skin were different. And then I asked what was the same. "They are the same on the inside," one child called. "They are all apples," said another. Exactly.