Tag: rocks

Game of Stones

Leave a comment

TIc Tac Rocks (5)

This is the most beautiful game to take to the beach or poolside this summer! It’s easily portable, fun for all generations, and also a cinch to put together.

It all starts with a trip to a park or the beach to collect stones. Travis was convinced some of the rocks we found were shark’s teeth, which made the collecting that much more fun!

Tic Tac Toe (1)

Use a paint pen or acrylic paints and a small paint brush to mark half of your stones with x’s and half with o’s – you’ll need 5 of each.

Tic Tac Rocks (2)

I had two old muslin bags around the house, one small and one large, so we made two copies of the game, one for our smaller rocks, and one for the larger.

TIc Tac Rocks (3)

Paint the bag with a tic tac toe cross-hatched board. Let dry.

Travis thought our new poolside game was a delight!

TIc Tac Rocks (7)

The bag now serves not only as your board, but also as the means to clean up the stones when you’re done playing!

Tic Tac Rocks (8)

Garden Rock

Leave a comment

Garden Rock (8)

A beach near us has great big rocks scattered all over the sand – not just your typical beach pebble finds, but large heavy ones to collect and take home. We decided they would make the perfect final addition to our little patio garden as decorative labels.

Note: If you can’t collect large rocks near you, check your local gardening store.

Travis was thrilled with the size of our rock canvas. I painted one rock with a garden scene (sun and flowers, although the colors later bled together; I also attempted to paint on the word Garden.

Garden Rock (6)

Meanwhile, he had fun swirling colors all over another.

Garden Rock (2)

I loved watching his concentration as he worked!

Garden Rock (3)

So much fun that he needed to paint a second rock.

Garden Rock (4)

We left them to dry overnight, then settled them among our pots on the patio the next morning, taking care to find each rock the perfect spot.

Garden Rock (7)

 

Create Your Own Constellation

Leave a comment

Constellations (8)

Late summer nights are the perfect chance to star gaze, look for shooting stars, and teach your kids a little about the constellations (although my own knowledge pretty much ends at the Big Dipper and Orion!).

We took the fun inside the next day with this cute idea from High Five magazine, using some recent rocks from a day of collecting at the beach. Wash and dry your rocks before beginning.

Constellations (2)

Paint the rocks black, and let dry completely.

Constellations (3)

Once dry, we painted on white stars. Although Travis didn’t quite master the shape of a star, it was fun to teach him how to draw one.

Constellations (4)

We let the white paint dry, then added a layer of glow-in-the-dark puffy paint.

Constellations (6)

Leave your rocks in the sun to activate the paint.

Constellations (7)

At night, move your rocks to the darkest spot in your house (that meant our bathroom, away from any windows!) to see them glow. I encouraged Travis to arrange them in fun shapes and make his own constellation.

Constellations (9)

A cute new way to “star gaze.”

Alphabet Rocks

Leave a comment

Alphabet Rocks (3)

I’ve been wanting to make these adorable letter-learning rocks for Travis for weeks now, but it required finding 26 relatively smooth stones, and we simply hadn’t had a chance to get to the beach. Finally on a sunny spring weekend we headed to the shore, perfect for collecting rocks.

Sands (3).JPG

Travis adored the collection process, finding rocks and shells and other treasures along the way. Do take care in selecting your rocks. You need them to be large enough and flat enough to paint the letters of the alphabet. Ultimately some of mine worked better than others!

Alphabet Rocks (1)

Once home, we washed the rocks and left them to dry overnight. The next day I painted them with lower case letters using acrylic paints. You can alternate several colors if you prefer. My original plan was to alternate blue and gold paint, but the gold didn’t show up well on several rocks, so all blue it was!

For a decorative touch, add dots of white paint around each letter. Once dry, make a black dot in the center with a sharpie.

Alphabet Rocks (2)

Now the rocks were ready for play!

Alphabet Rocks (4)

There’s so much you can do with these. In addition to just spelling sight words (your child’s name, go, stop etc.) we used the rocks for two specific purposes.

The first was as a learning aid to our Usborne Starting to Read Pack.

Alphabet Rocks (5)

Travis is very tactile, so having to select the rocks that went with each word on the page helped reinforce what he was seeing.

Alphabet Rocks (6)

We also loved using the rocks as a supplement to activity worksheets from Education.com. If you’re not familiar with the site, it’s full of activities and lesson plans for children, ages preschool through middle school. For example, kids will love to discover and learn new words with reading-to-picture match up sheets. Be sure and check out Education.com more learning resources just like the one we used.

For our purposes, Travis first found the alphabet rocks that corresponded with each word before we matched it with its picture.

Alphabet Rocks (8)

This made it so much more tactile and engaging for him than a two-dimensional activity.

Alphabet Rocks (9)

Overall, these rocks are a fantastic tool to reinforce letter learning and early reading. How do you plan to use the rocks? Please share in the comments!

Rock Snowman

Leave a comment

Rock Snowman (6)

A recent burst of warm(ish) weather got us outside over the weekend, and my little collector is always eager to bring home treasures from our walks. In fact, I always carry a zip-top plastic bag with me when we outside just for this purpose!

Rock Snowman (3)

Today we returned him with a variety of rocks and sticks, so thought we could build little winter snowmen.

Rock Snowman (1)

First the rocks needed a good coat of white paint, and we left them to dry overnight.

Rock Snowman (2)

When we settled in to build our snowmen, it turned out we really only had one rock large enough to be the base, which meant only one snowperson could be built. The rest of the rocks ended up as little “snowballs.”

Rock Snowman (5)

I put together the snowman for Travis with hot glue – three rocks glued together, two little sticks for the arms, and buttons and googly eyes hot glued on.

The finishing touch was a little top hat I simply made from construction paper.

Rock Snowman (7)

Don’t have rocks on hand to make a snowman? Check out our shredded paper or glowing bottle versions instead!

Edible Geode

1 Comment

Geode final

There are kids’ projects that are ho-hum for the adults, and there are kids’ projects where even the grown ups in the room say “Wow!” This project definitely falls into the latter category, a homemade geode rock – that just so happens to be edible too. You’ll need to be patient for this one; t takes about 4 days, start to finish… But nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of years required for a real geode!

To make our own geode, we first needed to form crystals: Make a supersaturated sugar solution by dissolving 3 cups sugar in 1 cup boiling water. Wait until you can’t see any sugar crystals on your spoon, to ensure that the solution is ready.

LP Natural (15)

Fill a bowl half way with flour, then press aluminum foil in to the flour and pour in your sugar solution. Cover with additional foil and let sit for 2 to 3 days – yes 2 to 3 days!

LP Natural (16)

On the third day, I thought we hadn’t been successful, seeing just a few sugar crystals floating on top of the sugar solution. But when we lifted out our foil and poured off the excess sugar solution, we were left with a beautiful geode! We turned this upside down on a paper towel and left it to dry out for another full day.

LP Natural (22)

The “geode” broke into a few smaller pieces as it dried, but even the adults in the room were dazzled by the resulting rock candy. I haven’t eaten this stuff since I was a child at the science museum, and it was very neat to have made it right at home.

LP Natural (24)

Travis happily crunched on the smallest piece, before I stopped him because we weren’t quite done making our rocks look like rocks.

In order to do that, we melted vegan chocolate chips in the microwave at 20 second intervals until melted, about 1 minute total. Brush the melted chocolate over the outside of the rock (leave the jagged “geode” side uncovered.

LP Natural (26)As the finishing touch, we crushed two Newman O cookies and sprinkled on the resulting “dirt.”

LP Natural (27)

That is one beautiful geode!

LP Natural (25)

 

Patriotic Rocks

1 Comment

Patriotic Rocks (6)

A very happy Memorial Day to all, and a sincere thanks to all those in our country who serve or have served. We had a very patriotic weekend, catching a local Navy parachute demonstration in honor of the holiday. Travis was smitten, so we brought the patriotic sentiment back home with this easy craft.

Take a walk to collect a few rocks, and then lay them out with red, white, and blue paints.

Patriotic Rocks (1)

Older children will definitely have fun drawing replica American flags on their rocks, but for a three-year-old, simply decorating in the colors of our flag was a joy.

Patriotic Rocks (2)

He liked choosing which colors should go where!

Patriotic Rocks (4)

I added a few lines of paint to a few rocks so that they more closely resembled our flag.

Patriotic Rocks (3)

Let the rocks dry, then proudly display as holiday decorations. These would be great for the 4th of July, too!

Patriotic Rocks (5)

Frog Rock

1 Comment

Frog Rock (6)

Here’s a sweet and simple project that comes together fast, with super cute results.

The best part by far was our spring nature walk – we always come home with treasures! Travis found the most perfect rock, and I decided we should turn it into a little frog. This sent us hunting for green leaves to cover our frog with amphibian skin, and Travis loved finding leafy treasures.

Frog Rock (1)

At home, we tore some of the leaves into smaller pieces, and glued them in overlapping patterns on the frog.

Frog Rock (3)

When the glue dried, I added little felt eyes and feet.

Frog Rock

Travis had so much fun leaping his frog about!

Frog Rock (5)

Storytelling Stones

1 Comment

Story stones (1)

I loved this beautiful storytelling idea I found, drawing on Native American symbols to tell stories, especially because it’s a way for pre-readers to weave sentences together and understand that different places and characters are the building blocks of a narrative.

I looked up a few easy Native American symbols online (based on my limited artistic ability!) and painted them on stones, and then let them dry before showing Travis. Together we looked at the website at what some of the symbols meant, and I arranged the stones for him.

Story stones (2)

I put together our first story in a random order that popped into my head. He was quite intrigued, and asked for a few variations. With easy words like “sun”, “day”, “mountain”, “butterfly”, and “eagle”, it was easy to make up cute stories with simple plots.

Travis hasn’t been much into painting lately, so to my surprised then asked if he could paint the rocks! I asked if he’d like to make up symbols of his own.

Story stones (3)

His “symbols” really meant covering the entire rock in white, but I asked him what “story” was happening on each rock, and he made up cute answers, drawing on the items that were around us in the kitchen.

Story stones (5)A great early intro to creative writing!

Rock On!

1 Comment

Rock On (3)

As any parent of a rock collector knows, rocks pretty much, well, rock! We’re always finding great stones to add to our collection, but I loved this project from High Five magazine because it upped the stakes a little – we needed to find flat rocks in order to make the project work.

Luckily an outdoor foray yielded just enough smooth flat ones to build a sculpture.

Rock On (8)

The first step was to paint them. I thought we’d use all three primary colors, but yellow didn’t show up very well on the dark gray rocks, so we mostly had a blue and red result.

Rock On (6)

This mama was particularly proud of a green shade she mixed, until a toddler came along and turned it brown – such is motherhood!

Rock on (9)

Let your rocks dry completely.

Rock On (1)

Once dry, we used our largest rock as the base and began gluing them together into a sculpture.

Rock On (2)

And of course what sculpture doesn’t need a healthy heaping portion of extra glue on top?

Rock On (4)

Overall, a very cute twist on rock collecting. What does your sculpture look like? Please share in the comments!