Georgia O'Keeffe's poppies

On Friday we kept the 2 minutes silence, and Lamb was very sincere about the whole thing. As the last of our poppy related arts 'n' crafts we took a look at Georgia O'Keeffe's beautiful 'Oriental Poppies' painting, and the boys had a go at recreating the picture.

Here is the tracing I made of the picture for the boys to work with as a guide.

Here is Lamb's interpretation with water colour pencils....

... and here is Moo's version of the same :)

Poppy seed pictures and hairy models

Yesterday poppies were the subject of our crafts once again. It is clear to me (and thankfully also to the new paediatrician who actually listens) that Lamb has quite a few sensory integration issues. Unfortunately the Occupational Therapists are so overstretched that they are taken on only the most extreme cases with most children not getting any help. This is the situation we, and many other families in the area, find ourselves in. Sensory integration is a broad subject and I know only a little, but I've been trying to provide controlled circumstances for Lamb to work on some of his sensory issues.

This is one such activity and it went surprisingly well.

The boys used glue to create a picture of a poppy. The glue had a tiny splodge of red paint in to help them see where they were putting the glue. They then had a whale of a time shaking and sprinkling poppy seeds all over their pictures and Lamb didn't mind touching the poppy seeds one bit. Result!

Later, when the pictures were dry, the boys used the textured pictures to make prints with lots of bright red paint.

Other fun for the day included the making of a hair model (from Easy Make and Do Projects: Human Body). This activity was more aimed at working on scissor and paper folding skills than learning about hair.

Moo is getting much better at controlling the scissors, and Lamb is improving his control when trying to fold to a specific line on the paper. Lamb enjoyed giving his hair a cut more than anything :)

We also made some posters about digestion for our body topic and spent some more time with Nina and her neurons learning about digestion. Both kids grasp the basic concept of why we eat and where our food goes, if not all of the finer details, which for their ages and stages is plenty enough!

Poppy and orange cakes

1 cup of self raising flour
3/4 cup of brown sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup of olive oil
about 3 finely grated carrots
2 tbs poppy seeds
1/2 a squeezed orange's juice
grated zest of 1 orange

Bake at 180 degrees for about 20ish minutes. Ta-da!

To continue talking about poppies and what they represent to us in November, we continued by making these little cakes. 'Carrots mummy? Cakes?' It was like a scene straight from Peter Kay! It was also a chance for the boys to have a taste of poppy seeds, which I don't believe they've tasted before and talk about our sense of taste. Lamb didn't like the feel of the poppy seeds in his mouth, and Moo was fairly neutral about the whole thing... but at least there were yummy cakes to eat at the end of it!

Sewing poppies

Now I'm not great at taking photo's but I'm sure you get the idea!

Yesterday we used some Binkamat sheets (which are fantastic by the way!) to sew some simple lines onto our poppies and talked about why we buy poppies in November. The poppy you can see in the picture is Moo's - not bad for 3 years old I think :) He was really getting the hang of it, but decided to call it a day half way round the second line I had drawn on to the poppy for him.

We also watched some programs about our skin and the boys drew pictures of what they had learnt. In Lamb's own words: Skin helps me. Keeps out water and germs. Holds in belly, food and heart.

Heehee, I just love that last sentance!

And here are the stained-glass autumn leaves we made the other day.