Crafty Moms Share: Halloween

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Math Lesson: Math Books Perfect for Homeschoolers and Summer Vacation

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Since I have not done a math post in awhile I thought I would share a few of the great math books I have found recently at my local library. There are many new ones out there and I promise to share more soon as well.

The first one is a great book for any homeschooler wanting a fun way to introduce some geometry. Shapes in Math, Science and Nature:Squares, Triangles and Circles by Catherine Sheldrick Ross is an amazing book to really learn about three basic shapes. It is full of information and activities to explore circles, triangles and squares and as a former geometry teacher, I highly recommend this one. It even includes some of the geometric constructions where only a compass and straightedge (with no measurements on it) are used. The grade level recommendation for this one is fourth through ninth, but there are definitely some activities younger children could do it in it.

If you are trying to introduce some algebra here is a book for you, Mystery Math: A First Book of Algebra by David A. Adler. This book introduces the concept of a balanced equation, a variable and solving the equation while keeping it balanced in a fun way. In order to do this, a child must be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Since it has a theme of a haunted house, it also would be fun to read and introduce around Halloween.

Are you doing any traveling this summer? Here is a perfect book to teach math while traveling or about traveling. It is Travel Math by Pia Awal. This book introduces time and distance calculations, as well as calculations with things like population size, mountain height, temperatures, etc. The math involved is recommended for fourth grade and up.

So those are my recommendations for today with more to come. For more Math Lessons, check out:

Halloween

Congratulations to Andrea F. for winning the ebook of Christmas Crafts for Kids and a belated congratulations to Brenda W. for winning The ABC's of Australian Animals yoga book!

I have never really liked the scary parts of Halloween. I don't like where Halloween has gone and how over the top it is. I do remember loving dressing up and trick-or-treating as a child, so I wanted Hazel to have that experience without all the drama and commercialism. For her first Halloween I was excited to dress her up and take her to some family and friends' houses. Now of course she is excited to dress up and go trick-or-treating. I have made her costumes except for the first year where I found an adorable one at a consignment shop.

I chose the duck and lion costumes. She wanted to be the dish and spoon with me since she use to take my hand and tell me to run so we could be the dish and spoon from Hey Diddle, Diddle. Last year she wanted to be Rapunzel and this year she wants to be Cinderella. I finally finished her dress. I still need to put the elastics in her lower sleeves/gloves, but I need her here to measure her arms to do that. Here is the dress.

I bought her a Cinderella wig to go with the costume. I will add a picture to this post once she is dressed up for trick-or-treating.

She picked the darker blue for her gown instead of the Disney light blue. I should add she has two light blue dress up dresses to be Cinderella, but will not leave either one for any length of time since the cheap fabrics bother her skin. This is why I make so many of her costumes.

Now Hazel is easily scared so Halloween is not a time we pull out the scary and gory decorations. We tend to focus on pumpkins, though we do have a large spider and web on our staircase this year and some friendly ghosts in our front entrance. I have struggled with explaining Halloween to Hazel and why so many people like to dress up scary. Last year I used the Mexican Day of the Dead to help explain it. Today I found a wonderful way to do it and to bring the religious meaning back to the holiday. Over at Catholic Icing there is a wonderful post on Explaining Halloween to Catholic Kids. I would say not being Catholic, that it could be used for any Christian children.

Then there is the issue of the candy. We try to limit Hazel's sugar input (and should really limit ours more). We have used the story of the Pumpkin Fairy to help with this. I shared our version of the story here.

This year we spent some time making the egg carton pumpkins that you have seen around on-line including some at Sharing Saturday. We took our candy corn rice krispie treats a step further and made them apple and pumpkin shape (we used cookie cutters). We decorated them this time with M&M's and Steve helped Hazel with the decorating.

The final thing I would like to share with you is a wonderful book. Now the note to parents says it is not a Halloween book, but it is about a jack-o'-lantern. The book is The Pumpkin Patch Parable by Liz Curtis Higgs. I bought a copy of this book for my church and then found a used copy at the used book store and picked one up for ourselves. The church used it for Hazel's class earlier this month and one of the crafts they made was a simple one. They took orange jack-o'-lantern goody bags and stuffed them and then added a special leaf on the tie.

The book goes through a farmer planting a pumpkin patch and then when harvest time comes choosing one special large pumpkin to carve a smiling face and leaving it on his porch for all to see. Throughout the book, there are Bible quotes to go with the story. It is really a nice book to take some of the scary away from Halloween and make you like jack-o'-lanterns more.

So that is a bit about our Halloween. How do you celebrate? We are really excited that this year it appears there will not be a Halloween storm so Steve will be home with us!

Decorating for Halloween & Fall

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This past weekend we made a very easy Halloween decoration. Our decoration was inspired by the DIY Halloween Tissue Ghosts I saw over at Shindigz back when I was doing a review for them. I happened to find the tissue paper bells on clearance at the Christmas Tree Shop and I think I paid something like a dollar for all four. Then we took a piece of black construction paper and cut out eyes and mouths. I let Hazel cut her own and then we glued them on.

Since the bells had strings and the bottoms had the round ball that would ring the bell, we hung them on our chandelier to greet anyone who comes to our front door. Since we were hanging them, we skipped the tulle as well.

I guess we did a good job since Steve thought I had bought them that way. We also hung the extra spider web we had leftover from our various crafts and added the big spider we used at Hazel's nursery rhyme birthday party for Little Miss Muffet.

We also went on a wonderful nature walk around our neighborhood. We of course took our wagon (to carry everything and in case Hazel got tired) and a bag to collect things. We some saw fun mushrooms. We thought this one might be a fairy bathtub or pool.

And here is a fairy village.

The colors were also beautiful on the walk.

The trees have been so wonderful this fall. The colors are so vibrant.

We were collecting leaves and such and Hazel picked up a stick and started putting leaves on her stick. She decided it was a leaf stick. It came out beautifully and we have it sitting in a glass jar on our table now.

We planned on making more, but haven't made it out there yet.

But in the jar it looks like a flower. We love it! How are you bringing nature in to celebrate the season?

Pumpkin Time! Decorated Pumpkins, Pumpkin Books, & More

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With Halloween only 15 days away, I thought I would share some of the ways we have been decorating pumpkins and more!! I guess I better get serious about sewing Hazel's costume. This year we planted some pumpkins in our garden. We saved seeds from last year's pumpkins and bought a pumpkin plant. We saved seeds from white pumpkins and sugar pumpkins. Apparently white pumpkins take over and don't grow white the next year. We ended up with two (and there is one more small one out there) skinny and kind of tall orange pumpkins. These took over the pumpkin area and also hindered the zucchini (we got our first zucchini of the year last week now that the pumpkin vine is dying off).

When we were at Hazel's best friend's house for a playdate a few weeks ago, they had already decorated and had some great pumpkin ideas, so we borrowed a few of theirs with a few changes. They had found a kit to make two black lace pumpkins at Target. It came with pom pom spiders. We did not find the kit at our small Target, but found some black lace tights and stretchy spiders.

We used our homegrown pumpkins since they were so skinny. Total cost was $6.

They also had a pumpkin they painted with blackboard paint and then her friend wanted to spray it with gold spray paint. The result was beautiful. We used gourds for the rest of our decorations since I have been told to watch my spending. Since we did not have blackboard paint, we used Hazel's black tempura paint. I had some gold glitter paint and did another coat with it. The one problem with the tempura was the other paint made it watery again, so there are some orange spots showing. We also did one black and then Hazel used her glitter nail polishes to decorate it. She used blue, pink, gold, silver and multicolored glitter nail polish on it.

I had painted two gourds with the gold glitter paint--an orange gourd and a white gourd. Then Hazel added some of her glitter nail polish to the top of the orange one.

Hazel was having so much fun painting with her nail polish that I bought her another white gourd to paint. (She also painted some acorns with it.) I thought she would use the glitter ones, but she decided to use the solid colors first.

Finally when I was at Target again, I saw a kit using a fake gourd and making it a spider. I knew we had some fake gourds that we used for turkeys last Thanksgiving and we painted one of those black. Then we used pipe cleaners to give it legs and glued on eyes.

We also made some pumpkin bread last week. We first cut open two sugar pumpkins and enjoyed cleaning them out. Hazel had the best time playing with the goo and seeds. I believe she said, "Sometimes it is fun to get messy."

Then she liked the feel of the seeds and trying to get them offer her fingers.

After they were clean we baked them in the oven for an hour and a half at 350. Then I pureed the insides and put it in the refrigerator. We made pumpkin bread later in the week. We used the recipe here, but changed it to be gluten free. One loaf we ate and the other we brought to her school for Grandparents' Day.

Finally some of the pumpkin books we have been enjoying lately. Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman is among one of Hazel's all time favorites! Three of them go into how pumpkins grow. We also shared the Pumpkin Fairy story a few years ago. Are you getting ready for Halloween?

Halloween is Coming: Wiggly Halloween DVD Review & Giveaway with Halloween Crafts

Today I am going to share with you a few of our Halloween preparations as well as a wonderful DVD from The Wiggles: Wiggly Halloween. I was sent a copy of this DVD to review here (all opinions are my own) and I get to give a copy away to one of you! Thank you NCircle Entertainment for this opportunity!

The new Wiggles entertain in this friendly Halloween DVD. Now if you have been following me for any time, you may know Halloween is not one of my favorite holidays. I think it has gone way overboard and lost the fun and meaning somewhere along the way. I try my best to focus on the non-scary parts for Hazel since she is sensitive and we take her trick-or-treating to family and friends houses (sometimes not on Halloween) and around our neighborhood to a few of the neighbors we are friendly with on the very early side. The past two Halloweens Steve has been working Halloween night due to storms hitting our area, so I have had to deal with the many, many trick-or-treaters we get on my own as well as getting Hazel out trick-or-treating. I do however remember the fun of dressing up and of trick-or-treating, so I really try to get Hazel excited for this.

Candy Corn Rice Krispie Treat

That being said, I found this video a perfect show to express my views. They mentioned scary things like witches, ghosts and zombies but did them in a non-scary way. The songs are fun and entertaining. Hazel favorite part is that there is a female Wiggle now. Every time the scene changed she had to point out who Emma was. It was really cute. The songs had words changed so that they would not scare young children and the whole DVD is full of fun, music and dancing. There is definitely an effort on the part of The Wiggles to get the children watching up and moving around with their dances. I also love how they feature children in so many of their songs. This DVD is a perfect non-scary celebration of Halloween for young and/or sensitive children. I know Hazel is almost too old to be enjoying them, but since she is so sensitive this is one of the few shows that does not scare her.

Above is a picture of the candy corn rice krispie treats we made with Hazel's best friend and his mom. His mother found the recipe in a magazine, but I don't know which one. I found a similar one here. They made the rice krispie treats before we got there with brown rice krispie cereal. They chose not to dye the treats to match the candy corns. They also bought Reese's Pieces instead of M&M's since the colors matched better.

Next we are sharing some of the edible bugs we made to bring over to Hazel's friend. He is always giving her presents so she wanted to give him one. We found the idea in Family Fun Magazine this month. They are made out of things like dates, prunes, raisins and dried cranberries. We also used chow mein noodles, dried bananas, white chips and sunflower seeds. The instructions called for sliced almonds, but Hazel's friend has a severe nut allergy, so we used sunflower seeds instead for the flies.

The last idea we are sharing today is our Spider Web Jar that we saw on ShinDigz DIY section. I received the fake spider web as part of the order I got to review their products. It is really easy. You need a empty and clean jar, fake spider web and spiders (which the web often comes with) and a LED tea light. Follow the instructions on their site.

Now onto our giveaway!! Here is your chance to win your own copy of The Wiggles: Wiggly Halloween DVD from NCircle Entertainment. Please follow my Giveaway Rules and just follow the Rafflecopter for what you need to do. Good luck!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Another Turkey & Winners!

First some announcements:

The winner of the Best Halloween Costume is: Sarah from Happy Lil Lamont with her daughter's beautiful flamingo costume!

The winner of the Melissa & Doug Big Rig Building Truck Play Set is Shannon F. Congratulations, Shannon!! You have three days to email me your address! Please check out Melissa & Doug's Terrific 20 List! Melissa & Doug are giving away a toy from this list every day on their Facebook page!! Plus some of the other blog's contests are still going on. There is a list at the bottom of my contest post of the other ones.

Today I thank God for not having to be in Hazel's picture with Santa Claus this year! (She even had a conversation with him on her own!!)

The other day I was poking around Pinterest and found this great turkey suncatcher from Learn Create Love. Learn Create Love even provides the printable for the turkey. I did mine a bit different however. I used contact paper and put the sticky side up over the pattern and had Hazel stick on fall colors of tissue paper squares over the pattern. Then I cut out a body from brown construction paper. We sealed the tissue paper by folding the contact paper over it. Then I cut out the tail part of the pattern from it. I glued the head/body on and added the face details.

A very easy, quick Thanksgiving craft.

Halloween Sharing Saturday Features!

Sharing Saturday will begin a couple of hours, but I wanted to share with you some of the amazing Halloween ideas that have been shared the last couple of weeks. I meant to do this Wednesday but somehow on Wednesday my only focus was on Hazel, pumpkins and trick-or-treating. So here it is.

Best Halloween Costume Contest

Ok, so I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun to share our kids' (or our own) Halloween costumes and pick our favorites. So here it is!

Button Code:

All you have to do is link up the costume you want to enter. If you do not have a blog or a post with the picture you can use either your blog address or Crafty Moms Share for the address and then upload a picture from your computer! You can enter more than one (and they can be from the same post). Enter each costume separately. Then display the button on your blog either in the post or somewhere else and ask people to come vote for their favorite costume. The winner will get a homemade felt bat. We will follow my Giveaway Rules, however this is open internationally. A winner will be announced on November 15th!