Last year I asked Gracen what she was thankful for, and her answers melted my heart. This year, I decided it would be fun to make a visual representation of her responses so that we could revisit and reflect upon them throughout the weekend.
A thankful tree is something I’ve actually done in my classroom many times before. We start the project out as a group with a read aloud, a discussion, and everyone contributing a few leaves, and then throughout the week the students are free to add leaves as they are reminded of things they’re grateful for. It’s always turned out to be a gorgeous project that serves as a wonderful reminder of just how much we all have to be thankful for. Our smaller at home version was no different. We’ve revisited it many times and added things as Miss G has requested to and the entire project, start to finish, was a lot of fun.
It started a week or so ago in our courtyard with a stack of coffee filters, some watered down food colouring (we used approximately 3 tablespoons of water for 10 drops of colouring), some droppers, and an old piece of cardboard as a work surface.
Using a stack of 2 or 3 at a time, Grae squeezed our homemade watercolours out onto the filters and watched the colours run and mix to create gorgeous colour combinations and patterns. Here in the October heat, they dried so quickly that I was able to cut them into very simple leaf shapes as she continued painting more filters.
Throughout the week, we talked about things we were both thankful for and I recorded one idea on each leaf.
Some of the things she felt happy to have were really eye opening. While I do appreciate the construction across the street from our building for the entertainment / education if provides Miss G, often times it just seems like a whole lot of extra noise, dust, and traffic. Well, Gracen doesn’t agree. She said she’s happy to have it because “it’s really cool and we get to watch all of the cool stuff happen like big trucks and cranes and cement coming”.
When we were ready to assemble our tree of thanks, I sketched an outline of a leafless tree onto an Ikea flatpack I had tucked away. Brad cut it out and we hung it in our main room using painter’s tape rolls.
Gracen and I have been spending a whole lot of time at the beach lately (yay!), but this afternoon, we finally got around to finishing off a fun little project we started days and days ago.
It began like this. Coffee filters, coloured water, and a plastic dropper out, 
Of course it didn’t take Grae long to find a table full of fun materials to experiment with. Without hesitation, she began using her dropper to slurp up coloured water and spew it back out on the filters.
She really loved watching how the colours spread and mixed with one another.
So much in fact, that she fully covered upwards of 30 separate filters. Thank goodness for a big laundry drying rack! We placed the filters on the rack in our solarium, and they dried in no time.
After tucking them away for several days, we came home from the beach today {some of us still sporting our bathing suits and sandy fingernails} and dug them out for a quick pre-nap project. We also gathered a pair of scissors, some long green pipe cleaners, and some short colourful pipe cleaners (regular pipe cleaners cut into thirds).
To transform our beautiful watercolour-y filters into flowers, we started by carefully folding them in half three times. 
Then Grae would give me some sort of petal description (‘long and skinny!’, ‘pokey like the rose bush!’, ‘big, big, big, big, BIIIIIIIG!’, and ‘you know…..like….ummmm….like the little circle circle ones?’ were a few) and I’d cut the curved edge to match. I also snipped the very tip of the point off at this point too.
Then came her very favourite part – carefully unfolding the cut filter to reveal its shape.
Here are a few of the other shapes we came up with together.
Next, Grae would pick a small pipe cleaner, bend over the top so it was no longer pokey, and place the bottom through the tiny hole in the centre of the filter.
Then she’d bring the filter up around the pipe cleaner and pinch it at the base.
While she held it tightly, I’d wrap a long green pipe cleaner around the filter and short pipe cleaner to form the stem.
Fun, right?
Every flower turned out completely different from the last…
And by the end we had a beautiful bouquet of colourful flowers perfect for the mantle, a table centrepiece, or a Mother’s Day gift. 
Back when we were living in Kuwait, I remember desperately longing for rain. The kind that lasts days and days and lends itself to cozy hoodies, movie afternoons, and pots of soup simmering on the stove. Well, I’m happy to say, I think I’ve officially had my fix. It’s been raining for several days in a row now, and though lazy afternoons on the couch watching documentaries and romantic comedies don’t exactly fit well with our current life, we’ve enjoyed the rain nonetheless. 
The project started off as a 
Grae decorated her coffee filters independently for a while, and then asked me to join her to finish them off. 
Afterwards, Miss G used an easy-to-squeeze spray bottle to soak the filters pretty thoroughly.
While waiting for them to dry, we began to work on our butterfly bodies. Using Sharpies, we drew little faces on the tops of the bamboo pins.
Here they are when done.
Next, Grae chose some pipe cleaners from our stash, we cut them in half, and bent them into little antennae shapes.
When we got back to our filters, they weren’t quite dry yet, so we took a blowdryer to them. 10 seconds each was all they needed.
To assemble the butterflies, we simply pinched them across the middle (Miss G did this job) and fanned the wings out nicely (my job).
Then Grae carefully selected a clothespin body and a set of sparkly antennae and we clipped everything together.
Here are are the two butterflies Miss G declared her favourites.
At the last minute, we decided to add magnets to the backs of the clothespins with hot glue (I also popped a little squeeze of glue into the tops of the clothespins too, just to hold everything together more permanently).
And here’s my proud little girl with her finished project.