Sharla Kostelyk

Desert Sensory Bin

Every year, The Husband travels to Moab, Utah to go mountain biking. The kids are always full of questions about what it’s like there and I had planned to make them a special desert themed sensory bin while he was gone this past time but didn’t get it made until just last week. It may not have been in time for his trip, but it was in time for our official homeschool start and as always, the Sensory Bin was a very popular station!

This was a very simple bin to create. For the base, I used sand. I added a Desert Toob which had in it the little tourist man, many different animals that can be found in the desert, and a cactus. I also added some stretchy snakes, a piece of cork in the form of a cork coaster and a large squishy lizard. I had also bought a large squishy orange snake for the purposes of this bin but it had mysteriously gone missing from my sensory bin storage before I made the bin. My curious kids must have happened upon it at some points and taken it somewhere to play with!

The kids liked all of the items in the bin but the squishy lizard and the stretchy snakes were among the favourites. They used the cork coaster as all kinds of things, they scooped with it, pushed sand with it, set things on it, made it a character in their story, and used it to cover animals from the sun. I had bought a pack of them at the dollar store for sensory bin purposes and it worked really well for this bin.

You can find many more sensory ideas in the Sensory Bins book.

Join me for a free 5 part email series Sensory Solutions and Activities and get your Sensory System Behaviours Easy Reference Cards.

Easy Fall Apple Tree Painting

By Sharla Kostelyk

All that’s needed to make this craft is large paper (we used a large roll of paper that we picked up from the newspaper a few years back), paint and some small apples.

The neighbour next door has generously offered that we can pick the apples from their trees which we have been doing and have already made gluten free apple crisp and a tiny bit of applesauce from. When I thought of this craft idea, I sent the kids next door to get a few apples and they came back awhile later with a bag of store-bought apples from our neighbour two doors down because the ones on the trees next door were too small! This gave me a bit of a chuckle as we had our own store-bought apples but I wasn’t wanting to waste them on this craft! I sent them to return the large apples to the farther neighbour and fetch me some tiny apples from our own small apple trees out front.

When they returned, I cut the tiny apples in half, keeping their stems attached. I painted the outline of a tree trunk and branches onto the large paper and then let the kids get in there with the apples to do some apple print painting. We always find it easiest when working with tempera paint to put it in paper plates first. The kids used the apples as stamps and with their stems, they were able to make it look as though they were growing on the tree.

When the completed project was dry, the kids cut it out and taped it onto the wall. I think it makes great fall wall decor for our homeschool room!

If you are looking for other simple fall craft ideas, you may want to check out the easy fall crafts we made using household items.

Water Beads Sensory Tray

By Sharla Kostelyk

With all of the sensory bins and activities we have done over the years, we had yet to use water beads. I had a misconception that they were sticky and gross, so I had been avoiding them! After this experience, I can say that we will be using them on a regular basis from now on.

Please note that due to the potential for sea glass to be sharp and the potential choking hazards of the rest of the items, this tray is designed more for older children than for toddlers. Even with older kids, this is a tray that should be used with adult supervision.

To create this water beads sensory tray, I used a glass 9×13 inch cake pan. I lay sea glass, glass beads, and water beads into the bottom of the pan. For the water beads, I used two shades of blue aa well as clear beads. I then added water.

The kids loved watching the water beads grow from those tiny little dots to marble sized balls. They also loved how the clear water beads were invisible underwater. This fascinated them! They would scoop their hand into the water and ask someone else to guess how many water beads they had in their hand. Since you could only see the blue ones, the other person would guess a small number and then they would delight in pulling their hand up out of the water to reveal a large amount of beads. I was even amazed at how invisible the clear ones were underwater!

The textures between the gel feeling of the water beads to the sharp rough edges of the sea glass to the smoothness of the glass beads to the moisture of the water gave this tray a lot of variety. This sensory activity held the attention of my kids for a long time and they used it for weeks. We probably would have kept it for longer except that it was beginning to feel a bit slimy! The kids have already asked me to make this one again.

Another caution I will give as well for the water beads is that when they escape the tray, they feel pretty yucky to step on in bare feet!

You can find many more sensory ideas in the Sensory Bins book.

Join me for a free 5 part email series Sensory Solutions and Activities and get your Sensory System Behaviours Easy Reference Cards.

Activities for Today I Feel Silly

By Sharla Kostelyk

Around our house, between having a child on the autism spectrum and having kids with trauma backgrounds who have gone to and some who continue to go to therapy to help them deal with and express their feelings, we have a lot of books about feelings around the house. One of those books is Today I Feel Silly: and Other Moods That Make My Day by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Activities to go with the book Today I Feel Silly

One of the things I like best about this book is how it talks about in a given day, we may feel a whole bunch of different moods, sometimes at different times and sometimes even at the same time. I think that’s a really good thing for kids to be able to understand and identify in themselves.

Last week, we read the book again and I made some super simple activities to reinforce the concepts.

I set out different things on the table like string, yarn, paper shreds in purple, and ribbon and had the kids draw a face on a piece of paper and use what was on the table to make silly hair. I was surprised that the results were not very silly or wild! It did get them talking about the feeling they were trying to express on the face they made and several of them wrote the feeling word onto their craft.

I Feel Silly happy face I made emotion sticks using emotion cards that I printed from here (note that the way they are set up, you need to copy and paste them into a word document before printing). I then got the kids to help cut out the different emotions and glue them onto coloured cardstock. Once that was dry, we glued them onto popsicle sticks.

I used these emotion card sticks in two ways. The first was to line them up on the counter and have the kids come in one at a time and go through what each emotion was and then have them pick two that they were feeling at that time. The point of this exercise was to show that it is normal and okay to be feeling more than one thing at once.

using emotion cards to show two different feelings

The next activity we did was to all sit at the kitchen table with the sticks and for me to describe a scenario and for them to hold up the emotion that they think that scenario would make them feel. I think this helped with some of the more obscure ones on the cards such as confused, excited or anxious.

Easy Fall Crafts

By Sharla Kostelyk

Fall is my favourite season and the colours and feel make it a natural time to be inspired to create autumn-inspired crafts. Here are some of our favourite easy crafts to make using things that can be found around the house. They are simple, do not require a lot of preparation and they all turned out well for us.

Super Easy Fall Crafts with household items

Toilet Paper Bird Feeder

All you need for this is a toilet paper tube, peanut butter and bird seed. I find the cheapest place to get bird seed is in the bulk bins at the grocery store or bulk bin store. You can use almond butter or Sunbutter as an alternative to the peanut butter in the case of allergies.

easy birdfeeder Spread peanut butter over the cardboard tube and roll it in the birdseed. You can then slip it right onto a tree branch or hang a string through it to hang it off a branch.

Apple Bead Tree

This is another craft made using an empty toilet paper roll. Draw the shape of a tree top on a piece of green cardstock. Glue red beads (apples) to it. When it is dry, make 2 small slits in the side of the toilet paper tube and slide the green top into the slits. (If you wanted, you could paint the “tree trunk” brown.)

Bean Mosaic

With a pencil, lightly sketch what you would like to make. Using different types, sizes, shapes, and colours of beans, glue them to your paper to create the desired look. Depending on the shape chosen (leaf, tree, apple, pumpkin) and the colours of the beans or lentils, this can create a beautiful fall craft.

Fingerprint Trees

Print the templates for the fingerprint trees. Use stamp pads in fall colours to create a beautiful fall tree using fingerprints. This can even be framed and kept as a keepsake of how tiny the kids’ fingerprints were that year. Ours turned out really well.

Fall Fingerprint Trees

Leaf Rubbings

A classic fall craft not to be missed is leaf rubbings. These can be done using crayons and paper and also can encompass bark or sticks or pinecones or any other outdoor treasure your child can find. If you want to get fancy with it, you can have them cut them out afterwards or even make them into a mobile by hanging them from a wire coat hanger.

Apple Prints

All you need for this craft is paper, paint and an apple. Cut a shape into the apple and use it as a stamp. We recently did this as an activity to correspond with the book The Kissing Hand.

Apple Prints

What are your favourite fall crafts? If you are looking for more ideas, you can follow me on Pinterest or you can follow my Fall board.

Personalizing Back to Homeschool Pictures

By Sharla Kostelyk

This year for the kids back to (home)school pictures, I wanted to do something different. There are so many cute ideas out there on Pinterest and other blogs with “students” holding signs or chalkboards announcing their grade, but that concept doesn’t work that well for us as because of some of the special needs of our kids, they are not necessarily in the grade they should be in for their age or they may be doing more than one grade in a single year so I had to come up with another idea.

This is a picture of our little “class”. As you can see, some of my little “students” are getting to be as tall as I am! I think it’s going to be a great year!

I chose to personalize the kids’ individual pictures with something that would be fun to look back on someday…their favourite book. They each chose their favourite book of the moment to have with them in the picture.Miss Optimism is 11 years old. She chose the book Mia, a Matter of Taste. It’s the book she happens to be reading right now after we picked it up for her on our vacation.

Einstein is 11 years old. He had a hard time choosing a favourite book. He is a voracious reader! He chose one of the Warriors books to represent the whole series as he has read them all.

Snuggle Puppy will be 11 years old in less than a month. He chose the Bible as his favourite book which I have to say made my heart melt!

Granola Girl is 8 years old. She really enjoys the Little Critter books and it came down to her choosing between the Little Critter ABC book or this one and the Just a Little Critter Collection won out!

Dancing Queen is 7 years old. She loves the book I Like Myself so much and the smile on her face in the picture is from her telling me about her favourite part in the book!

Other ideas to personalize your child’s back to school picture:

have them pose with their favourite stuffed animal
take the picture while they are doing an activity that shows a bit of who they are
have them holding a sign of their goals or dream
have them hold a sign of what they want to be when they grow up or have them dressed in costume of that occupation
eating their favourite food
posing in their secret or happy space
playing with their favourite toy
holding a sign with their favourite scripture verse
sitting with their pet
holding their favourite movie
dressed as their favourite superhero or book character
wearing their favourite outfit
draped in their favourite colour or standing in front of a “wall” (sheet or blanket hung up) of their favourite colour
holding pictures of themselves when they were younger
with their special blanket
highlighting their hobby
playing their favourite board game
holding a balloon with their age written on it
with their bike or skateboard
doing their household chore
with their own artwork
being silly

If you want to learn more about our upcoming year, you can read about the kids’ goals, the curriculum choices we will be using and our classroom. I am participating in the Not Back to School Blog Hop where you can find other ideas for (not) back to school pictures.