“Collection” Theme Round Up (from Abacus: our creative home curriculum!)

The end of June was spent on the road on the way to Wisconsin, so I missed getting this round up of our June “Collection” theme posted. Still lots of good memories here with hopefully some ideas you can carry over to your own stories.

Click here to see the original June post with the complete list of Collection ideas (which is where these came from)

Outside:

On our road trip through Nebraska and Iowa, every time we stopped for gas, the girls and I collected wildflowers from the side of the road and pressed them in a little flower press I brought with us. We forgot to bring a flower book, so most remained un-identified, but it was a lovely way to make a boring stop more fun.

Thanks to our dear friend Lindsay, we had our second annual “Sleep in the backyard” night. It was made extra beautiful by the singing campfire songs out of a book collection of classic song lyrics.

I used some old letterpress trays I had laying around to make our “Collection” themed wall. My plan was to fill up the wall with all sorts of found treasures over the course of the month, it still has a lot of empty spots, but it has been the perfect place to stash tiny treasures. I think I will keep it up for a bit longer. I’m enjoying having somewhere to put those tiniest of tidbits.

Its hard to see from the photo, but we found several insect skeletons, lots of cool rocks, little figurines, an old brass button, a key, a more. You can also see the beginning of my silhouettes collection.

History:

We visited the Build Frontiers exhibit at the Greeley History Museum where the girls and Tim had a great afternoon playing with legos. The best two take aways from the day were these cool passports that the city of Greeley History museum is doing, and also a great lego app called Lego Movie that is pretty great.

(Rattlesnake Kate is a Greeley history celebrity – seen here immortalized as a lego mini figure)

Art:

In celebration of Flag day, Lucy designed this flag – hopefully we can sew a version of it and hang it on the treehouse. (The page came out of this Maps companion book)

We spent a whole lot of time this month working on all sorts of tiny drawings – all of which are getting compiled into our first ever wall calendar called “Collection”! I will have the calendars up for sale on this site soon! I picked up the proofs this week and they look pretty great if I do say so myself. It helps that there are some fabulous illustrations done by these two cuties.

We had a tea party with using my teacup collection for Lucy’s 6 year old woodland fairy party. Here are some photos from the magic filled afternoon:

And in the spirit of fairies, we had several fun days using bits and pieces to make fairy houses.

Movies:

Not a good movie at all, ha, but we did watch “National Treasure” for it’s contribution to the “Collection” theme 🙂 I suppose my 6 year old now does know what the Declaration of Independence is (sort of…)

Books:

For reading, we started “The Borrowers” and immediately realized it was still a bit old for the girls. Besides that, we have just particularly enjoyed working on our summer library program sheets and picking up lots of good stories from our local library.

We did check out and read a lot of Jan Brett books and then went to her show in Fort Collins at the Contemporary Art Museum. So neat to see her work in person! Her attention to detail is pretty insane. You cannot help but admire her work.