Friday Fun School // Week 1

As part of our schooling adventures this year, we have planned for an "unschooling" fun Friday every week. We go to Bible study in the morning and then spend our afternoons with our friends, the B family, doing some sort of activity, whether it is a craft project, outdoor adventure, or service project.

This week was our first Friday Fun School, and although the two mamas were about to keel over from exhaustion when it was done, it went great. Thanks to a couple of great ideas from some of my favorite crafty blogs, we were prepared, the kids had a ball, and no one was hurt in the making of this craft. : )

First, we started with our craft. I hit up one of my FAVORITE craft blogs (and just for all round photography and color and mama inspiration) Whatever. Meg posted a very cool butterfly canvas craft several months ago and we decided that would be the perfect project to kick of our Friday activities. For those that are interested, we had seven kids tackling this project and they all thoroughly enjoyed it - we had five girls (ages 10, 7, 5, 5 and 4) and two boys (8 and 3). (We also had two little boys, 20 months and 11 months, who were taking naps during this time). Busy!

I brought in Travis' laptop so that I could show them what our end result was supposed to look like.



I even dug out my not glamorous industrial apron from Sam's in case I got hit with a random paint brush somewhere during the event.



Next up: painting our watercolor paper with bold strokes and bright colors. Then we let this dry so that we could eventually punch our butterflies out from it. My tip: spend the extra dollars and buy the watercolor paper. I was so glad I did. It gives your butterflies a little extra bit of texture to them and the color from the paint stays so much better.



Note our bold and bright painting shirts. : )





After putting our watercolor paper aside to dry, the kids each picked out a color of acrylic paint and painted their canvas. (No pictures of that). Then, as our watercolors and canvases began to dry, we began punching out butterflies and gluing them on.



I thought all our used, punched out watercolor trash was pretty. : )



While we were waiting for things to dry, we snacked. Cake batter blondies. Super easy, super good. Another of our little plans for our Friday school is to have the kids take turns making the snacks (reading the recipe, following the directions, etc.) and this recipe is perfect for that.



The finished products:



This was a big project for our first Friday. I don't know that every week will be as complicated, but for kicking off our year, it was perfect. And, I know how three original works of art hanging in our dining room. : )