Oh Waily Art

Yesterday we did some art in the Oh Waily household.  This tends to involve paper, crayons and lots of scribbled circles at the moment.  While Miss Oh was doing this, I got out her shape puzzle and traced around the shapes – similar to one of the uses of the Montessori metal insets – and made a house using the square and triangle, a sun with the circle and a random “pool” with the ellipse.  Miss Oh watched while I did this and then oversaw the appropriate colouring in of each shape.  As I was doing this she started asking me to draw various animals, including a zebra.  This jogged my memory and away I went, computer in hand to our printer.  I had come across a download from Kids Craft Weekly from 2007 that involved the outline of a zebra and, knowing my drawing skills, decided that it would be a good idea to save this for future use.  The future arrived yesterday.  Printed out on the “B” side of some paper, Miss Oh got to colour in the zebras as she saw fit.  It’s her first attempt at “colouring within boundaries”.  Obviously I didn’t expect her to be able to do so, and it didn’t stop her enjoying the process.  She even managed to put in a nice green eye for him.  If you want the zebra outline you can find it here at the Stripes issue of Kids Craft Weekly.  Scroll down for the file and ideas of how to use it.

Miss Oh was also doing some more water pouring yesterday, and to make it obvious I had put some food colouring into the water.  Having been shopping with me she knew that I had just purchased other colours and she asked me to add them to her water – on top of the existing colour.  This made for some interesting and slightly ugly results, so I just couldn’t resist doing the colour mixing activity.

Here’s the end result.

The method is extremely simple.  I mixed up red, blue and yellow food coloring in water, filled up the appropriate tray and got out the dropper.  I had the colour wheel out for her to reference and then I asked her which of the missing colours she wanted to make.  Miss Oh chose the purple, and so we went through the process of dropping blue and red water into the empty space and stirring them together.  Repeat and rinse with the orange and the green.
She managed to understand that red and yellow made the orange and so forth, so that’s a really good start.  I will repeat it at some time in the future because I’m sure it will not have stuck.

I can highly recommend using food colouring in place of watercolour mixes.  It was very, very easy and very very vibrant.  Clean up was a breeze too.

Now back to working on black, brown and grey.

Oh Waily Activities: Transfers & Droppers

The beautiful weather of late allowed me the luxury of exiling Miss Oh Waily to the shade of our eaves for her messier activities.

Transfer and Droppers

Perhaps you will have noticed the looming hand of doom coming out from under the table.  This would be Mr Oh’s earlier art work, using the prone figure of Miss Oh as his template.  Sidewalk chalk is great.  She loves to scribble with it, and it comes off with the rain.  How happy a clean up is that ?!  Think of all the trees I’m saving.

Anyway, back to the activities.
Doing my “follow the child” thing, I put out the quinoa transfer for her to do.  I thought it would be nice for her to have a new grain to handle, other than rice.  It’s smaller, rounder, and is remarkably attractive for static electricity.  It sticks to the spoon, the bowls, the tray, her, me, the table, the chairs and the flooring.  Therefore it makes a complete mess when being worked with.  I grew tired of wiping, sweeping and vacuuming indoors, so it was relegated to being an “outdoor activity” until she got bored of it.

It is just another way for Miss Oh to indulge her current love of running her hands through, and handling all sorts of odd grain-like things.  This sort of textural trying out and handling of things means coming up with more ideas for her to experience.  I refuse to go to the bulk bins for this any more, so today I will be attempting to make a very simple pair of sandpaper blocks.  Mine will be on whatever stiff card I have at home, since woodworking is not one of my skills.  This may be asking for trouble, but I’ll try.
Then, on my next shopping trip I will take in a visit to Spotlight and pick up some small pieces of different fabrics and make up a fabric box for her.  Now all I need to do is transform the freebie airline eye-mask into a blindfold, convince her to wear it, and we will be underway with some new sensory fun

The other activity that is in the picture is transferring by dropper. Its for the tripod finger grip, you know.  And for strengthening the hands in advance of writing.
The activity is simple – using a dropper Miss Oh is to transfer water from one bowl to another.  As you can see I used yellow food colouring to make it a bit more obvious and interesting for her.
She got the hang of the dropper after a few goes, did half a dozen transfers and then she moved on.  She went back to it a few more times but it is not a huge hit like the original rice pouring activity was.

Dropper Activity

Still, I have another use for the dropper having just purchased red, blue and green food colours to go with our existing yellow.  I see an art activity in our future.  But before I go down the mixing colours road, I think I need to work on black, brown and grey a bit more.

Oh, and if any of you locals happen to know where I can pick up a simple old-fashioned watercolour set for kiddies I’d like to know.  My local Warehouse Stationery was devoid of such a simple item.

And those are our current activities in the Oh Waily household.  Until next time…

Monday Munchies

This is my follow-up to the Oh Waily Snacks post from before Christmas.

As I said at the time, we are not in possession of the colourful and pretty muffin tins, so we made do with our old metal muffin tin.  It works pretty well and allows me to check that I am touching as many nutritional bases as possible.

Today I thought I would just use some of our smaller containers and a nice Christmas tray to put them all out on.  It’s only really for my enjoyment at the moment, since Miss Oh Waily is not interested in the aesthetics of her snack display, simply the contents.  Still, over time she may come to appreciate it and in the meantime it gives us something to talk about at snack time.

So today’s Monday Munchies are nuts, pretzels, dates and raisins, some cheese, a portable cheese spread and cracker combo, and a whole bunch of grapes.

Oh, and a cup of water to wash it all down with.

What do you do for kiddie snacks?

Weka Burgers and Kereru Pie

Sound tasty to you?

The interesting postulation of Roger Beattie, a farmer and conservationist, is that farmed species are not in danger of going the way of the dodo. Quite right. The omnivorous masses will keep the beefy, woolly and dear things alive and kicking for posterity. At least until they end up on your dinner plate.

What does this have to do with our dear little Weka or Kereru?

Weka - Courtesy of Antoine Hubert †

Well, Mr Beattie is suggesting that perhaps our Department of Conservation should consider the possibility of commercializing the world of endangered species in order to expand the population.

It has created a bit of a kerfuffle.  The head of DoC seems to think that Kiwi drumsticks, weka burgers and kereru pie would not be to the taste of the non-avian Kiwis.  In fact there seemed to be a moment where the idea of eating your national symbol was somehow an obscene suggestion to make at all.  Tell that to our cousins across the ditch with their kangaroo burgers !  *

Now, while I wouldn’t necessarily line up for the first taste of Kiwi Wings, I can see that there is a seed of logic in his suggestion.  It would be better for our wildlife if we kept our minds open to any idea that may encourage less dodo-like endings for their species.

I can see that commercializing endangered species is a bit of a weird concept.  No one is going to want to eat the Kauri snail, other than the French, but maybe we could see the odd bit of weka and kereru hitting the fine dining plates of the world.  After all, the weka has been a food source before and which gourmet would turn down the chance at a pigeon the size of your average kereru?

There is nothing quite like hearing and watching the wood pigeons in flight.  They are big, loud and completely mad.  They don’t look aerodynamically capable and they occasionally don’t sound like they’ve figured out the landing on branches skill, but they are also completely wonderful.  If we have to farm some of them for gourmets to delight over in order to ensure their survival then personally I think we should take a long hard look at the possibility and not shrug it off because it’s “not the way we go about conserving things”.

I believe there is certainly a case to examine here.  Would attempting small-scale commercialization of breeding for profit be such a bad thing really?  With the right controls, the right choice of species to begin with, and the right monitoring, perhaps this could be a workable solution to the survival of some native species.

Perhaps in a few decades the multinational dish Big Mac will have been replaced by a local alternative – the Wicked Weka.  And all because we tried to think out of the box to create a plentiful population and a commercially viable breeding stock.  I hope so.

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*admittedly they are considered something of a pest and requiring of culling, unlike the situation with our flightless, defenceless, burrowing, nocturnal avian.

† Antoine Hubert’s Flickr Stream