Knuffle Bunny World Travels

A long time ago before Merry could even speak we saw a Between the Lions show featuring Mo William's book "Knuffle Bunny."

It was so cute we started calling Merry's bunny Knuffle bunny.  Years later we found the actual Knuffle bunny book, and quickly bought it.  Then came "Knuffle Bunny, Too" and finally "Knuffle Bunny Free".  After reading the third book I got an idea.  It started as a small idea and grew into a curriculum.

You see in the third book our heroine Trixie imagines her Knuffle Bunny visiting all the children around the world.  And at the end of the book she gets a letter from Knuffle Bunny, her first pin pal.  Now what better way to introduce a child to the concepts of how big the world is, how differently people live in different places, and how people are all just people, than writing letters to an imaginary girl about the pretend trip  her imaginary bunny is going on.

To start our journey I happened upon a Knuffle Bunny Event Kit.  It's from the Go Mo Grown-up page
there are other cool printable on that page too.  We went through most of the activities on day one but used the Knuffle Bunny from the name tags on our letters.

 We started with where we live and then worked our way out.  First Merry would draw a picture then she would dictate the letter, I would write then she would trace.  And finally she would add Knuffle Bunny to the picture.

We looked at major landmarks along the way.  Our most common way to travel was google image search. Merry would look through the images and pick one she liked to draw.

Here is our board about half way through.  The large Knuffle Bunny is from the same free printable as the smaller Knuffle Bunnies we used on the letters.  By the end of the year Knuffle Bunny has been to 6 of the 7 continents, and we have had fun.  I'm also excited to say this idea will keep going next year when Knuffle Bunny will travel across the USA visiting each of the fifty states.

This was my first totally my own idea curriculum.  I like to mix and match and make things work with my kids but I hadn't taken my own idea and ran with it before.  So I was a bit nervous to blog about it, silly, right.

Paper towel tube dolls

So it took me a bit to finally blog about this activity, which we did for "May the fourth be with you." I had gotten rid of all our toilet paper rolls so had to use the paper towel rolls I had been saving to make kaleidoscopes, this was easier anyways.  First we watched the lego star wars DVD, a family favorite.  Then the kids each picked a character to make.

 All I did was give them a bin of leftover craft supplies from previous activities.

My oldest (8) spent a lot of time on the details, especially the buns.

 They turned out awesome, if I do say so myself.

My younger (6) was more of a big picture girl.

I was very impressed that she drew the bun on the foam shapes.

My nephews (4 and 5) had fun, they really liked the straw sabers.  

 I loved how different they each made their dolls.  I think we make more of these.

Engineering Expo

My husband is weeks away from Graduating with a Bachelors in Civil Engineering.  I am very excited.  He decided to go back to school after our first child was born, now eight very long years later he is finally finishing.  Just thinking about it makes me do a happy dance.

OSU has an Engineering Expo every year so seniors can show off their hard work and the school can show perspective donors how great it is.  Jon's team was one of the teams presenting from his class.  Safe to say I was more excited than he ad the rest of the team were.   

Engineering Expos are basically school science fairs where you don't understand most of what your looking at.  We had fun walking around and making college kids try to explain there projects to grade schoolers.

The gal in the above picture did a great job getting and keeping my daughters attention, she was very animated and proud of her project.

They tried out a dance mat.

 Saw a Hedgehog.

And we got to see all kinds of ROV (remote operated vehicles)

Merry thought it was pretty cool to meet a beaver (of course, she assured me, it wasn't a real beaver, just a person in a beaver costume.  A real beaver that size would be scary.)

 Our favorite booth (besides their daddy's of course) was a tesla coil.  It's a speaker that makes sound using electricity. 

 So after a full day of engineering marvels were my kids impressed, well kinda.  Merry wants to build a robot.  Charry still wants to be a cup cake decorator, but she did have fun.

Here is another shot of us with the beaver.  Random nice thing about the day, we had multiple people offer to take pictures of us so I could be in the shots too.