Page 26 June 2014 Imagination destination takes kids all over the world By Lisa Weisenburger Sometimes you don’t have to leave the house to get away. In this month’s Kid’s Corner, we turn the air conditioning down, fill the blender with a little fruit, coconut water and lots of ice, dial up some Jimmy Buffett and escape to a far off land. At the Weisenburger home, we call this the Imagination Destination. When my older boys were young we went to some pretty fantastic places in the summer. We escaped. We went to the rainforest and the jungle. Last summer we even went to outer space. But in reality, we never left our dining room table! In my quest to bridge academic years, each summer excursion has a little lesson with math, science, reading, and of course writing in the travel log. To avoid any initial arguments, I pick the destination. I gather all the books from the kid’s shelves and even my own that remotely relate to the place we’ll go. I spend some time on the Internet with my printer close at hand and collect the toys and parts of games sets and play sets that are in some way connected to our destination. Every single item is then piled on the dining room table. From there we let our imaginations drift to our destination...a little bit...almost every day of the long hot summer. This summer we are off discovering ponds, learning everything we can about that microcosm. My online research revealed hundreds of free reproducible goodies connected to ponds, their plants and animals, and their entire ecosystem. A frog life cycle worksheet and booklets that the kids can color, cut and assemble are also great parts of this lesson. We will Elegance at Andorra 3437 E. Lions Street Isabel Schmidtka Bacon 480-620-3199 azlistinglady@gmail.com Call me today for a private showing Featuring over 3400 sqft., 5 bedrooms, 51/2 baths. Low maintenance yard with heated pool/spa, built-in BBQ and outdoor fireplace. Gourmet kitchen with gas range, double ovens and granite counters. Great room with formal dining, gas fireplace and french doors. Couples retreat complete with jetted tub and two spacious closets. Gated community in the sought after Biltmore area. Offered at $865,000. MLS # 5092249 10601 N. Hayden Rd, Ste I-100, Scottsdale AZ 85260 read Frog and Toad, Froggie Learns to Swim, and The Red-Eyed Tree Frog . I am finally putting all those Scholastic book orders to excellent use I found directions for little origami jumping frogs and we have now spent hours folding and creasing and coloring and then having hopping contests. We have measured ten consecutive hops and figured out the average distance an origami frog can hop. Not a lot, by the way. We mixed all of our left over green paints (because I didn’t have enough of any one shade) and created our own special shade of green lily pad. And to add a few pink flowers to the lily pads, we used the leftover pink tissue paper from Valentine’s Day and made petite paper flowers to attach with simple white school glue. After creating the separate parts of a pond, it was clear to me that we needed to pull it all together. I wish you could’ve seen the look on my six-year-old’s face when I said, “Come on, let’s paint the windows blue and pretend we’re IN the pond!” I did mix a little dishwashing liquid into the paint in hopes that at the end of the summer the paint is easier to remove, but I will worry about that in August. We put a tree on the edge of the pond made of brown craft paper and used recycled magazine pages for a leaf here and there. We have marsh grass made of leftover scrapbook paper and Easter basket filler. So far, my son’s favorite thing, besides painting the windows blue, has been making butterflies and dragonflies out of random plastic utensils. We even found a use for the plastic flies and spider rings that were lurking at the bottom of the toy box and played a toss game into the mouth of an empty oatmeal container “frog.” Every fulfilling academic experience culminates with a field trip. Did you know A summer lesson can be disguised as fun through art and travel. • One plastic spoon • Two plastic knives • Googly eyes or sharpie • Spray paint • Glue gun Spray paint the knife “wings” your color of choice and do the same with the spoon “body.” With low temp glue gun, glue wings crisscrossed onto the spoon. Add eyes and decorate. WHAT YOU WILL NEED: Knife Dragonfly Continued on page 27

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