Karen's Clan

Seeing as May is the month in which Moms are celebrated, it seemed only fitting to me to celebrate moms at Wonder Workshops too!

So we began by talking about our moms, and what we loved about them, what made us feel full of wonder when we thought about them. After some serious silent pondering, a few offered up , "Auntie Karen, that's too hard, we think everything is wonderful about her!" Some sweet ones mentioned how much they loved being cuddled and helped close, or there moms laying with them at night before they got into bed...

Then I told them that although human mothers were completely full of wonder, I had become amazed at how amazing animal mothers were. and so we embarked at looking at what it took to become a mother, the gestation periods  of animals compared to a human mother. I had marked each animal and the length of their gestation period in days on pieces pf paper, which each child had to draw out of a hat and keep secret! They then had to break down the days into hundreds, tens and ones, and then had to build the number using the pieces of paper I had prepared. (I had worked out a fairly accurate scale with the strips of paper I had cut). Once they had built it, we stood back and looked at each one and tried to guess what the animal was!

Then we got to work on the serious business of the day - I had loved these heart garlands (excellent tutorial, adn thankfully the great photos mean it doesn't matter if you can't speak the Asian language!) I had seen on Pinterest, and so gathered the supplies and we got to work. I was so impressed with how well the kids, did, considering many of them had never touched a sewing machine before! And I'm even further impressed that I only had one bird's nest in my machine to untangle after 7 kids had sewed! Whilst some were sewing, others were decorating their brown paper bags which were going to carry the Mother's Day gift home in secret! Thankfully, we finished it before any mom's returned!







And finally, a bit of drama. Children got to pick an animal picture from my hand (I used the amazing resources at Animal Planet and Time Photos), show it to the others, listen to the amazing way in which it mothered, and then, they had to act like that animal! It provided much amusement at the end of the day!

Can you tell the boys much preferred the drama to the sewing?  :)

Aragorn was being a killer whale eating the "seals"!

Hearts of wonder!