Imagine Childhood : Magic & Memories That Last a Lifetime

... giveaway forum: fairy garden kit

With Mother's Day just around the corner, we thought it would be the perfect time for a Fairy Garden Kit giveaway! Featured in the current Mothering Magazine's "Strokes of Genius" section, this wonderful kit comes with everything you need to start your very own fairy garden, and we'll even throw in a beautiful handmade fairy!

Giveaway includes: 1 Planting Box 1 Wooden Base (lid) 1 Bag of Potting Soil 1 Piece of Flagstone 1 Arbor 1 Bench 1 Birdhouse One handmade felt flower fairy A list of plant suggestions and Fairy Dust

To enter the giveaway, simply respond to the forum topic in the comments for this post. Forum topic: What do you love about being a mom, or about the moms in your life? The giveaway will close next Wednesday May 6th at 11:59pm MST and the winner (picked by a random number generator) will be announced Thursday May 7th! Good Luck!

... barn stories: native gardening

When we moved to the land I was amazed a the diversity of plant life on such an arid spot.   The land responded immediately to the weather conditions (drought = barren, lots of rain = paradise of wildflowers), all to disappear and reappear with years in between and no intervention from me. I also became very aware that just walking on the land during a drought could destroy the future year's glory.  Building a home here left a scar even if we tried to keep it small. To restore the destroyed spaces was almost impossible since the system was open to foreign weeds and much more.  It really does take thousands of years or more to create the bio-diversity seen on undisturbed land.


Tread lightly...


My garden is a native garden in process.  It changes each year.  I transplant in the spring on the one or two days the conditions are right - cool, damp and cloudy - and if I miss the day, generally the transplants do not survive.


The birds are also architects of the garden bringing each year unknown surprises. Bunnies, birds, snakes, lizards, the toads and the bees all find a home there with the dogs running freely through. Enjoy this Mother's Day with a day of gardening with your little ones, because before you know it they will be gardening on their own.

... looking up

Spring means that the nights are getting warmer and clearer, the perfect time to take a step outside and look up…what do you see?


Maybe it's a lion or an ancient warrior... or a big bear?  Or maybe, it's something that has never been seen before... Whatever you find, the spring skies offer wonderful stories and scientific exploration for everyone in the family.  So if you have a moment one of these evenings, take a star walk and explore the galaxies right above your head. If you would like to know exactly what you are looking at there are some amazing free down-loadable star charts for the northern, equatorial, and southern hemispheres here (they even come in multiple languages!... just scroll down the page a bit).  And if you'd like a few books to keep on hand this one and this one are must haves. And for those nights where the clouds make stargazing difficult, try making one of these star light flashlights to tell bedtime stories by. Happy stargazing!

... nature walk: maui, hawaii

This week's wonderful Nature Walk comes to us from Maui, Hawaii where Theresa and her family went on some amazing adventures.  Navigating through a forest to a waterfall, and along sandy beaches, they discovered beautiful flowers and sea treasures along the way. Thank you Theresa for sharing!

If you would like to contribute to our weekly Nature Walk series, you can learn more about submitting photos here, or you can also visit our new Nature Walk Group Pool on Flickr to add your adventures to the collection.

Thanks again Theresa for Sharing!

 

... feeling your way through

Because of airplanes and satellites, we can see the detailed geography of the world from a “birds-eye-view” perspective.  Like puzzle pieces, each continent, country and state fits together in it’s right place.  Borders and coasts are exactly replicated in lines and dots on the printed page or images on the screen.  From this vantage point it’s easy to see how to get from one spot on the globe to another and with technology like Google Maps and GPS in-car navigation, you can have the directions laid out turn by turn and even dictated to you in a comforting English accent (or French or American, or whatever else suits your fancy...) while you drive.

Now imagine navigating through the water in a kayak in the dark without any of these tools.  How would you find your way?  Perhaps you would use a three dimensional tactile map like the Inuit people did.  Maps like this one (a beautiful carving of the shores of Greenland) aided their travels. Made from wood, the contours of a coastline were replicated in the points and angles of the sides of the carving while the slope of the landscape was revealed within the relief.  While tracing the object with their hands, they would travel from point to point. This perspective and relationship to geography is pretty amazing, and something that we don’t often think of when using maps on a daily basis... that before we could simply pull up a picture of a map, we had to travel... we had to understand the landscape through our feet, our eyes and our hands.

Although wood carving is usually not the most suitable activity for younger children, carving soap (easily done with a butter knife, and even sometimes with a plastic utensil) can be a great alternative.  By making their own tactile maps after the Inuit versions, kids can have a physical record of their daily explorations.

Whether of the edge of a field at the park, or the contours of a lake, making these maps can be a great opportunity to practice translating shapes and contours into physical objects, while learning a little about another culture in the process.


After you're done you can use the soap maps for bathtime fun.  Just don't forget to bring along a little kayak too.

Happy mapmaking!