Happy May Day!

...after the fact, of course.

In honor of May Day it rained. And so, thought I, what better day to make that rain stick that I've had planned for a while now? None, was my answer.

I've been trying to do more hands on activities with the boys. They keep themselves entertained wonderfully, but often the activities they choose are less than desirable. Also, I'm trying to incorporated these activities because I am planning on doing a at-home, coopt type pre-school thing after the summer. Something along the lines of a Montessori pre-school, but we won't have to take out a loan to do it. Before I offend someone, I'd like to state that I have nothing against sending your kids to preschool. At all. I think it's spiffy if you can afford to do it. But, as I may have mentioned before, things are a little pricey here. And I've always thought, with most things in life you don't need to invest a lot of money if you are willing to invest your time. And I'm applying this to the boys. Hopefully it will pan out. Also, I'm definitely open to any ideas anyone has about more play/learning projects for us, so let me know if you've got them.

And we move on.

I read about making your own rain sticks out of mailing tubes one day and the next I found a badmitton birdie tube out in the recycling (right on the top, by the way, I wasn't rooting around in there or anything) (Not that I'm not capable of it).

What we started out with

My original plan was to help the boys to use the hammer. I tried this with Ben. Then I realized that I had been on crack and went and found the little mallet in the boy's toy stash. Success reigned and eyeballs stayed in sockets.

I had marked several spots on the tube for the nails, but we got pretty liberal with our placing of the nails. I got the nail started with the hammer and then the boys would finish up with the mallet.

Ben, whistling "If I had a hammer..."

Sam hammering in the nails.

Wow. Look at that cute little body.

After we got all the nails in Sam poured in some little white beans. It didn't quite make the sound I wanted, so I dumped those into a bowl and got some bigger navy beans. Ben poured those in.

We ended up dumping them out and pouring them back in several times with a mixture of big and small beans. Then I sealed up the ends and Sam and I wrapped up the tube with electrical tape to keep the nails from slipping out in case of overuse.

Ben taking his turn pouring in the beans.

Then we moved on to playing with the rain stick, playing around with the beans and pouring them in and out of bowls. I think Dr. Montessori would be fairly pleased.

And don't worry, that one bean that Ben stuck up his nose came out without too much trouble. (**Mental Note** - Use the bigger beans for these projects).