Having You Tube at our fingertips online is such a great resource. You can see just about anything! Music, TV shows, people doing stupid things, and tons of how-to videos. Today’s post sends you over there to check out the video by Randy Comer, showing you how to fuse glass. This video provides some really cool information such as cutting glass, assembling it for a firing, a quick bit about pattern bars, using all the different components that were previously made to assemble a new piece and slumping that piece once it’s been fired. He also gets into why he would fire something more than once, which was after he fired a piece that was draped and then slumped to change the piece a bit. Randy is very good at conveying this information and I think you can get a lot from this. He doesn’t get into actual temperatures that he’s firing at or firing schedules, so I do recommend maybe checking out some other videos on You Tube to find out other information. But do remember that firing schedules for pieces do change and are not the same for every project.
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Strawberry Activities for Kids
Strawberry season has already come and gone where I live, but I still think of strawberries as being a transition between spring and summer. They’re fun to talk about and explore any time of year, but if strawberries are in season or accessible where you live, so much the better because you can add picking strawberries or making strawberry jam to your activity list.
First let’s talk about the parts of a strawberry plant with this printable from Affordable Homeschooling. You can talk about how strawberries are unusual because their seeds are on the outside of the fruit. And Homeschool Preschool has a printable showing the life cycle of the strawberry from seedling to plant to fruit to seeds.
Simple Creative Learning has a printable pack that includes labeling the parts of the plant, a life cycle page, letter tracing, pattern recognition, three part cards, counting activities and more, as well as a printable mini book kids can color.
3 Boys and a Dog also has a printable activity set with a strawberry theme that includes shapes, writing activities and letter matching, to name a few. You can grab a strawberry letter recognition activity from ABCs of Literacy. This one includes printable strawberry shapes with upper and lower case letters and recording sheets to mark upper and lowercase letters and write letters.
For older kids, print out the free strawberry notebooking pages from Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool Plus, which include information about different varieties of strawberries, plant diseases and the history and lore surrounding strawberries. The site also has information on the life cycle of a strawberry and an activity to hand sew a strawberry out of felt.
Speaking of older kids, another fun strawberry project is extracting the DNA from a strawberry, which you can do with this tutorial from the National Human Genome Research Institute.
How about some strawberry crafts? Work on scissors skills with the strawberry printable craft from Krokotak, or print a strawberry shape using bubble wrap with this idea from In the Playroom. Inspire the Mom has a few strawberry crafts just for preschoolers and early elementary (love this mosaic one you could also do by hunting down the color red in magazines and using different kinds of paper).
And of course some sensory fun is always in order. Try the strawberry play dough made with Jello from 123 Homeschool 4 Me, or make your own freezer jam with this classic recipe from Betty Crocker.
You might already have some strawberry themed books on your shelf, but I also found Spring is for Strawberries by Katherine Pryor with illustrations by Polina Gortman (hardcover, 32 pages, published 2023 by Schiffer Kids, suggested retail price $16.99), which is a celebration of seasonal produce throughout the year (only one page features strawberries, but it’s still a cute book about the seasons). This is a great one for families that love the local farmer’s market.
Summer Worksheets with a Fruity Twist