What Inspires Your Work?

As I wander the World Wide Web looking at the interesting work of all of the different glass artists out there I wonder what inspires them and motivates their work. For myself it can be a mood or color or sometimes the prodding of a special order or upcoming show. A deadline is very motivating and gets the creative juices flowing. Where do you get your inspiration?

For the last glass show I participated in my motivation and inspiration was the glass I had fallen madly in love with. Some of you may know it…Double Helix Aurae and Kronos and Gaia. So beautiful! When properly worked in the flame it gets the loveliest metallic sheen to it. The jewelry I made with those beads were a hit and I couldn’t be happier. The beads shown below are made with Triton. I think I love this glass the best…or is it Aurae I love more? It’s all wonderful!

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I’m curious about what inspires your work. Is it the sunset you saw the other evening? How about the smell of some flowers you encountered on a walk in the park? Let me know. For the first five inspirational comments I’ll send you a set of the very glass beads that have been firing up my creative juices for the past couple of months. Send me your address to my email at [email protected] and I’ll get them right out to you. Have a great day! Be inspired!

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?