Spring Baskets and Egg Dying

For the basket: About 4-7 days before you want to use your basket, have your child spoon some soil, and then some wheat berries, and then some more soil into a small dish. Keep watering it a little each day. The wheat berries will shoot up grass. When it's tall enough, place the small dish into a basket.

For the eggs: Cut up a bunch of beets and put in a pot. Cover with water. Boil for an hour. Take the beets out and put raw eggs into the pot. Boil for 20 minutes. For blue, use blueberries (we added blueberry extract, because we wanted them to be really blue), and for yellow, use tumeric.

Easy Play-dough

In a large bowl, mix together 2 cups flour and 1 cup salt. Add 4 tbsp. cream of tartar and 2 tbsp. olive oil. Mix together, then pour 2 cups of hot water on top, and mix. Divide up into a few groups and drop a few drops of different food coloring on each mound. We used the natural food coloring from Whole Foods, so the colors are a little bit muted. I want to try it again using tumeric to make orange, and dye made from boiling beets in a pot for an hour to make the pink. We initially made lavender, pink, yellow, and blue. It became a lesson in color mixing when Isla mixed the yellow and blue and discovered it made green. We'll see how long it "keeps" in baby food glass jars with lids.