Welcome to Building with Rainbows! I’m Emily, the mama behind the blog. My two kids, husband and I have a lot of fun playing, building, reading and exploring together. With the advent of Covid-19, our at-home activities became a bigger part of our daily life, and I decided to start this blog to share our play, learning, and adventures.
The big kid (age 9) is super analytical and a voracious reader. When he reads, he reaches for facts, when he builds he loves buildings with features like trap doors.The younger kid (age 6) is my storyteller–she can make any build come alive and weaves elaborate stories that draw in her brother. Because so many of the things I talk about here with kids are age specific, but kids keep growing, I’ll be referring to the kids by their initial and age–today they’re E9 and E6–this way a post written in the past will still be reasonably up-to-date with age recommendations.
Together, they can play for hours in the worlds they build, and I can happily watch them for just as long! When they’re not building and playing in small world play, we read together, work in the community garden and and on weekends when we can we love to head for the mountains to hike (looking forward to this again!).
On Saturday mornings, the kids get a bit of highly coveted time playing Minecraft with Dad, and I love taking that bit of time myself to play and build something all to my own specifications–who says mama can’t play too? Often its marble runs built from blocks (I post here when it is @buildingwithrainbows) –I really do love building them with the kids, but getting to do it input-free is fun too sometimes.
Like many families we were surprised to start doing School at Home this past March, and while it brought its own set of challenges, I have absolutely loved all the new time with my kids. Schooling has its moments of resistance, but it also has amazing times when we get to walk away from the desk, and read together, and then build something to illustrate what we’ve been reading. I’ve really enjoyed getting to help the kids focus in their own interest areas, and take their own pace to have time to understand things fully.
I’d love to use this space to share some of our building fun, share some of the stuff we’ve learned about wood toys, and discus books for kids and also our adventures learning going forward. I hope you enjoy joining us, and would love to hear about your own experiences as we go!
–Emily