I was excited to get back to particpating in the Unplugged Project this week, after last week’s failure….

But I have to admit, I did kind of have a rough time coming up with a project for fruit.  Normally at this time of year we would be doing all kinds of fabulous fall crafts themed around apples.  That’s one of my favorite things when the season starts to change.

Sadly, my parents trees did not have any fruit this year, and I don’t know anyone else locally who grows apples.  So I spent most of my week pouting over our apple drought this year.  And moping about the fact that we already did a perfectly glorious fruit project a couple months ago.

FINALLY, I got inspired.

We’ve been studying Indians all week for Miss A’s history (I know that’s not the PC term, but all of the books we’ve been reading say Indians, so that’s what I’m saying).  Anyway, I decided to totally wing it with this project, which is VERY unusual for me.  I apologize in advance if this is horrifying to any history buffs who know more than I do.  I kind of just made it up and hoped it was somewhat acurate.

We started with about a half a bag of freezer burned frozen raspberries.

I let them thaw.

Then the girls and I had a chat about how the indians didn’t have stores, and therefore did not have things like paint.  Earlier in the week we learned about teepees and they saw pictures of decorated ones, so I explained that the indians used plants, and fruit (?) to make their own paints.

I instructed them on how to smash their fruit with a rock to make the “paint”.

Then we finger painted designs onto construction paper.

It was very messy, but they had a lot of fun, and it smelled really good.

(I realized only after I had uploaded the pictures onto my computer how…um….gory they are.  Sorry about that.  Not intended, and I promise it’s all raspberries.)

So it was a fun (hopefully not too inaccurate) project, and I was really happy we were able to tie it in with school, because that seems to be the only way we accomplish anything lately.

Go check out more fruity projects here.