Friday, October 9, 2009

Fairy and Gnome Homes

Last month Dan and I coordinated some children's workshops for a spiritual retreat that we took up in the Sierra's. We had such a great time! I must say, we only were able to attend one of the adult workshops (that dealt with Chakric meditation and some inner-child work...which was actually pretty heavy stuff), but it was a great one! Since we headed up the children's workshops, the entire retreat was very refreshing for us. The schedule's for the weekend left plenty of time for people to relax. Nice mountain air, late night and early morning swims...ahhh! I could really use another retreat about now-lol!

There were a total of 3 workshops that we personally ran out of the 4. We started the day with some yoga for the kids. Instead of doing our sun salutations, we used the "Yoga Planet" deck from Barefoot Books. We chose a few of the cards from each element to work on with the children, which was a lot of fun for them since some were in game form. As you can see...we had a few of our "mountain friends" watching....


Our second workshop was really the one I enjoyed the most. We did a "Fairy and Gnome Home-Building Creativity & Imagination" workshop. It was fun to see the different style of homes that everyone worked on.
Here we have "Pine Cone Palace"...


Next we had a gnome home, which I thought was really interesting. We had a 6th grader working on this one and she decided to recycle a lot of different manmade items that she found in the woods to create balconies on the tree and as seen here, a slide! It really made me happy that she had thought to do that.


Our last workshop was a nice "Nature Walk" after lunch.

Now even though it was a "Spiritual Retreat", it was really for the adults. It was requested that I come up with crafts or things to keep the children busy, while the parents had their workshops. Really though, I think we had more fun with the children's workshops than the adults did at their own-lol! Not as though their workshops were necessarily suppose to be fun, but I had a few ask if they could come along and build fairy homes with us! We did enjoy our time up there. What a great way to end our summer and the kids had a blast!


2 comments:

  1. What a wonderful retreat! The fairy/gnome home idea sounds like a lot of fun. Beautiful pics. :)

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  2. The retreat sounds like great fun and what wonderful activities you arranged.

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