Thursday, October 20, 2011

Some recent crafts

I know I have been doing a horrible job keeping up with this blog. Summer got away from us and went by entirely too fast. Now that school has started for both kids (that's right, M is now in preschool, oh my!) and we have settled into our routines, I am starting to add in some fun and educational crafts into our daily/weekly routine. Thanks to my good friend Missy for referring me to the site notimeforflashcards.com. That site is LOADED with awesome ideas! I don't think I will ever need another site to find ideas from again! So here are a few things we have done the last two weeks.


This one I found on no time for flash cards but I changed it a little bit. I cut the pumpkins out of orange construction paper instead of the foam pipe stuff they used. While M was at school I got this ready to go. I drew and cut out 26 pumpkin shapes and labeled each with each letter of the alphabet. Then I drew three green squiggly lines for vines on a piece of paper. I added some leaves and then wrote each letter in random order along the vines. Then M had to match each letter and glue the pumpkin on. This took some time and she didn't have the attention span to do it all at once so we did in three different segments. She is getting better at recognizing her letters but still doesn't know every one. She was still able to do this even if she didn't know the letter name. I used all capital letters but for older kids you could have them match capital letter with the lower case letter. You could also do just lower case letters. I plan to do it again with lower case letters but this time I am going to have her put apples on a tree. It could also be done with leaves. There are tons of possibilities for this one!


Here is a fun one that I did with E. M was really only interested in wadding up all of the pipe cleaners. Take four pipe cleaners of whatever color or combination you like (E loves Halloween colors so they were pretty fitting). Then fold in half to find the middle and tie them in a knot. The knot makes the body. Then bend the legs however you like. You could also wrap another pipe cleaner around the middle to make the body a bit bigger. We chose not to.


M has shown an interest in helping in the kitchen so I decided to make it a weekly activity to let her make/help make a special lunch, something different than sandwiches and leftovers. So yesterday we made homemade pizza with our friend E.


E enjoyed eating the cheese that was left over.


Here is a fun one we did today. I emptied out our paint supply box and put a piece of paper in the bottom. Then I put a few drops of paint on the paper, added some bouncy balls and let M roll them all around through the paint. We started with two colors and four bouncy balls. We added more colors two at a time and eventually four more balls. I would suggest less paint or thicker paper because our paper was a bit wet and ended up folding over a few times. You could also tape the paper down. Since Halloween is coming, it would be fun to make spider webs this way with black paper and white paint. You could also use marbles instead of bouncy balls.


Here is the finished painting drying on a paper bag since the back got paint on it when it folded over.


This last one I only have a picture of the finished product. This one went fast and since I was doing most of the work, I didn't get pictures of the process. That's okay because these were pretty easy and I'm sure you can picture it in your head. I painted M's foot white and then stamped it on black paper. Once it dried we added eyes and cut them out. They are now hanging on the kitchen wall for all to enjoy! I would have liked to use goggly eyes but we didn't have any. As much as I would have loved to make a trip to Hobby Lobby, I decided it was not necessary.

So that is what we have been up to. Hopefully there will be more of these posts in the near future!

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