Creative Family Fun

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Crafts

In Like a Lion

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This cute lion was not the end result I had pictured when we started this craft.

In fact, my original plan was to make suns by finger painting paper plates.

Instead, they turned into lions.

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I gave the girls paper plates and put a glob of yellow and orange paint on each.

I told them to smear it around with their fingers.

They balked at that suggestion

“Too messy,” said AJ. Really?! They love to be messy, but apparently not today.

“I want a paint brush,” said Lizzie. Well, alright, paint brushes it is.

Now that they were happily equipped with paint brushes, they got to work.

They smeared and painted and made pretty orange and yellow paper plates.

I still assumed we were making suns.

After they dried, we got out the scissors and started cutting.

We cut lines around the edge starting at the outer edge up to the flat part of the plate. We cut them about one inch apart all the way around. Then we bent up every other strip.

“I need a black marker,” said Lizzie.

“What for?” I asked.

“It needs a face.”

“Oh, you’re going to give your sun a face. That’s cool”

“No Momma, it’s not a sun. We’re making lions.”

So, we drew the faces and hung our really cool lions up in the window.

Moral of the story: Sometimes your kids have better ideas than you do.

100 Dresses

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Did you ever read the book The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes?

It was a favorite of mine growing up and the idea of all of those drawings has always been appealing to me.

Perhaps that’s why, when Lizzie asked me for something to color, I started drawing dresses.

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It started out innocently enough.

I drew her a few dresses and she went off to color them. When she was finished, she came back for more and then kept coming back.

I think I’m drawing dresses every couple of days now.

I typically draw a couple of dresses in pencil, then go back and trace with a Sharpie.

Then, Lizzie colors them with her markers. I’m not sure why she decided that these should only be colored with markers, but it does make them nice and vibrant.

Now, we’ve got quite a large collection of beautiful dresses. Probably nearing 100 if this pile is any indication.

Now, what should we do with them? Make a display, a scrapbook…. hmmmmm.

What would you do with all of these dresses?

Snowballs Book and Craft

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We found a lot of inspiration in the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.

Lois Ehlert is one of my favorite children’s book illustrators and I’ve been wanting to do a craft based on her illustrations. Snowballs was the perfect choice of book.

The book tells the story of a snowfall and the children who decide to make a family of snow people decorated with found objects. It is full of collage illustrations that inspired us to make our own snowman faces.

Supplies Needed:

Paper plates
Pictures of food
Glue
Cotton swabs for spreading the glue (if desired)

I had a few old cooking magazines that were destined for the recycling bin, so we went through them and cut out pictures of food.

We found fruits, vegetables, grains, and even a few cookies.

If you don’t have any old magazines, check the sales ads in your newspaper or print out some clip art to find your pictures of food.

We propped the book up for inspiration and I let the girls work.

Lizzie was very deliberate in placing her food pictures, since she was trying to make a face. She wanted to make sure she had the perfect eyes, nose, and even cheeks.

AJ, on the other hand, was just having fun gluing. She ended up making a pretty nice food collage. They turned out great!

If you would like more inspiration, check out these Lois Ehlert style snowmen from Teach Preschool.

Kindness Challenge: The Bookmark Project

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When Toddler Approved issued their 100 Acts of Kindness Challenge, we jumped right in.

The challenge is to do 100 Acts of Kindness between January 16 and February 14.

We talked about the challenge and brainstormed different ways to be kind.

We plan on helping pick up toys, saying please and thank you, waving at our neighbors, feeding the birds, sending cards to people we love, hugging each other, and many more acts of kindness.

We talked about places we go to often and how we could be kind there.

One such place is our local library. And this is where we got a little bit sneaky and had a lot of fun!

Bookmarks, we thought, what kid doesn’t like a new bookmark? And wouldn’t it be fun if we hid them in books at the library for kids to find and hopefully be a bit surprised!

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So, we cut strips of paper and got out our stickers and a few fun punches. We decorated and giggled and talked about the kids who might find our bookmarks.

When we were done, I turned them over and wrote “If you found this, please keep and enjoy. Happy Reading!”

When it was time for our weekly library trip, we hid the bookmarks in my purse. If you’re going to do this, you have to be sneaky, right?

We whispered and giggled and talked about the books we were going to put them in. We decided on chapter books, because you need a bookmark to read chapter books.

When we got to the library, we made a bee-line for the chapter books. We pulled them off the shelf one by one and stuck a bookmark in the middle. Will it make someone’s day? I certainly hope so!

What did we learn (other than the fine art of sneakiness) during this process?

We learned it was fun to be kind and it was fun to plan little surprises.

We learned that there are many, many ways to show kindness.

And hopefully, we learned a little bit about loving our fellow human beings.

Have you and your kids performed any acts of kindness lately?

Panda Bear Masks

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Can you guess what she is?

A panda bear, of course!

When we learn about other countries, we always include animals.

And, since we are talking about China this week, learning about pandas was the obvious choice.

While we were learning all sorts of fun facts, we also made panda masks so we could pretend to be panda bears.

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Supplies Needed:

Paper plates (I pre-cut the eye holes in the plates)
Scissors
Black paint
Black construction paper
Glue

We had a wonderful book, Giant Pandas by Gail Gibbons, to use as inspiration.

After talking a bit about the different features of a panda, the girls got to work painting around the eyes and adding a nose and mouth.

I had also pre-cut some ears out of black construction paper that the girls glued on their masks.

Here are the finished masks!

Lizzie added black all around the edge of the plate because the panda pictures we were looking at had black necks and shoulders.

They turned out great and Lizzie has been telling everyone that pandas eat a lot of bamboo!

What have you and your kids been crafting lately?