Crafts Archives - Page 18 of 19

Read.Explore.Learn.- A Present for Mom

May 11, 2012 By Deirdre

Welcome to Read.Explore.Learn.! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing ways you have learned with and explored books.

Steps:

Link your activity below.

Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

Present for Mom

A Present for Mom by Vivian French is a sweet story about a little boy named Stanley. Stanley can’t figure out what to give his mom for Mother’s Day.

Stanley’s siblings have all figured out what to do and when Stanley tries to replicate what they are doing his version of the idea falls flat.

After tossing and turning the night before Mother’s Day, he wakes up with the perfect idea. It really is perfect. Stanley gives his mom a box filled with his kisses. His siblings think the box is empty, but his mom knows it is filled with love.

This is such a wonderful book. We enjoyed seeing Stanley try to find a gift for his mom. JDaniel loves Stanley’s idea. I think I have a box of kisses arriving soon.

Present for Mom Book Extension Ideas

Let me start by saying this has been a crazy week at our house. We did a few crafts and activities that I have mentioned on the blog already or on Quirky Momma ( I have become a weekly contributor there.). We did a few things that I haven’t shared too.

Mother’s Day Breakfast Sundae

JDaniel and I did a trial run of the breakfast sundae I want him to create with my husband on Sunday. This Mother’s Day Breakfast Sundae is really delicious and simple. Yogurt and toppings in a waffle cone bowl will be delicious!

Mother’s Day Pillow

JDaniel and I made this simple Mother’s Day pillow using shelf liner. It is going to be given to the lady across the street. She lost her one and only child a few years ago and I thought it would be great to give her a Mother’s Day gift.

Mother’s Day Poem and Fingerprint Mat

A simple $3 frame with a mat from a big box store were the perfect canvas for JDaniel to place his fingerprints on. A wonderful poem placed in the frame created a wonderful Mother’s Day gift for my mother-in-law.

Handprint Magnet

Two handprints glued to clothes pin with magnets on the back is the gift my mom will be receiving from JDaniel. We had fun selecting the paper for the handprints.

What have you been working on this week?

Read.Explore.Learn.- Tweak Tweak (An Elephant with Many Questions)

May 4, 2012 By Deirdre

Steps:

Link your activity below.

Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. the badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

The little elephant in the book Tweak Tweak by Eve Bunting reminds me of JDaniel. His mama tells her to tweak her tail when she has a question and just like my guy she is filled with questions.

Does she want to know what the frog is doing? She is jumping says his mom. The little elephant wants to know if she can jump. Her mom tells her that she can’t but, she can stomp.

As she goes on her walk with her mom she wants to know if she can do the same things monkeys and many other animals can do. Each time her mom points out that he can’t do what they can, but she can do special things that elephants can do.

Her mom also tells her she can walk with her mom, ask questions and learn. Oh! and remember the way home.

What did we do to extend concepts from the book?

Elephant Puppet for Retelling

An old cd with felt ears and wiggling eyes makes a perfect elephant puppet. After reading Tweak Tweak, JDaniel stuck his finger through the hole in the center of the cd to add a trunk to the puppet.

Read.Explore.Learn.- Tweak Tweak (An Elephant with Many Questions)

This is so much fun to play with!

It was a lot of fun to watch the elephant’s nose wiggle up and down while he retold the story. I like pretending to be the elephant too.

Elephant Foot Letter Searching

JDaniel used this elephant’s foot to search for letters in his favorite book.

The toilet paper tube was really too large for isolating letters. I will need to think of a smaller tube for this activity.

Sandpaper and Yarn Letter Practice

JDaniel had fun trying to place pieces of yarn onto sandpaper with the letters of the alphabet written on them.

Here is the E for the elephant he used.

5 Crafts Made of Recycled Materials

April 21, 2012 By Deirdre

When it comes time to craft and create, one of the best places to find inspiration is to go through your recycling bin. It is filled with cardboard boxes, soda or water bottles, egg cartons, and so much more.

I thought I would share with you some of the crafts JDaniel and I have created using recycled materials.

Soda Bottle Flower

This flower made of the bottom third of a soda bottle, muffin tin liners, a bottle cap and straw was easy to make and looks great with light streaming from behind it.

You may be thinking that you don’t remember seeing this flower featured here before and you would be right. I shared it on a guest post I did for Childhood Beckons. You can visit Childhood Beckons to see how to make this fun flower step by step.

Rained on Pictures Collage

How did we make the raindrop collage? Magazine pictures were cut and glued onto blue construction paper. Then JDaniel used a blue marker to create the raindrops over the collage.

Cardboard Garbage Truck

This garbage truck was created to go along with the book the Grandma Drove Garbage Truck, a book I featured in a Read.Explore.Learn post.

Egg Carton Lamb

This fun lamb puppet was created using an egg carton for the lamb’s body. He was featured in a guest post I did for Rainbows Within Reach as a part of an egg carton challenge.

Lorax Collage

We had fun searching for yellow and orange pictures to include in this Lorax collage. It was featured on the Quirky Momma Kids Activities Blog. I love that we even found a picture of a Lorax.

What have you been creating with recycled materials? Share your ideas or links to your creation in the comment box below.

A Paper Plate Lion and Lamb

March 3, 2012 By Deirdre

I had a picture of a lion and lamb craft we made on Wednesday post Odds Are JDaniel Will Have Another Lion Birthday. The post was on the weather and it didn’t seem appropriate to share how we made the crafts. Let me share with you know how we made the paper plate lion and lamb.

Today I wanted to share how we made each of these really easy paper plate crafts.

Let’s start with the lion.

Supplies:

White paper plate

Yellow yarn

Brown Buttons (2)

Black Construction Paper

Glue

Needle with a large eye whole

Hole punch

Directions:

1. Punch a ring of holes on the outside edge of the plate.

2. Punch a ring of holes on the inside edge of the plate or snip small holes with scissors.

3. Weave the yarn up and down diagonally from an outside ring hole to an inside one clockwise.

4. Do the same type of weaving counterclockwise around the plate.

5. Sew connecting stitches in the inside ring.

6. Stitch the two-button into place.

7. Cut a triangular nose and curved mouthpieces out of black construction paper.

8. Glue the nose and mouth on.

Now let’s move on to the lamb.

Supplies:

Black paper plate

Blue construction paper

White hole reinforcement rings

Directions:

1. Trace a hand onto a black paper plate.

2. Place white hole reinforcement rings all over the palm of the hand and a few on the fingers.

3. Place a small blue construction paper circle on the thumb for the lamb’s eye.

I think both of these crafts are great ways to welcome the month of March. You will find more art projects on my Crafts for Kids board on Pinterest.

Update: Both of lion and the lamb paper plate crafts have been updated. You will check out the updated crafts on the Lion and Lamb Paper Plate Craft post. The lion craft is similar. The lion craft is totally new. I think you will like both of them.

Act of Kindness Project- Kindness to Siblings or Those You Love Like Them

February 15, 2012 By Deirdre

Toddler Approved is hosting a wonderful project called the 100 Acts of Kindness Project. I love the idea of JDaniel and I doing things for others between Jan. 15th and Valentine’s Day. Each week she puts up a challenge for you to complete as some of your 100 Acts of Kindness.

This week’s challenge was to give kindness to siblings. JDaniel doesn’t have siblings. There are times when he has said he would love to have a younger brother or sister to play with. There are times when I wish we had given him a sibling but, that wasn’t meant to be.

JDaniel asked me about why many of his friends and relatives have siblings and he doesn’t last fall. I tried to explain why we only have him. He seems to understand why.

JDaniel decided after that conversation that he has been given something just as special. He informed me that he was given friends and cousins to love just like brothers and sisters. Friends are welcomed with hugs. Cousins are talked about often. JDaniel truly cares deeply for these surrogate siblings. They are a very special part of his life.

When it came to this challenge, JDaniel came up with what he wanted to do all by himself. He wanted to make Valentine’s Day cards for his friends using the salad spinner just the way we made the cards we gave to his teachers in the first Acts of Kindness Challenge. He loves pushing down on the salad spinner to make the watered-down tempera paint fly.

While I cut the paper into card-size pieces and watered down the paint, he gathered the salad spinner and a golf ball. Once everything was ready he wanted to do all the creating himself. He put the card stock into the salad spinner and place the golf ball in. The paint had to be dumped in without any help and of course, the spinner had to be spun by him alone.

When the cards were done, we laid them out to dry before adding felt sticker hearts to them. He was thrilled with the results and couldn’t wait to share his gifts of brotherly love with his friends.

If you too have an only child, I hope you will find surrogate siblings for them. It is not just like having a sibling, but it does teach them to learn to get along with and care for others. It would be an act of kindness for them.

This post is linked to Mrs. Matlock’s AlphaThursday.

Acts of Kindness- Giving to the World Through Missions

February 11, 2012 By Deirdre

Toddler Approved is hosting a wonderful project called the 100 Acts of Kindness Project. I love the idea of JDaniel and I doing things for others between Jan. 15th and Valentine’s Day.Each week she puts up a challenge for you to complete as some of your 100 Acts of Kindness.

This week’s challenge was to give to world. Our church is hosting its missions conference this week. How wonderful that it is being held during Toddler Approved’s give to the world challenge.

Giving a Buffet Item to an International Dinner

The missions conference started with an international dinner in the fellowship hall. The Sunday school class my husband and I belong to was to bring something from the Orient. I decided to make something quick and easy from the frozen food section at Aldi. Our dish is shrimp-fried rice that was defrosted and heated up on our very own stove.

Once we got there JDaniel and I had fun checking out all the foods that people had brought to share and deciding what to put on our plates. My husband had volunteered to work the book table and so we saved him a place at the table but, didn’t wait for him to come to dig into the treasures we had found.

I took this picture when we dropped off our food. The table couldn’t be seen after people added their food to the table and started to fill their plates.

Learning About Other Cultures and Crafting

JDaniel loved exploring the tables set up by the various missionaries.

The Sunday school director decided that it would be fun for the children to create cards and gift for the missionaries. I volunteered to be downstairs with JDaniel’s class during the opening session of the missions conference so, I got to help make fun things too.

Read.Explore.Learn.- Curious George and Valentine’s Day Flowers

February 10, 2012 By Deirdre

Welcome to Read.Explore.Learn.! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing the ways you have learned with and explored books.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

There is just something wonderful about Curious George! We love him at our house. We loved Happy Valentine’s Day George too.

Curious George decides to celebrate Valentine’s in a big way for those he carries for and they with him. There is crazy cooking. There is wild decorating. There is card making with a small mess.

What did we do?

Craft- Flower Arrangement

How did I make it?

Materials:

Detergent bottle top
Decorations
Green Pipe cleaners
Buttons
Hearts cut out of tag board with holes punched at the narrow end
Styrofoam ball

Directions:

1. Decorate the outside of the detergent bottle cap.

2. Pull a pipe cleaner up through the top of a button so that it extends about three inches

3. Beneath the button push 5 hearts onto the pipe cleaner.

4. Pull the top end of the pipe cleaner back through one of the remaining holes in the bottom.

5. Fan out the hearts into petals around the button.

6. Twist the end of the pipe cleaner you pulled through around the long end of the pipe cleaner.

7. Twist the end tight enough to hold the heart in places.

8. Push the flower into the styrofoam ball.

9. Place the styrofoam fall into the detergent lid.

Read.Explore.Learn.-Valentine’s Day

February 3, 2012 By Deirdre

I look forward to seeing the ways you have learned with and explored books.

Steps:

- Link your activity below.

- Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. the badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

- Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

- If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

The little girl named Cornelia Augusta in The Day It Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond is amazing. She takes to the time collect hearts that rain down one day and she uses them to create wonderful valentines for each of her friends.

I love how Cornelia Augusta takes the time to send cards to the people she cares about not only the year hearts rained down but, every year after that.

The children in Anne Rockwell’s Valentine’s Day create wonderful valentines for a classmate that has moved far away. Each child decorates their card with a memory they have that is tied to the student.

What a wonderful way to share memories with a friend and let them know they are important.

I loved getting to see what each child picked and how they decorate their card to represent their memory.

What did we do?

Card Making

I cut six pink and two green hearts out of the tag board. JDaniel was able to push the pink heats up the lollipop stick to create a petal effect.

We added the green hearts as leaves with a Valentine message on the largest leaf.

This lollipop man is so easy to make. You just cut four small slits in the old playing card for the red pipe cleaner through. A simple heart is a head and a lollipop is placed in one of the hands.

Here are some of the cards we decorated. I colored in the robot and JDaniel put stickers around the heart on these cards.

Hearts 4 Kids

Our local radio station His Radio is sponsoring a program called Hearts 4 Kids. We sent our cards that didn’t have candy to that project. The project is open until Feb. 6th at midnight. .

Surprise a Neighbor

We took the cards with candy to the older lady that lives next door.

Read.Explore.Learn.- Don’t Worry Douglas Craft

January 6, 2012 By Deirdre

I look forward to seeing ways you have learned with and explored books.

Steps:

- Link your activity below.

- Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

- Please try to visit at least three of the other people who have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

- If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

This week we read the book Don’t Worry Douglas! is given a new knit hat by his dad and he is asked to be careful with it. Douglas barely makes it out of the house when his hat snags on a tree and is destroyed. His hat is unraveled and he doesn’t want to tell his dad. David Melling’s Douglas is a lot like a lot of children who are afraid to tell their parents when they have done things wrong.

Douglas tries to seek advice on how to fix his hat from his friends. Most of them would just like the yarn for their homes but, they do try and tell him to talk to his dad.

In the end, Douglas does talk to his dad and his dad does understand. He does remind Douglas to be careful with the replacement hat he gives him right off his head.

Of course, he reminded him of that with the first hat too.

I love the reminders in this book to listen and be willing to share when mistakes happen. JDaniel and I talked about both of these concepts after reading the book.

What did we do?

Craft a Bear and a Mom Lesson

This craft was more about me listening than JDaniel painting his Don’t Worry Douglas! bear.

I cut out a bear out of a brown paper grocery bag and set out brown paint with a sponge to paint it.

JDaniel told me that he didn’t want Douglas to be brown. He wanted him to be blue, green, and black.

I thought about forcing him to paint him brown so that I could have a brown bear for this post and decided that it wasn’t that important. What was important was to listen to what he wanted to do!

When he had finished painting, I said it was time to add eyes, a nose, and a mouth. JDaniel declared the project as done. I said that it would be fine with me.

When he left the room, I seriously thought about adding facial features to the bear. Then I thought about what I would be saying to him about listening. If I had added facial features I might have been telling him that it wasn’t okay and that I had to sneak in a face to have it be right. That is not a lesson I want him to learn.

Sometimes crafts may need to be finished the way I see them. This craft did not have to be that way.

If you like this bear craft, here are some more bear activities.

Printable Bear About Colors Activities

Color Bear Bingo Printables

Bear Shape Activity

Read.Explore.Learn.-Special Christmas Trees

December 16, 2011 By Deirdre

Welcome to Read.Explore.Learn.! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing ways you have learned with and explored books.

Steps:

- Link your activity below.

- Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.

- Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

- If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

I am featuring two very special Christmas books this week about Christmas trees. I love them both.

The first is called The Little Fir Tree by Margaret Wise Brown. It is an amazingly moving book about a tree that is dug up every winter just in time for Christmas to be taken to a little boy who is bedridden. When Christmas is over he is returned to the woods to grow and wait.

The tree looks forward to making this special trip be part of the celebration while the seasons come and go.

One year the man doesn’t come and the tree starts to worry and dislike the now frozen world around him. As Christmas nears the man comes with the whole family including the little boy walking on his own.

The tree gets to celebrate Christmas in his home this year bedecked with berries, apples, and cookies!

The second book is called Night Tree by Eve Bunting. One Christmas Eve as a family sets out into the woods to find a tree.

When they find the perfect tree, they decorate it with popcorn, apples, sunflower seed balls, and tangerines for the animals that live in the woods to feast on. They spread breadcrumbs beneath the tree as well as nuts and apples.

After the decorating is done the family spreads out a blanket and sings songs while sipping on hot chocolate.

When they finish, they pack up their things and leave the tree for the animals to enjoy!

Both of these books have wonderful illustrations and messages. I hope you get the opportunity to read them both during the Christmas season.

What did we do?

Decorated a JDaniel’s Tree

When JDaniel was six months, old my husband planted a tree for him. It is still small and so it is easy for JDaniel to help decorate.