Paper Plates Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Paddington Bear Paper Plate Craft

January 5, 2015 By Deirdre

When my son was born, my mom bought him a Paddington Bear stuffed toy she found at second hand store. “When JDaniel gets older, he is love reading books about him,” Mom said. Paddington has sat in JDaniel’s room for years. It wasn’t until recently that we started to read the books that star Paddington Bear. At six JDaniel is just the right age to help me read the books as well as do a craft featuring Paddington.

Crafting Paddington Bear

You really don’t need a lot of materials for this craft. We used the following:

Small white paper plates
White tempera paint
Brown tempera paint
Plastic fork
Red construction paper
Black construction paper
Glue stick

Putting the craft together:

We did’t have tan paint at our house so, the first step for us was to mix a little white paint into the brown paint. Just a little white paint created the color we needed for the fur of Paddington Bear. If you have tan paint, you can totally skip the mixing of the white and brown paint.

Then we dipped the back of a plastic fork into the paint to coat it. The fork was then dragged across the surface of the back of the plate to create a furry effect. We started at the middle of the plate and dragged a fork to the outside edge. The fork was dipped and dragged over and over again to layer the paint.

On some of Paddington’s book covers he is wearing a black hat and others he is wearing a red hat. We decided to cut out a hat for our Paddington out of red paper. The hat was later given a black outline to make the details of the hat stand out.

Finally we cut eyes, a nose, and mouth out of black construction paper. You could draw on the facial features for Paddington bear with a black marker or crayon if you like that look better.

How you could use this Paddington Bear craft:

You could simply display your Paddingtons on a bulletin board or the refrigerator.
Paddington could be used for retelling a chapter or event in one of the books.
A large tongue depressor could be added to the back of the paper plate to make a Paddington Bear puppet.

Here are some wonderful book featuring Paddington Bear:

The links below are affiliate links.

A Bear Called Paddington

The Paddington Treasury: Six Classic Bedtime Stories

Paddington Helps Out

Here are a few other Read A Book and Explore It ideas:

Apples A to Z (math related activities)

Space Boy (reading and science related activities)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar (math and reading activities)

New Year’s Eve Countdown Activity For Kids

December 22, 2014 By Deirdre

This New Year’s Eve countdown activity is fun for kids to create and use. You could use it to the countdown on New Year’s Eve along with this New Year’s Eve customs sheet or use it in centers at the beginning of the New Year. I know that most countdowns start with ten, but I decided we should start with twelve. Twelve is a number tied into New Year’s Eve so much. It just made sense to count up or countdown to twelve.

The links below are affiliate links.

Putting the Countdown Ball Together

Our New Year’s Eve countdown ball used only a few supplies. You will need sparkly stickers ( I found ours at a dollar store.) and a small white paper plate. You could have your children uses magic markers, crayons (I think Crayola Glitter Crayons would be great!), or glitter glue pens too. They would add more color and texture to your countdown ball.

Two small slits were cut into the middle of the paper plate prior to decorating it. The number countdown slide would need to be slipped through it. We decided it would be easier to cut before stickers were put in place. It would also make it easier to know where to avoid putting stickers.

You may want to tie a lesson on symmetry to this New Year’s Eve Countdown Activity. We talked about it as we worked on our countdown balls. It was easy at the beginning to try to mirror the stickers from one side onto the other. As the paper plate filled up with stickers, it was much harder.

All the supplies you wanted to have available to your children could be put out all with paper plates and they could just create. You will probably end up with some New Year’s Eve countdown balls filled to their plate edges with decorations and others may be sparsely decorated. What fun it will be to see how each one turns out!

When the plate is completely finished, you can have your children create a countdown strip of their own or you can have some already made. We found that it was easier to write the numbers on the strip when the strip was in the window. We just pulled the strip up a little to write the next number counting down. That way we knew the whole number would fit in the window.

Ways to Use the New Year’s Eve Countdown Ball

There are so many ways to tie the New Year’s Eve countdown ball into learning. I have listed a few below. I bet you can come up with more ways.

Basic Countdown

Slide the number strip down one number at a time to countdown by twelve.

Counting Up

Children can slide the strip up and count up to twelve one number at a time.

Adding Up

Children place a number in the sliding window. Then they can call out a number or roll a die to get a number. They will then move the slide up that number of times to find the sum of the two numbers.

If you like this idea, but want to have your children create a simpler version of it I have one for you. This printable coloring activity may be just what you are looking for.

Here are some other New Year’s Eve Countdown ideas:

New Year’s Activities

How to Make Noise Maker Shakers

New Year’s Eve Sensory Bin

New Year’s Drink for Kids- Firecracker Sparkler

New Year’s Eve Customs Sheet

How does your family celebrate New Year’s Eve?

Art Projects For Kids- Four Calling Birds Craft and Coloring Page

December 4, 2014 By Deirdre

Counting down to Christmas is a whole lot of fun! We have been working on counting down with memory boxes and blessings. Here is yet another way we have been working with counting and Christmas is to count the 12 Days of Christmas. We are exploring the 12 days of Christmas with several other bloggers. Each of us has selected a couple of the days to create art project for kids or fun theme activities. Today I am sharing activities for four calling birds. (You will find a list of other blogs sharing art projects for kids and activities at the end of this post.)

I confess I had a hard time deciding how to make calling birds. I created a Four Calling Birds smart phone or cell phone coloring page with four birds displayed on the monitor. This really didn’t seem all that Christmassy though. I decided that I had to think of something that was craft related.

After digging around in our crafts closet, I found some materials I thought would make really cute birds. (Four really cute birds actually.) Four really cute birds that aren’t calling to anyone is what I came up with. Well, maybe they could be calling to you to make them. This is one of those art projects for kids that you will really want to make.

How did we create them?

Supplies

Small paper plates (2)
Paper doilies (2)
Wiggly eyes (4)
Yellow construction paper
Scissors
Glue sticks

Steps to Create the Birds

Cut each of the paper plates in half.
Cut each of the doilies in half.
Glue a doily half onto half of the paper plate. The doily wing should be sticking off the flat section of the paper plate to make it look like the bird is flying.
Glue a wiggly eye near the front of your paper plate.
Glue the beak on the back of the paper plate near the top of your plate.

We glued our four calling birds to a piece of blue construction paper when we were done. I think you could put holes through top of the plates and make them ornaments. You could group them together on your Christmas tree. There are a number of ways you can display these art project for kids.

Welcome to day 4 of the 12 Days of Christmas Series, a kid-friendly activity to celebrate each of the 12 days! Be sure to stop by your 7 favorite bloggers for each of the 12 Days of Christmas Series. You will find amazing art projects for kids, cooking activities, learning fun and more.

Enchanted Homeschooling Mom ~ Stir the Wonder ~ JDaniel4’s Mom ~ 3 Dinosaurs ~ P is for Preschooler ~ ABC Creative Learning

Letter and Number Literacy- Fine Motor Webs

September 24, 2014 By Deirdre

Working on letter and number order with learning webs is a simple way to work on letter and number literacy. It is also a great fine motor activity for kids. I love it when I come up with an activity that works on a variety of skills. It is like being able to layer learning.

Letter Literacy Web

I started out creating a letter web. Some of the children I work with in school are struggling with the alphabet. I find them singing a letters of the alphabet as we work with letter order. Why not create a learning tool that would work on letter literacy and fine motor weaving I thought? They could sing while they worked on it, but they wouldn’t have to. More than anything it would help put the alphabet in their visual and muscle memory.

When I thought about putting the web together, I decided that I could write the letters on the small white paper plate and my son could use the hole punch to place a hole beneath each letters. That would give him a fine motor exercise to do. ( He just loves using a hole punch!)

With holes under the letters it was time to try weaving the yarn up and down through the holes. This literacy weaving activity is a little tricky. Sometimes you push the yarn into the holes under the letter and sometimes you have to push the yarn up through the holes. We found it was easier to push the yard down into the holes than it was to push it up into holes as we moved through the alphabet.

When we reached the end of the alphabet, we tied off the yarn. We were left with a really cool letter and web design that I think spiders and kids would love.

Number Literacy Web

The letter literacy web was such fun. We decided to create a number literacy web on a paper plate. We used the numbers up to 20. This gave us a little more space between holes. (The letter literacy web had to have 26 holes.)

I tried to write a number under one of the holes and then turn the plate 90 degrees and write the next number in number order. I did well in some cases and poorly in others. The web would have been prettier with more diagonal numbers or vertical ones. The horizontal numbers created straight lines in the web.

We followed the same weaving steps we did with the letter literacy web. Yarn was woven up and down through the holes beneath the numbers in number order.

Both web ended up being pretty. Both literacy webs worked out to be good ways to review number or letter order. I plan on sharing them with the kindergarten teachers I know.

If you are looking for more web activities, you might want to check out my sight word tape web.

Building Word Families – Worms and Apples

August 18, 2014 By Deirdre

Becoming familiar with building words and getting to know word families is foundational to learning to read in my opinion. I know that not all children learn by using phonics skills and word families, but a lot of them do. My son happens to be someone who liked to break a word down and stretch out its sounds. This worm and apple word family slide activity was designed to work on exploring word families.

This particular activity could be used with preschool children, kindergarten children and those starting first grade. As children pull the worm up through the apple, they simply read the new word that is formed when a new letter appear beside the family letters. The letter worms I created don’t have a lot of letters them. The worms would have been super long if they included all the letters that might we used to create all the words in each of the word families. I would suggest that you ask your children to tell you what other words they know that could be members of each of the word families. They may come up with a whole lot more.

You may want to have your children record each word they make in each of the word families on paper. Some children will be able to have a better understanding of word families and their words in the family when the have written them down and can see them in their own writing.

Creating Word Families Worms

Supplies Needed:

Small paper plates

Red paint

Paintbrushes

Green construction paper

Scissors

Black Marker

Directions:

Paint the back of four small plates red. ( The front of paper plates usually has a coating on it to keep food from leaking through. It may resist paint.)
While you are waiting for the paint to dry, cut four worms out of green construction paper. You could be green poster board or something stronger if you like.
Outline the worm and draw a face on it with black marker. Think through what word family and what words you want your children to work on before writing letters on the worm and the family on the paper plate apple.
Cut two horizontal lines about three inches apart into each apple. This will be the area your worms will slide through while building word families.
Weave the worms up from the back and across the slat you have cut into the apple. Then back down through the top cut.
You should be able to slid the worm up and down through slat.

Once you have the worms in place, you are ready to build words.

If you are looking for more learning to read activities, you may want to visit my Learning to Read board on Pinterest.

Follow JDaniel4’s Mom’s board Learning to Read on Pinterest.

Paper Crafts for Kids- Patriotic Wind Sock

May 8, 2014 By Deirdre

Sometimes it is a simple paper plate crafts that brings the biggest pleasure. Recently JDaniel and I hung a simple paper craft paper plate in a tree in our backyard. We both found ourselves looking up at it as it twisted and swirled in the breeze.

When I said simple, I meant simple this paper craft requires only eight supplies to make. Considering two of the supplies are paper plates that really isn’t very many crafting elements to have to gather.

You will need:

Scissors or an Ellison press with a star block

Glue stick

Blue plates , two

Party streamers, red

Star template

Fishing line

Needle

Cardboard from a cereal box

We lucked out by being able to use an Ellison press to cut our stars out of the paper plates. If you don’t have one available to you, you will want to cut star you have drawn out on a piece of cardboard. You can then use the cut out star or the outside section that you have cut the star out of the star to draw the star on the plates. It is important to try to make both stars exactly the same. Yes, I know it could be a challenge.

Next you will need to cut out various lengths of the party streamer. We went with lengths that were longer rather than short. With the streamer strips cut out we then glued them onto the back side of one of the paper plates.

Then we glued the back of the second paper plaaate to the back of the first. The tricky part is making sure that the star cutouts on both plates line up. I had to keep turning our plates clockwise until I found the right way to line them up. If you try and try and don’t get it to work, it will be okay. It will add a 3-D effect to the paper craft plates as they spin in the breeze.

Finally we pushed a needle threaded with fishing line into the top of the paper plate. We tied off the fishing line to make loop in the fishing line. The loop was what we used to hang the paper plate wind sock like craft in a tree.

The wind was kicking up a breeze when we hung our paper plate craft up in the tree. It was such fun to watch the streamer tails slipping and flipping in it.

It really looked like our patriotic paper plate craft was dancing!

We didn’t use materials that could stay outside overnight. Just before bedtime I took the paper crafts down from the tree and hung it from the ceiling fan in JDaniel’s room. We will take it outside again for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Veterans Day just to watch it dance!

Here are some other paper crafts made with paper plates and more:

Paper Plate Sunflowers

Paper Lion

Paper snowman

What is your favorite type of paper to craft with?

Thanksgiving for Kids- A Cornucopia of Prayer

November 20, 2012 By Deirdre

Years ago I was taught to pray for the area I lived in, the city and state I lived in, my country and the world. It was a simple prayer exercise that lead me to pray for my family and friends as well as people around the world. My prayers became less self focused and more others focused when I prayed this way. I decided the time before Thanksgiving would be perfect to introduce this method of praying to JDaniel. Thanksgiving is a time of thankfulness and gratitude. It is a time when we spend time with family from faraway and sometimes it is a time when we travel to places beyond our everyday world. This Thanksgiving for kids activity is a great way to explore prayer.

Thanksgiving for Kids Activity

JDaniel and I constructed a cornucopia out of paper plates painted brown as a visual reminder of those prayer areas. We filled the open end of the cornucopia with fruit and vegetables. The fruit stands for fruitful prayer. The vegetables were added just to balance the fruit. I wish I had a deep reason for having them there.

My family and I having been praying from the front of the cornucopia back each night. I think it has helped us each to focus on the world around us and the world beyond us. Our prayers are not as much focused on our family now.We are also trying to keep our eyes open when we are out and about to find prayer needs in our neighborhood, city and state. It has been wonderful to see the world through eyes of prayer. The our local world is filled with blessings we can thank God for and areas of concern we can ask him help with. We world beyond the one we drive around in has been a little bit harder. We can pray for things we hear on the news or global issues like famine and lack of peace. I think we may need to choose areas of the world to focus on and read about to broaden our world view.This has been a wonderful prayer tool for my family.

If you like this Thanksgiving for kids activity, here are a few more that you will like:

Lantern Turkeys

Handprint Turkey Puppets

Turkey with Food Feathers

Turkey Hat

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.