Turtles Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Easy Craft Ideas- How to Make a Paper Turtle

April 28, 2015 By Deirdre

Sometimes easy craft ideas come from a desire to use up the craft supplies you have on hand. We used this same type of chevron cupcake liner to make a “Your My Biggest Fan” Mother’s Day card. These cupcake liners looks like a turtle shell to me so, we used them to create a paper sea turtle. (It is cool to see how many easy craft ideas you can make with what you have available.)

Adding Cupcake Liners to the Plate

There are three different types of paper in the paper turtle. He has a construction paper head and flippers. His body under the cupcake liners in a paper plate. Finally there are the cupcake liners.

We started with a flattened cupcake liner glued to the center of a small paper plate. Once we started placing the other cupcake liners, we realized the center one wasn’t really needed. We could have just used four cupcake liners. We also could have cut cupcake liners and added them around the edge of the liner in the center.

A small bit of the white paper plate is still visible. If you decide to make a paper turtle like our, one of the easy craft ideas I would suggest is adding more liners or arranging your liners to cover all of the plate.

Adding Flippers

Four pieces of paper were layered and then cut out into a flipper shape. We wanted to have all our flippers the same size. The flippers we made a not huge. Some of the seven species of sea turtles have much larger flippers. If your children decide that they really like big flippers, you can tell them their fins are like the flatback turtles.

Adding a Turtle Head

The head on our sea turtle is a little egg shaped with a slight point. After looking a number of turtle pictures, we thought that is what the head should look like. Your children may have a totally different idea of what a turtle head should look like.

The turtle was given wiggly eyes for no other reason than we thought they were fun. You could easily have your children draw the turtle’s eyes or create them with construction paper.

Here are Some Other Easy Craft Ideas for Kids

Potato Print Turtles

Paper Plate Sheep

Paddington Bear Craft

Ocean Animals Paper Plate Craft

Oh! If you are looking for a great book to tie into this craft, may I recommend Turtle, Turtle, Watch Out! by April Pulley Sayre.

If you make any of these craft ideas for kids with your children, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Learning Games for Kids- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

August 1, 2014 By Deirdre

As shared earlier in the week in my Educational Games- Color Sorting Turtles, learning games for kids that feature movie, book, or television characters catch children’s interest. Just as in that post I went with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In this post I only focused on one Ninja Turtle called Raphael who wears a red head band. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles love pizza so pizzas were used as a game piece in this learning game for kids.

Sometimes learning games for kids focus on one particular skill. This learning game is open ended. The egg carton Ninja Turtle is the catching area or landing spot. Small pizzas were printed out on a section of a file folder to and then cut out. The pizzas as I mentioned are the game pieces.

How to Play These Learning Games for Kids

By keeping this game open ended we can play it to review or work on any type of learning concepts. If my son or I gets the correct answer, then we get to try to fling a pizza into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mouth. In our version of the game we could get as close to the turtle’s mouth as we wanted too. When you set up your rules for these learning games for kids, you could decide to try flipping, tossing or flinging the pizzas from 6 or 7 inches away.

Our pizzas were colored in so that it looks like they have olives, mushroom, pepperoni, cheese, and ground meat. ( I have attached a copy of the Pizza Cards we used. ) You or your kids can color them in to represent the topping they like. You could also write numbers, words or letters and make this game focus on a particular skill. That is all up to you.

How to Build These Learning Games for Kids

The Turtle’s Head Carton

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We took an old egg carton and painted in green. I think the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may have skin that is a darker green, but we used the green Acrylic Paint – Hunter Green.

that we had. ( I found that acrylic paint works really well on cardboard.) We didn’t paint the inside of the turtles mouth. If we had I think we would have used red.

Then a piece of red construction paper was measured to fit on the turtle as his mask. We found that cutting the strip on a diagonal gave us the long piece we needed. After looking at several styles of turtle head bands, we went for one that has rounded areas for the eyes.

White felt and black construction paper cut out to be used for his eyes. I thought the felt would add texture to this learning game.

When everything was cut out, we used an Elmer’s X-TREME Extra Strength Washable School Glue Stick to get everything to say in place on the turtle.

After placing all the mask elements in place, I decide to round the end of the front of the egg carton to look more like a mouth. This isn’t something you may choose to do.

We added a small popsicle stick to either side of the turtle’s mouth to keep in open. We colored the stick green to help it blend in. You don’t have to do that step if you don’t want too.

Pizza Game Pieces

After printing out the pizza game piece (see link to the game pieces above), we decorated. You can color them with markers, crayons or color pencils. We used markers for ours.

As I mentioned learning games for kids that feature characters they like will spark their interest and get them involved in the game easily.

What characters would your kids like to see in homemade learning games for kids?

Science Experiments for Kids- Turtle Balancing

July 31, 2014 By Deirdre

Turtle balancing is one of those experiments for kids that looks easy, but is tricky. Coming up with ways to balance them is easy, but what ways will allow the turtles to stay standing. It is easier to get them tumble than it is to get them to all to stay stacked. We found two ways that worked right away. Coming up with more was challenge.

Making this set of balancing turtle was super easy and they didn’t require a lot of supplies.

Here is what you need:

Four paper towel rolls

Magic marker black

Scissors

Green paint

Printer paper

Pencil

How to put the turtles for these experiments for kids together:

Trace a turtle on a piece of copy paper folded in half in pencil. Then cut the turtle out. The turtle cut out will be a template you use to trace the turtle onto the paper towel rolls.

Place the turtle outline on one paper towel roll at a time and trace the turtle onto it. I tried to place the nose of the turtle close the edge of the paper towel roll so that it would be easier to cut out.

The paper towel rolls I used were easy to cut, but not so flimsy that the turtle’s legs would collapse under them. I was able to cut them out while watching JDaniel play in the yard one afternoon. They took no time at all.

The original idea was to draw a grid on each turtles back and place a spiral each square of the grid. Once that was done, green paint would be placed over the marker design. When we did that, the design did not show through well. JDaniel explored the turtles and trying to balancing them a little and then I drew the design on top of the green paint. The design looked much better on top of the paint.

With the turtle creation completed it was time to go back to balancing the turtles.

Science Experiments for Kids- Turtle Balancing

One way to balance the turtles that we tried was to create a turtle tower with one turtle on top of the other. The next best way was to have two turtles on the bottom and to balance the rest of the turtles on them. The second way did send a turtle tumbling at first. Placing the turtles carefully on each other in just the right place was key. Finding that right place was tricky.

Having more than four turtles would make this science experiment more challenging. Thankfully we go through a lot of paper towels! We should be able to add to the turtles number by the end of the week.

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After exploring this science experiment, I remembered the book Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories I will have to look for it the next time we go to the library. It would be great to read it and then pull out our growing number of turtles to balance them.

Here are some other science experiments for kids we have done this summer:

Science Ideas- Controlling the Flow of Water

Measuring Forms of Water

Polar Ice Fishing

How Long Will a Lego Boat Float?

Educational Games- Color Sorting Turtles

July 29, 2014 By Deirdre

Taking characters like the Teenage Ninja Turtles that kids are excited about and using them in educational games peaks children’s interest in the skills covered in the game. This educational game invites children to sort through a bowl of treasures and match them to each turtle’s mask. Each of the treasures in this game are intentionally small. Children will have use their pincher grip to pick them up. This will allow this educational game to work on more than one skill. Fine motor skills and color matching united to create a fun color sorting turtle game.

Educational Games Supplies

To make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you will need:

Purple construction paper

Orange construction paper

Red construction paper

Blue construction paper

Black construction paper

White construction paper

Dark green construction paper

How to create the turtles:

I created each aspect of the turtles by layering construction paper so, I could cut four turtle parts out at a time. The turtle’s heads were all cut out at the same time by layering four pieces of dark green construction paper. The top of the head is a smaller semicircle than the bottom section of the head. The white and black sections of the eyes were created by folding two narrow strips of white paper and two narrow pieces of black paper into fourths before cutting out small circles. The black pupils were cut out first and the white sections were cut out second. The second set of black narrow strips were folded in half and cut into smiles.

For the masks a piece of blue, red, purple, and orange paper were stacked to together. The turtle’s head was traced onto the top piece of construction paper. A mask was drawn onto the face outline and then all the layers were cut out.

When all the pieces had been cut out for the turtle’s heads, they were glued onto the head. I decided that the masks needed to have little end pieces on the left hand side. Those pieces were cut out of some of the scraps leftover from cutting out the masks.

Playing This Educational Game

A bunch of treasures were searched for and found in our craft closet. I found buttons, stickers, and pom poms. I sorted through the treasures and took out all the red, blue, orange and purple colored ones. These treasures were placed into a black snack bowl.

With all the game elements in place I asked my son to sort the treasures out by color and put them on the turtle what was wearing that color. If you have young child, that may take some time. Some older children may easily be able to see how the treasures should be sorted, but may have trouble using their fingers to pick up the objects.

To add a reading element to the game I wrote out the color words on white paper. I made it a easy by writing each color word out with a magic marker of that color. To make it a little more challenging I could have written the color words out with a black marker. I asked my son to place the correct color word under the turtle wearing that color of a mask.

More Educational Game Ideas

If you are looking for more educational games and activities that work on learning colors, you may want to check out my Learning About Colors board on Pinterest.

Follow JDaniel4’s Mom’s board Learning about Colors on Pinterest.

Children at Play- Teddy Needs More Turtle Skating Practice

February 22, 2012 By Deirdre

Last week as I put away the red sled made of cardboard we played with during Read. Explore.Learn JDaniel headed upstairs to grab Teddy and my husband’s turtle slippers (which now live in JDaniel’s room). He had another idea of what to do with the bubble wrap ski slope on the living room floor.

The slope wasn’t a slop anymore I was informed. JDaniel declared that it was now an area for Teddy to skate on. The turtle slippers were to be Teddy’s skates.

While Teddy seemed willing to try skating, his feet didn’t seem to agree. It was very hard to keep Teddy’s feet in the slippers. They just kept slipping out.

Teddy’s feet don’t have a large enough surface area to stay in the slippers. I tried to explain that to JDaniel but, the whole concept of the surface area went right over his head.

I suggested that JDaniel hold Teddy’s feet in the slippers. The pressure from his arm muscles might keep Teddy’s feet in.

JDaniel was willing to try this in fact he pressed down on Teddy’s legs as hard as he could. The slippers did stay on but, now his feet won’t move to do to the pressure.

It seemed Teddy would never be able to skate. There were just too many things for JDaniel to do to help him move and keep his slippers on.

Instead of getting frustrated, grabbing Teddy up, and flinging slippers, JDaniel did a very wise thing. He decided it was time to get more helpful ideas from me.

We discussed all the variables involved in Teddy skating down the bubble wrap with slippers. It was a very lively discussion. The kind many of you have probably had with your children when everything seems to be going wrong and every idea that comes to mind is a possibility.

Ultimately JDaniel decided it was my job to make it happen and his job to cheer from the edge of the bubble wrap. I really tried to keep pressure on Teddy and move his feet while sliding my feet behind his. This approach really should have worked. It really should have.