craft Archives - Page 2 of 2

Earth Day Craft for Kids- Coffee Filter Earths

April 18, 2014 By Deirdre

This Earth Day craft for kids helps illustrate that the effect doing something to or for the Earth in a big or small way can spread quickly. One small drop of consideration will bleed into the lives of others and our planet. Okay maybe this is giving a simple Earth Day craft too much power. Maybe not.

Children seem understand on the need to take care of the Earth. They can have deep and passionate feeling about recycling, litter, and clean water. My son sure does. Sometimes I slip up and am absent minded about putting recyclables into their bin in the garage. JDaniel’s just shakes his head. It is so not what I have taught him we should do.

JDaniel and I talked about these topics as we worked on creating coffee filter Earth Day crafts. The craft really does lend itself to discussion of the effects of one or two people on the Earth.

We started by putting blue and green watered down food coloring into bowls. The thought was that the watered down food coloring would flow more easily. Although undiluted food coloring might have given us bolder colors. If you try this at home you might want to try it with and without water.

We used eye droppers to squirt the food coloring onto the coffee filters. If you don’t have eye droppers available to you, you could try using small spoons or a turkey baster. The turkey baster may give you larger squirts of color.

Our watery food coloring flowed through and across the coffee filters we were using. The green food coloring flowed over and around blue coloring to create earths with water and land blended together.

We ended up with a lot of food coloring pooled on the coffee filters. When we lifted the filters up the pools disappeared. Several times we moved the filters to a new spot on the newspaper before continuing to work on our Earth Day crafts.

The weather was warm and sunny the day we made these Earth Day crafts. We set them outside on the deck on clean dry newspaper and they dried in minutes. The coffee filters held the bright colors of the food coloring and got a little stiff. They were just perfect for displaying on the refrigerator.

We were both amazed at how different each Earth Day craft turned out. Some had larger landforms (green areas) and some had much more blue watery areas. All of them had blurry areas where the two colors flowed together.

Here are some more Earth Day Activities you will love:

Recycling Truck Number Puzzles

$Earth Day Math Activities - Recycling Bin Counting with Printables$

Recycling Bin Counting Activity

These Earth Day books are fun to read on or before Earth Day.

Here are some Earth Day themed Toys and Activities:

If you are looking for more Earth Day activities to do with kids, you may want to check out my Earth Day board on Pinterest.

How does your family celebrate Earth Day?

Fun Craft For Kids- Torn Paper Easter Chick

April 12, 2014 By Deirdre

Easter crafts are fun to make and send to friend and family. We recently sat down at the kitchen table and created this fun craft creates a fun torn paper Easter chick.

One of the best things about torn paper crafts is that there isn’t a wrong way to tear paper. There are times when you try to tear the paper in a shape as we did for the chicks head and body. When you are trying to tear it in a shape, it can help to draw that shape on the paper and tear around it. Be warned that sometimes the paper won’t cooperate. You may end up with a wonky looking circle. We like odd shaped circles at my house so, that didn’t bother us.

There are times when you just want to tear off strips of paper. When you are going to use those strips as feathers for an Easter craft chick, having odd bends or twists in the paper you are tearing works out really well.

We tore the body and feathers for the chicks out of yellow paper. The beak and the feet of the chicks were torn out of orange paper.

We both experimented a little with torn paper placement on our Easter craft chick before we glued the pieces in places. One of us put a little more thought into our creation than the other, but we both shifted, flipped, and rotated the torn pieces.

When we both had our chick’s bodies decorated the way we wanted them to be with torn paper, we added eyes to our Easter craft. Once again we tore paper. White paper was used for the outer eye and black paper was used for the inner eye or eyeball.

I just love the look of a fun craft of torn paper. The torn paper seems to give this Easter craft texture. The layering effect of the paper also gives it a 3-D look too.

These Easter craft chicks turned out as well as the torn paper penguin we made in the winter. I will need to work on some more torn paper crafts with JDaniel. If you are looking for more spring art projects, you may want to check out my Spring Craft board or Easter Craft board on Pinterest.

Fire Truck Craft

October 6, 2013 By Deirdre

One of the fun things I have been doing to help JDaniel’s class this year has been to help with the SEEDS program. It is right up my alley. The program is like Read.Explore.Learn. and you know how much I love to explore books.

I decided to share a fire truck theme book with them called Meeow and the Big Box is about a kitten who uses a big box to create a fire truck for pretend play. We first heard this book shared at a library storytime focused on fire safety. The librarian created a visual using a box that walked us through each of Meeow’s steps. The children just loved this book.

Creating the Fire Truck Craft

I only get about half an hour to read the book and do the craft. To save time I try to have everything cut out and ready to glue down. I even do a trial run on my own or with JDaniel to time it. He loves getting to be a guinea pig for his class.

Here is how the trial for this craft turned out:

First, we put the body of the fire truck on black paper. Then JDaniel added the windows and white bumper area. I think I could have cut a long strip for the bumper. It didn’t stick out very far in the front or back of the fire truck. I may need to make these a little longer for the class.

The windows for the fire truck were moved around a lot. JDaniel had ideas about where they needed to go and not go a couple of times. They really could go anywhere on the front of a fire truck and could be turned vertically or horizontally. I think not having a specific place for the windows gives the children can invite to make their trucks unique.

After working on the windows, JDaniel worked on adding the yellow accessories to the truck. The ladder could have gone anywhere on the truck or even on the roof of the truck. Both of the lights could have gone on the top or on the front. The trial run ended up with one of the top and one on the bottom.

The last thing to go on the fire truck craft was the wheels. I am not sure that fire trucks have brown wheels, but black wheels would have blended into the black background so, I went with brown.

I think it will be fun to do this craft with JDaniel’s class. We had fun working on it together. It would also be great to create with your children during National Fire Safety Month in October. They would probably like to read Meeow and the Big Box and make a fire truck too.

The Pout-Pout Fish Themed Recycle Fish Mobile

August 17, 2012 By Deirdre

This week I am going to share a wonderful children’s book called The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen. The pout- pout fish has a mouth that looks down turned. He decides that it means that he needs to be dreary all the time. The other sea animals try to get him to smile. He just won’t. He says he can’t he doesn’t have a choice. By the end of the book he finds he does have a choice and a wonderful smile if he will only swim upside down. (Spoiler Alert: A kiss helps make him smile too.)

This wonderful book is filled with rhyme you will love reading it all of the time.

How did we explore the book The Pout-Pout Fish?

Recycled Bottle Fish Mobile

JDaniel has been asking for mobiles for his room for along time. I made him an American flag mobile earlier in the summer and decide to add a fish one to his room too.

We have a lot of sticks that fall from the trees in our backyard. JDaniel stores them in a beaver dam area behind some bushes. Whenever we need a stick, we just head into the dam and look for the right one.

Once we had found the right one, I spray painted it white and red to look like coral.

A simple wash of water and glue was applied to multi-colored tissue squares. The squares were then placed all over water bottles that had the back third of them twisted to form a fish tail.

When we had applied enough tissue, we added giant wiggly eyes to the fish. Later when they had dried I added a piece of fishing line to each fish and hung the fishing line from the branch.

One night a few day later we put glow sticks in the fish to make them bioluminescent. JDaniel love having his Pout-Pout Fish glowing fish mobile in his room.

Starfish Math Game

We are trying to work on some basic math and reading skills this summer. One of the skills we have been working on is counting to ten.

To practice JDaniel and I sat down with some starfish game boards, pom poms, and a die. We each got to take turns rolling the die and adding pom poms to our starfish. The first person to get to ten was done and had to help the other person fill up the circles on their starfish.

Here are some of my favorite Posts from last week’s Read.Explore. Learn. link up:

I love this Nemo fish created by Colorful Imaginations.

Make Way for Ducklings is one of my favorite books. I love everything School Time Snippets did to explore and extend the book. The math lesson below looks like a lot of fun.