tissue paper Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Tying together a book with crafts and learning activities based on it is a lot of fun. Recently we did just that with the book My Heart is like a Zoo. My Heart is Like a Zoo is a wonderful children’s book that compares various animals to love. What fun it is to read just how the storyteller’s heart is like each of the animals. Each illustration of an animal is made of layered hearts. Recreating these Valentine’s Day crafts to place on cards for JDaniel to give and learn with seemed like a great idea. (See yesterday’s post 8 People Kids Can Give Valentines Cards to find out who we will be giving cards to.)

Before starting the card-making process you may want to go back through the story and talk about why each animal fits with the love description shared with it. At my house, we thought some were perfect matches. We came up with other descriptors we thought fit better with others. It was fun to walk through the book again and share our insights.

How did I make the cards?

Craft Supplies:

Origami paper
Glue sticks
Scissors
White Cardstock

Valentine’s Day Crafts Tips

Origami paper worked out to be the best paper for creating heart animals. At first, I thought about tissue paper. It is thin enough for the bottom layers of tissue to show through. It is also a little bit of a challenge to cut. If you were going to try to make these cards too, I wanted to use a type of paper that would be easy to cut. Origami paper worked out really well.

I experimented with the different colors that the illustrator had chosen for his pictures. Changing some of the heart’s colors associated with Valentine’s Day seemed like a fun thing to do.

Children just need to look through the book to find an animal they want to try to recreate or be inspired to create a totally new animal.

I used white cardstock. It was much easier to see the layered hearts on the white paper than it was to work with a darker color like red or purple.

Directions:

Step One

Cut out all the shapes you will need to create your animal.

Step Two

Try putting the pieces together the way you want them arranged before you glue them together.

Step Three

Glue the hearts into position. I found that it was easiest for the smaller shapes to the largest shape. All the shapes that went on the bottom were glued first and then the shapes on the top.

Step Four

Finally, glue each of the animals to a piece of white card stock folded in half hamburger style.

Other Ways to Use These Valentine’s Day Crafts

Instead of making cards with the animals you could glue each of them to an index card and add a popsicle stick to the back. They would make great retelling puppets.

You could leave the popsicle sticks off the back of the index cards and use the animal cards to make a sequencing game.

If you try these Valentine’s Day crafts, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Whether you are celebrating Fire Safety Month in October or putting together a community helper unit for your children this fire truck activity would fun to do. It is super easy to put together and super fun for kids to do.

The goal of the activity is to blow into a straw and get all the flames off the bottom a plastic bag decorated with a fire truck. If you can get the flames above the fire truck, that is even better. It takes a lot of breath control to get the flames ( tiny pieces of colored tissue) to rise off the bottom of the bag before you fill the bag with air.

We had to release the air collected in the bag a few times before my son was able to get almost all of the tissue pieces flying. The great thing about this fire truck activity is that you can repeat it over and over again.

How Did I Put This Fire Truck Activity Together?

Step One: Gather the Materials

Large plastic bag
An average sized straw ( A wide straw will allow tissue to fly into it and into your kids’ mouths. A narrow straw won’t generate enough air to get the tissue paper moving.)
Orange, red, and yellow tissue paper in small pieces
Red and black permanent markers
Fire truck coloring page

Step Two: Decorate the Fire Truck Bag

You will need to search your children’s coloring books or the internet for a coloring page picture of a fire truck. Then you will place the coloring page into the plastic bag. Next, you will use the permanent markers to trace the picture of the fire truck.

If you prefer to draw the truck for this fire truck activity freehand, you can. I am just not that talented when it comes to drawing fire trucks.

Step Three: Assembling the Activity

You will need to place a bunch of the colored tissue pieces in the fire truck bag. Next, you will place the straw in the bag. You will need to seal the top of the bag to the right and left of the straw by pressing down on the seal or zipping it shut.

Getting the Fire Truck Activity Going

Now it is time to start blowing the flames. We tried laying the fire truck bag on the table and blowing. It was much easier to hold the bag at the top or on its sides as air is being blown into it.

After posting this activity, I decided to see what it would look like with the fire truck colored in. I went back colored in the fire truck and retook some of the pictures.

Here is what it looks like colored in:

I even made a new opening picture for the colored in a truck.

Which do you like best?

Before or after doing this fire truck activity, you may want to sit down with your children and read a fire truck related children’s book. Here are a few of our favorite fire truck books.

The links below are affiliate links.

Curious George and the Firefighters – Curious George goes on a field trip to a firehouse and ends up helping the firefighters put out a fire.

The Fire Cat– This book is an easy reader. It tells the tale of a cat named Pickles who is adopted by a fire department. Pickles learns during this book to help the firefighters do their jobs.
Meeow and the Big Box>The librarian created an interactive box that illustrated how Meeow created her box step by step. It was such fun.