Spring ideas

Now that St. Patrick's Day is over and March 20th has passed, fun spring ideas can come flowing out.  Easter is early this year.  Only 2 more weeks to do fun Easter crafts.  Some of the things we are going to be using around here are:
-Plastic Easter eggs
-Tissue paper
- Foam Easter egg and bunny shapes
- Paint
-Ribbon, buttons, and stickers
-Water table
I have been working on letters with Little Monkey and am always looking for fun new ways to do it.  He catches on quickly and realizes when I am trying to get him to work on something.  I have a bunch of foam letters from the dollar store so I made up a fun Easter inspired sheet with some letters on it.  I am going to put the foam letters into the plastic Easter eggs and hide them around.  He will have to find them and then match the letter to the one on the sheet!
I made a sheet with letters and one without.  So you can use the one with letters and just print it out twice, cut out the letters and put them in the eggs to be discovered and matched, or you can write out your own.
I hope everyone is having a great start to spring.  We had snow....but the sun is shining now.  Such weird weather we are having!
Easter Letter find (with letters)
Easter Letter Find2 (without letters)

Stamping and Marbles

Sorry this is a little late, the weekend got away from me!
On St. Patrick's Day we did some stamping with green peppers and some marble painting.
The stamping with green peppers proved to be a little more difficult than I anticipated.  They were pretty big for little hands. I think next time I will look for pepper's with long stems on them, or attach a temporary stem.  Little Monkey's only concern through it all was whether or not I was going to make him eat the green pepper.  Don't worry I didn't make him eat it :)

Next we moved onto marble painting.  This is one of my favourite activities!  It is a little hands on, so I didn't get many pictures to share.

I use old phone boxes because they are small and the little ones can grasp them better.  

Put the shape you want the paint on in the bottom (we did shamrocks this time), dribble some paint on, put the marbles in, close the lid and SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE!  The kids love the last part.  When you are done shaking open the box up and see the shape all painted!  We added sparkles at this point.  Here is the finished product:

I am planning lots of Easter/Spring ideas and will get on posting as soon as I have a more concrete plan of what I am doing when!  

Unexpected Rainbow

Little Monkey and I were sitting around playing with cars while Little Princess napped this morning.  I was trying to figure out something more interesting to do with the cars.  We usually park them and line them up over and over again.  Then I remembered I had bought a large roll of paper from IKEA and we hadn't used it yet.  Then I saw our button rainbow on the door, and it hit me....why not make a car rainbow?!  We rolled out a big piece of paper and drew our coloured sections on.  Finally it was time to find their parking spaces!  Little Monkey had so much fun doing this.  He was very excited when we had parked most of his cars and he noticed that there were much more red ones.  It was a great way to spend some quality time on the floor playing!  I think we might roll out another piece tomorrow and make a road.  That will be a fun activity for daddy to do :)

Tissue paper shamrocks

We ventured into tissue paper this afternoon when Little Cousin was over.
I started off by tracing a foam shamrock.  I did 2 because they weren't very big.  If you have older children, they could do the tracing themselves.
I cut the tissue paper into strips before hand to make things go smoothly.  I find it easier when I am doing a craft to have most everything done ahead of time :)  I let both boys scrunch up the tissue paper.  (I didn't get a picture of this because I was also scrunching with them)  We made loud sound effects each time we scrunched and we also did some extra ripping.  We used a glue stick and rubbed it all over the shamrocks and stuck our scrunched up tissue paper on top.  It was fun to see their faces at the shamrock filled up with colour!  They were very excited when they finished.

I love using tissue paper because it adds a nice textural element to craft time and it isn't too much of a pain to clean up.  I thought about using sparkles but then I thought of the crazy clean up after....I went with tissue paper :)  Another good thing to invest in are trays.  Like the ones you put your food on at a fast food restaurant.  I got mine at the dollar store (big surprise!).  They are great for keeping messes somewhat contained.  I will get a picture of ours in use when we do some painting tomorrow.
Next up for the blog, marble painting, veggie stamping, and green inspired food for St. Patrick's Day!

Button Rainbow

I found a whole bunch of coloured buttons at the dollar store not too long ago.  I couldn't resist picking them up!  What was I going to do with them?

Seeing as St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner I thought it would be fun to make rainbows with them.  I got out my white cardstock, a paper plate, and markers.  I thought about colouring in the sections but Little Monkey knows all his colours so I wasn't too worried about him matching them up.  I would suggest colouring in if you have a little one that isn't familiar with their colours....you don't want them to get too frustrated.

Next we organized the buttons into coloured groups.  I think next time I might leave them a little mixed up for more of a challenge locating the colour he wanted.  I did the colour sorting myself at this stage (honestly I didn't even think of getting Little Monkey to help).  

For this craft I used a tacky craft glue.  I wasn't sure if regular old white glue would hold the buttons on.  I put the glue on and Little Monkey used a foam brush to spread it around.  I let him decided what buttons he wanted where.  He had lots of fun with it.  I think he was more excited that I was actually letting him play with all the buttons.  He had found the button stash a little while ago and I told him he wasn't allowed to play with them.  YAY for finally getting to play with the buttons.  When we were done Little Monkey wanted to help put the buttons away.  I am glad he was thinking.  It turned into a great sorting and fine motor activity.  He put away a good amount before he declared "I'm done" and went off to play with his cars! 

  We really had fun with this one.  I am trying to figure out something else to do with buttons.  Don't worry I am sure I will come up with something :)  

Next up for the blog is, tissue paper shamrocks, green yogurt chips, and an adorable outfit for Little Princess.

Shamrock Hand Prints

We got to the shamrock hand prints early.  I have the pleasure of watching Little Monkey and Little Princess' Little Cousin!  (wow that was a lot of little's)   Little cousin is such a sweetie and is right in the middle (age wise) of my two.  We had lots of fun with this craft.  I didn't end up painting their thumbs as they don't like to close their fingers when pressing them to the paper.  I thought it might look a little more like an inverted daisy than a shamrock :)  We also added some sparkles because that is always fun.  We will be sparkly for days now.  I really like how they turned out.  This is one that I have never tried before and we had lots of fun doing it.  I am a fan of painting the kids hands myself instead of letting them dip their hands in the paint.  I only do it this way when there is a specific part of the hand (or foot) that needs to be painted.  We do lots of plain old finger painting as well.  I let Little Monkey and Little Cousin to paint the stem on by themselves.  Sorry about the Christmas paper plates.  We use paper plates a lot when painting so I tend to stock up when they are on sale.  The sparkles I got from the dollar store (see I am there all the time).  They are perfect because they have little holes in the top so the sparkles don't come out all at once.  They also fit perfectly into toddler's hands.
It is going to be a busy weekend.  I am working on an adorable outfit for Little Princess.  I am also going to attempt to make puffy paint and finger paint.

Next up for the blog is a button rainbow.

Shamrocks

I will probably have quite a few posts over the next week because I have a lot planned.  Little Princess was in the hospital for almost a week so that is why there hasn't been any recent posts.  We are back and feeling better and ready to get creating.

Shamrocks are the theme of today!  This morning we got to lace shamrocks.  We used foam shamrocks and pipe cleaners.  I got the foam shamrocks at the dollar store.  They came in plain green and sparkly green.  I am saving the plain green ones for another fun activity for next week.   Have I mentioned my love of the dollar store?!?!  I will save that for a whole other post. :)  I just used a small hole punch to punch little holes around the outside.  Some shamrocks had lots of holes and some had just a few. Little Monkey did great with it.  He had lots of fun repeating, 'pull, pull, pull' over and over again each time he put the pipe cleaner into a new hole.  We started out with me holding the shamrock until he got the hang of it.  He has now done 5 of them all by himself.  I think we might be ready to move onto string or ribbon to lace from now on.  I will keep that in mind for Easter ideas.  This afternoon we are doing shamrock hand prints.  I will get as many pictures of that as I can.  I am hoping to get Little Princess in on this one.  I am guessing the camera might be a little green by the end of the day.

-Rachelle

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