Pressed flowers for young children

Emma helped me press some flowers recently, and then wanted to play with the finished product. Because she didn’t want the fragile dried flowers to fall apart, we decided to laminate them using some packing tape. Now she has beautiful dried flowers she can play with to her heart’s content without worrying about crushing them!

We pressed the flowers by placing them between two sheets of paper in a dictionary and leaving them there until they dried. Be sure to wait until the flowers are completely dried to laminate them, or they might mold.

Blog Favorites: Crafts requiring minimal materials

• 4 Crazy Kings shows how to make Easy Toilet Paper Tube Stamps. Materials used: toilet paper tubes and paint. Haven’t got paint? See the post for some substitution ideas.

 

• Make a nature collage using a lint roller as described at the Frugal Family Fun Blog. You can even turn your collage into a placemat! Materials used: a sticky lint roller and plants from your neighborhood.

 

• Make your own foam bath toys as seen at Pink and Green Mama. Materials used: craft foam (and scissors).

 

• Looking for outdoor water play ideas? Try this aluminum foil river from Filth Wizardry. Materials used: aluminum foil.

$1 Crafting with Dad: Dinosaur Models

Last Saturday, Mike and I decided to take advantage of my 14-year-old sister visiting to go on a mini-date. Our destination? Our local Michaels craft store, where we picked up these two wooden dinosaur models for $1 apiece. Emma and Johnny put the models together with Mike Sunday and last night, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves each time. Johnny’s dinosaur rarely falls apart, but Emma’s has a habit of losing limbs, so we may need to add some glue so she can play with it a little more. Both kids really enjoy their dinosaurs.

 

Our kids enjoyed finding the pieces and matching the shapes to the map provided with the wood cuts.

Blog Favorites: Fourth of July Crafts

 

• The picture above is our version of the 4th of July Firework Pom Poms from Make and Takes. Visit the linked post for instructions and much prettier pom poms. We didn’t have any blue yarn, so we used blue pipe cleaners for the handles. My kids have no clue what pom poms (or fireworks) are, and I think they’re both a bit perplexed by this craft. Maybe they’ll get the point after our local parade on Saturday.

 

• The Frugal Family Fun Blog shows how to make a patriotic wreath using a paper plate, glue, and punched out stars. Sticker stars would work great also.

 

• No Time for Flash Cards shares Letter F Flag and Flag Place Mat crafts.

 

• Make a Handprint American Flag as shown at Her Cup Overfloweth.

Yarn prints

MATERIALS:

• Paper
• Yarn or string
• Tempera paint
• Phone book

This is another craft that Emma found in this French craft book. It’s quite simple.

STEPS:

1) Place a sheet of paper in an old phone book, coat the yarn or string (except one end) in paint, and arrange the yarn on the sheet of paper, leaving the end hanging out:

2) Place a second sheet of paper on top and close the phone book:

3) Remove the string, pressing down on the phone book

4) Open phone book, retrieve papers, and lay out to dry

RESULTS:

We made three different prints using slight variations to this technique.

Here is the first print, which was done with a lot of paint on the yarn and pressing down quite firmly on the phone book:

A second print with a moderate amount of paint, done closing the book and then re-opening and separating the pages before removing the yarn:

A third print made with the least amount of paint and pressing only lightly on the phone book while removing the yarn:

The third technique is the one recommended by the book, and I think I do like the effect best.

Emma enjoyed this activity and it created minimal mess, but she wasn’t interested in making more than three prints. I think it is something we’ll try again, though, and I’d like to turn the prints we have into cards. I also think this could be a good activity for introducing the concept of mirror images.

Picnic Table Talk: Arts and Crafts

I was really excited when I heard that the picnic table talk topic for this week was arts and crafts. As the title of my blog implies, I love crafting with and for my children. I wrote about things I do to encourage creativity in our home here (there are more excellent ideas in the comments for that post). That post inspired this post about crafting in tight and/or rented spaces (there are some great suggestions in the comments for this post also). Crafting can get pretty messy, so I shared my best laundry tips and tricks here.

I get fantastic inspiration from blogs that I read, and I sporadically share my personal favorites through “blog favorites” posts. Here are a couple favorite activities I made up with my kids:

• Using a plastic desk protector and a roll of paper to make various play mats – so far we’ve done a Play-doh play mat, a restaurant play mat, and a house plan play mat.
• Geometric shapes felt board activities.

Emma has recently started inventing her own craft activities, which is very fun and rewarding to see.

I’m always a fan of free-style art, and let’s not forget nature’s art. I try to let my kids play outdoors as much as possible, weather permitting, and I’ve even been known to bring the outdoors in on particularly blistery days.

I love art supplies. Here are the basics that I try to always have on hand:

• Felt
• Markers (I love Crayola washable)
• Crayons
• Construction paper
• Glue sticks
• Plain paper
• Roll paper (we get ours from Ikea, which has the best price I’ve seen)

Other items I like to have around:

• pom poms
• pipe cleaners
• beads (with holes large enough to fit on the pipe cleaners)
• yarn
• fabric scraps
• various kitchen and household recyclables
• Play-doh (store-bought or home made)
• any other art supplies I can get my hands on

I also recently bought some Crayola paint-filled brushes that I love (and blogged about here). I’m pretty loyal towards Crayola products, in no small part because I ingested ridiculous quantities of their art supplies as a child and still turned out okay. Not that I recommend ever ingesting art supplies of any brand in any quantity, but I appreciate the non-toxic and frequently washable nature of Crayola products.

I look forward to reading everyone else’s posts about arts and crafts!

Luxury Crafting

Johnny and I went on a shopping outing to Staples this week, armed with $6.00 of Staples money from recycling two ink cartridges (if you didn’t know, Staples now gives $3/cartridge for any brand of printer ink). Rather than use it to buy something sensible, we came home with these Crayola paint brush pens and some chocolate (Ghirardelli Luxe, currently free after mail-in rebate – so you do pay for the stamp - and highly recommended by our household).

The kids are loving their new paint brush pens. I love them because they feel like they’re painting but there’s no mess and – if they do draw somewhere they aren’t meant to – the ones we got are washable and so will come out of anything. The effect is somewhere between a paintbrush and a marker, so it isn’t exactly like painting with real paint. The brush is made up of individual bristles, so it’s different from other paint markers I’ve seen that had a flexible foam tip. The pens cost nearly $1 apiece, don’t have a ton of paint inside, and are non-refillable, so it isn’t something I would buy all the time, but they’ve been nice as an experiment in new artistic media. Here are a couple recent masterpieces:

Johnny:

Emma:

Now for a question: Does anyone know if it’s possible to get something like this that is refillable that still allows for a fine point the way these do? I’ve seen refillable paintbrushes before, but they didn’t have the beautiful fine point you get from these paint brush pens…

Line Art

I found this activity here and on at least one other blog, but I couldn’t remember where and didn’t know what to search for – so if you think I may have seen your post, please let me know so I can link up!

Update: Here's one of the other places where I saw this activity, thanks April for helping me find it!

Basically you draw random squiggly lines on a sheet of paper and color in however you want. Emma and Johnny really enjoyed this activity; they actually spent a couple days finishing their artwork! I helped Johnny color his in, which was very relaxing. Our house is a bit torn up right now (switching to a new heating system as the previous one broke – something we knew might happen when we moved in and thankfully something that happened AFTER rather than in the middle of a long cold winter) so I’m very grateful for quiet table activities like this one!

Is it just me, or is Johnny’s hair getting lighter every day?

Here are their masterpieces – as I was scanning them in Emma noted that hers actually is not finished, so I guess she’ll be working on it some more!

Emma’s:

Johnny’s:

I drew the lines on Emma’s using a permanent marker instead of a plain black marker, which is why the lines on hers look so much bolder.

We just colored these in randomly, but I could see this being a nice add-on activity to a lesson on complementary/contrasting colors or color wheels. You can also try to color in the squiggles to look like different objects or animals (sort of like finding objects/animals in clouds). I’m also thinking of having the kids make a few on cardstock to turn into cards.

Blog Favorites: Spring Crafts Part II

No time for Flash Cards has a very cute hand cut butterfly craft. There’s a great song to go along, as well as a couple of book suggestions. I love the Japanese Cherry Tree craft from this site, too – also with book suggestions to go along!

I love these footprint ducklings from Just For Fun – and Sandy has a book to go along with this project too! I love all of the hand- and footprint activities on Sandy’s blog – her footprint butterflies and hand- and footprint lobster are a couple other favorites of mine.

Kiddio shares a set of adorable fingerprint bugs made using a stamp pad and pen on paper

What better spring table centerpiece than grass? See how beautiful a shallow pot of grass can be at Chasing Cheerios (just follow the instructions on your grass seed packet to plant)

From paper bag to book bag

Emma and Johnny really enjoyed making this during craft time at the library yesterday, so I thought I’d share it here.

MATERIALS:

• Two paper grocery bags
• Markers
• Colored paper to cut out decorations (optional)
• Stapler
• Glue stick (optional – only necessary if adding paper decorations)

STEPS:

1. Cut one grocery bag in half.
2. Cut open the four corners of the second bag to the halfway mark.
3. Put the bottom half of the first grocery bag inside the second one.
4. Fold the cut edges of the second bag into the first bag.
5. Use the top half of the first bag to cut and fold handles.
6. Staple handles to bag.
7. Decorate.
8. Use to carry library books (or anything else).

Child-directed crafting

Johnny’s been sick and/or grumpy because of teething for the past few weeks, and sort of as a result we haven’t done a ton of organized crafting. Emma decided to solve the problem by coming up with some crafts of her own. Sunday she found this pattern and asked me to crochet this small orange ball for her. She was actually quite the taskmistress until I finished it. Yesterday during Johnny’s nap she asked for beads and pipe cleaners, which she used to make these:

I think they were originally supposed to be necklaces, but when she realized how small they were she decided to turn them into collars for her stuffed animals. Here is a picture of her hard at work:

I really enjoy seeing her come up with ideas of her own, especially when they are ideas that she can also execute on her own!

Blog Favorites: Quick and Easy Crafts and Activities

Here are a few of my favorite quick, little-to-know-prep toddler crafts and activities:

• Having Fun at Home shares a magazine cut-out activity you can enjoy with your toddler – all you need is an old magazine or two and a pair of scissors!
• Make a pretty star garland using star-shaped post-it notes and string in this activity from the Frugal Family Fun Blog.
• Have some spare change and toddlers old enough to not stick everything in their mouth? Try this simple coin sorting activity from Teaching tots at home.

Some favorites at our house:

• Take a blank sheet of paper and
• color
• paint
• draw (my kids especially love the never-come-out-of-clothing gel pens)
• Run up and down the hall as fast as you can
• Go on a walk and look for rocks/leaves/flowers
• Read books
• Play-Doh
• Dump out fabric scraps
• Dump out the paper recycling

Another peg doll

See the face? She tried faces on the first two and wasn’t happy with them (I think her fingers slipped or something so they didn’t turn out as she had envisioned them), but the third time was the charm.

Emma’s fine motor skills always amaze me. And they balance out her gross motor skills - she didn’t learn to climb until Johnny (nearly 22 months younger and king of gross motor skills) taught her how, and she mastered jumping this month after over a year of trying. Funny how kids are so different within a single family…

I definitely need to get this girl some colored sharpies (to be used exclusively under supervision during Johnny’s naps). And a few more peg dolls – maybe we’ll find some other 3D objects for her to let her imagination go wild with also. If I’m feeling ambitious, we may try some fabric scrap clothing for the peg dolls as seen in this post at ikat bag – I’m guessing Emma would love that!

Follow-up to yesterday’s post

Our dining room wall – and why I buy washable markers

Thank you to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post! Blissful_e wrote a comment asking for ideas on letting kids make a mess in a rented space. I think this is a great question, and so I wanted to address it in a separate post rather than writing an essay in the comments section.

Before we moved to our current home, we rented an apartment that had cream carpet everywhere except the kitchen and bathrooms – not a good environment for creative toddlers.  Luckily I only had one child at the time. Emma and I did most of our crafting on the kitchen floor. I also put one of these office floor protector mats under one end of the dining room table and sat my daughter over that for any crafty activities. We also bought a good carpet stain remover. If we were still living in that apartment with two toddlers, I would probably put a gate up in the kitchen and physically lock the kids in there for any messy activities. I’m really glad our house is nearly all tile/linoleum…

Some other ideas:

• Cover part of the floor with an old flat sheet. If you don’t have any old flat sheets, see if your local thrift shop or even dollar store has some you can get for a cheap price.
• For activities involving water or paint, put down a cheap shower curtain. Ikea sells a clear one for $1, or at least they did last time I was there. You can put your flat sheet on top of the shower curtain if you want, to add some absorbency.
• If you have a deck or yard, do crafts outdoors whenever the weather is nice (preferably not-super-windy).
• The bathtub can be a great place to do crafts like finger painting – your child has a hard surface to paint on (the bottom of the tub), and you’ll probably want to give them a bath afterwards anyhow. Just make sure you are using washable paint.
• Have older children help clean up – this helps teach them not to be excessively messy. I had Emma wash off her wall artwork featured above (created while I was mopping the floor and she was supposed to be sitting quietly at the table coloring). She hasn’t tried writing on the walls since, but if she does, she’ll be on clean-up duty again. Crayola washable markers and crayons wipe off with a cloth dipped in plain water. I’ve had great luck getting regular crayons off of walls with a plain rubber eraser and a little elbow grease.
• Choose art supplies you don’t mind cleaning up that can be kept within your child’s reach. In our house we have a bin with fabric scraps, colored paper, craft sticks (the tongue depressor type) and pompoms that Emma can get out whenever she wants. None of these are likely to hurt anyone or anything, and they are all easy to clean up. As Emma and her siblings get older (particularly as they grow out of the “high risk of choking” phase), I will be able to add a wider range of objects to this bin. Tape some contact paper to a wall or window (an idea I saw at Chasing Cheerios) and your child can use these objects to create a tactile collage.

Any other suggestions on saving parental sanity while allowing messes in tight/rented spaces?

Creativity

One of the best things about having a three-year-old is that, now that Emma is fully conversant and able to draw (monsters, in this case), I see more and more of her personality. I am always amazed by the creativity of young children.

While scholastic achievement is important to me, I feel like fostering creativity in toddlerhood is at least as important as teaching letters and numbers. My mother called her home a “laboratory of learning” – a home full of opportunities for creativity and self-teaching. Looking back on my own childhood and at the environments I see in the homes of friends as well as on blogs, I’ve tried to identify a few ways to create this unique environment:

• Books. Lots and lots of them. Both parents read aloud to us on a weekly basis, but there were books full of pictures, craft books, science books, medical reference texts and two full sets of encyclopedias. Books are academic, but they can be used to foster creativity as well – and they are often necessary for self-teaching. I love the internet, but books provide information in ways websites cannot. I was by far the most craft-oriented of my parents’ ten children, and most of the ideas I got and (skills I learned) came from books. Check out ikat bag’s post on the books for more on this topic.
• Time for child-directed play. We had hours of unstructured time when we could come up with our own activities. My parents purposely limited extracurricular activities to create time for this. It helped that we spent most of our lives overseas, living in communities that offered a fraction of the activities available in the US.
• Structured activities to teach concentration and discipline. In my home growing up, this was music lessons, but I think it could be any activity requiring a child to focus. True creativity requires an ability to focus.
• Willing suspension of disbelief. Appreciate the magic of make-believe (I love this post on make-believe from Filth Wizardry).
• Tolerance of messes. Your entire house doesn’t need to be taken over by creativity, but designate an area where messy creating (be it painting, cutting paper, playing with cardboard) can take place.
• Underlying order. Complete chaos hampers creative thinking. Craft supplies aren’t useful if they aren’t organized.
• Appreciate the potential of simplicity. Simple toys frequently allow for more creative thought than complex ones.
• For toddlers in particular, the creative process is more important than the product.
• Things don’t always have to be done the “right” way. Who knows, maybe your child will discover a better way ;)
• Teach flexibility. A Large Room shares a brilliant example of this.
• The primary goal should always be to have fun.

What do you think? What have I left out? What would you change?

Peg doll and recyclables dollhouse

I bought these peg dolls for Emma quite a while ago, and today she asked to get them out and decorate them. I think they turned out quite nicely, especially given that it’s her first go at decorating a 3D object. I need to get her some non-smudging pens for this type of work, ideally in a range of colors instead of just black. Any suggestions as to what I should look for?

The dolls needed a house, so we took the lid of a shoebox and some scraps of cardboard and fabric and created this humble abode:

Emma loved this activity, and it was made completely from leftover scraps apart from the two dolls (99 cents for a package of two, and I think I got them 40% off). She spent at least an hour playing with the finished product this afternoon. Maybe we should take a second shoebox lid and build an addition onto the dollhouse. :)

Easter Eggs!

Most of our planned Easter activities this weekend were cancelled, first by rain (Saturday) and then by both kids coming down with a stomach bug (Saturday night and all day Sunday). Luckily everyone seems to feel a bit better this morning, although I wouldn’t say either child is completely healthy. The one activity the kids did enjoy was coloring Easter Eggs. We skipped on messy food dye, and instead used crayons.

First, they melted crayon  shavings on hot, freshly-boiled eggs.

MATERIALS:

• Freshly boiled eggs (still hot)
• crayon shavings
• plastic wrap or wax paper or parchment paper

Lay the crayon shavings out on the plastic wrap/wax paper/parchment paper.

Roll the eggs around in the crayon shavings. Depending how hot the eggs are, you might want to use a spoon or other utensil to do this. The crayon will melt onto the hot eggs.

Move the eggs onto a sheet of paper to dry, and then transfer them into the fridge.

More hardboiled eggs were cooling in the fridge, so when the melting activity was finished Mike pulled the cooled eggs out so the kids could draw on them with crayons. 

They had a wonderful time decorating their eggs.

And they were immensely pleased with the end result. I don’t have a good picture of these because the kids’ crayon lines were too faint to photograph with my camera, but I thought they were very pretty :)

Blog Favorites: Collages

I feel like I’ve been seeing collage crafts everywhere lately. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Check out this cute collage bear activity that goes with the book “Elmer and the Lost Teddy Bear” from Teaching Tots at Home.
• I’ve seen a LOT of contact paper plus tissue paper collages, and it’s on my crafts-to-make-with-my-kids list. I love the tactile nature of this one from Chasing Cheerios.
• More Mom Time shares how your toddler can make a fun no-theme collage.
• Use color collages to review/teach colors – learn how at The Adventures of Bear.

If you know of a collage craft I’ve missed, please link up in the comments, I’d love to see it!

Bunnies and Sheep

MATERIALS:

• Bunny and/or sheep pictures printed on paper
• Cotton balls
• Glue stick

This is another library craft. There’s nothing spectacularly original about it, but it was one of Emma’s all-time favorite crafts, and I remember enjoying it when I was around her age. She loved using the glue stick all on her own, and she enjoyed arranging the cotton balls on her sheep and bunny.

Emma’s finished sheep and bunny

Johnny’s finished sheep and bunny

You probably noticed that Johnny’s sheep and bunny are a little bare. He loved putting glue all over them, but he had no interest in the cotton balls. I even put a few on, and he angrily tore them off…

Blog Favorites: Easter Crafts

Crafts to make with your tot:

• Make a textured Easter egg using pom poms, buttons, scissors, glue, and construction paper in this craft from No Time for Flash Cards.
• More Mom Time shows how to make cute wibbly, wobbly egg friends using plastic eggs, Play-doh, googly eyes, craft foam, and glue. Also, check out her educational letter matching eggs post – all you need for this one is paper, scissors, and a pen.
• Looking for Easter card ideas? Try these handprint bunnies from Just For Fun!
• Lucky Me! shares how to make a pretty Egg Sun Catchers using card stock, contact paper, tissue paper, a hole punch, and cording or yarn.
• Dollar Store Crafts shares how to make animal masks for your Easter eggs using pipecleaners, googly eyes, cardstock, and glue.

Crafts to put in Easter baskets:

• Tired of plastic Easter eggs? Check out this fill-able fabric Easter egg tutorial from One Inch World!
• Craftpad has a tutorial for adorable, Easter-themed felt finger puppets.
• For bookworms, check out these felt paperclip bunny bookmarks from LollyChops. While you’re there, be sure to admire the gorgeous dyed eggs she creates using painter’s tape, freezer paper, scrapbooking punches, and – of course – eggs and dye.

Still need something to use as an Easter basket? I like this tutorial for a felt spring basket from maya*made.

Finally, be sure to check out Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile’s list of 75 children’s Easter books!