Snow crafts

With all the snow falling A17 and I figured it was time for some snow crafts. The first idea I found online. You make this snowflake print by cutting a bell pepper in half. Dip each half in white paint or use a paintbrush to paint it on. Be sure to cover the parts in the middle too. Press the pepper down on a sheet of blue paper--press hard on the middle. It didn't turn out as well as we had hoped, though A17 thought the pepper was cool! We had to add a little more paint to the center to make it more snowflake-ish.

The second snowlflake was made by putting glue in the center of the paper and using qtips to make a snowflake pattern. Two very quick and easy snowflake crafts!

Pirate Crafts

A17 finished a fun unit on Pirates. We decided on a pirate unit after he had so much fun doing a pirate skit at AAC camp last summer. Aarrgh!! For this craft we found a wooden box ( JoAnn's) and painted it black. Then he glued on wooden decorations also found at the craft store. Inside are gold coins cut from craft foam. We also used the foam coins to play a pirate board game.

The second craft is a foam kit from Michaels. This was a bit trickier due to all the glue and needed to be completed in stages. The sails didn't go on exactly right, so we improvised!

For the map we started with off white paper and printed out a map. We crumpled up the paper then smoothed it back out. To give it an old look we used a wet tea bag and "painted" all over the paper. For a quick dry, I used my hair dryer.

Whale Pop-Up Book

As part of our continuing study on the ocean, today we studied whales. A17 made a very cute whale pop-up book. It was very easy to do by following the template. I helped with the cutting and the writing. I found this idea and reproducibles in the Evan Moor How to Make Books with Children Series: Read a Book-Make a Book. This book has projects for 38 different books such as Stellaluna, How to Eat Fried Worms and Peter Rabbit. The projects can be adapted for a variety of different stories. For example, the duckling pop-up could be used for any story about deucks or Easter. In addition to pop-ups, the projects also include layered books, pull tab books, slit books, and double hinged books.

Starfish art project

As part of our big unit on oceans, A17 read about starfish or sea stars today. We found a neat craft project to go along with our study. We traced starfish shapes onto sandpaper, cut them out and painted them. We painted them the same colors as the ones we read about in Rookie Read-About Science : Stars of the Sea by Alan Fowler. The pictures don't do them justice since you can't see the great texture! I think this would work great for sand dollars or coral too. I found this project idea in the back of Let's Read and Find Out Science 1: Starfish.