We just discovered that we have a hive of bees living in our porch. Every day for the past few weeks, the bees have been buzzing around our heads as we are outside playing.
There was one that lingered on our porch a few days ago & my daughter and I wanted to investigate a little. We watched it for a while as it rubbed its legs together and sat on our step.
My 4 year old loves to play with yarn. Many of our favorite activities and crafts are wrapped or threaded with yarn. We made lovely yarn wrapped hearts earlier this year & my daughter loved it.
She loves the yarn because she loves to unravel & cut it and I love it because it is great for her fine motor skills.
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This craft is fun to make & is fun to play with after you are finished, at least my daughter thought so.
Earth Day is April 22nd. It is never too soon to start teaching your children about the planet & how to protect it. We have taught our daughter to recycle & the importance of not wasting food, water or electricity. Even her favorite book “The Lorax” teaches her about what can happen if we don’t protect our planet.
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“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” Dr. Seuss – The Lorax
Since my daughter loves sewing so much, to celebrate this Earth Day, we opted to make an Earth craft & lacing activity. Here is how.
What you will need:
Cardboard
Yarn
Directions:
Draw a circle and a rough sketch of the Earth on a piece of cardboard. The shapes do not have to be perfect. Poke holes around the outline of the shapes of the continents.
Paint the cardboard using green for the inside of your outline & blue on the outside. Let the paint dry.
Use a yarn needle to thread through the holes on the inside of the continents.
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My daughter is obsessed with threading buttons. When she is bored she will just grab the box of buttons and thread one pipe cleaner after another. I have a drawer full of button necklaces made by my sweet little girl. With spring around the corner, I thought that we could put those button stringing skills to some good use and make a new wind chime for our new home. For our purposes, we used pipe cleaners. You may do this with yarn or string as well.
What you will need:
2 paper bowls
A variety of buttons
Pipe cleaners –
A small Play-doh lid
A foam sheet in any color
Glue
Directions:
Poke holes around the top of the paper bowl forming a circle. Poke one more hole through the center.
Pull a pipe cleaner through the center hole and bend at the top to secure. Poke a hole through the small Play-Doh lid & slide it up the pipe cleaner.
Cut 2 identical pieces of foam in any shape & glue the pieces together around the bottom part of your pipe cleaner.
Cut some of the pipe cleaners so that you have different lengths going around.
It did not take much convincing to get my daughter to start stringing up some pipe cleaners with the buttons for our wind chime. I had her only fill about 1/4 of the pipe cleaner& then we spread the buttons out. Poke each pipe cleaner through the hole in the bowl & bend at the top to secure.
Poke two holes in the other paper bowl & make a loop with another pipe cleaner like shown. Bend to secure underneath. Glue this bowl over the top of the other bowl. This will cover up all of the pipe cleaner knots on top of the other bowl & just make it look cleaner.
Find a spot to hang your wind chime.
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Painted Styrofoam Ball Necklace
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Like many little girls, my daughter loves to play dress up. She loves putting on her princess dresses & trying to walk in mommy’s high heels and she loves jewelry too. Lately, she has been enjoying threading buttons & pasta and anything else she can get her hands on to make necklaces for me & her to wear. Yesterday, we added Styrofoam to that list too.
We grabbed a handful of 2″ Styrofoam balls out of our craft supplies & then one larger one. I poked a wooden skewer into each to make it easier for painting & drying.
Hold on to the skewer & use acrylic paints to paint around each ball.
Put the skewers in a deep container ball side up & let them stand to dry.
Once dry, remove the skewer & use a plastic yarn needle to poke through the existing hole & string up your painted Styrofoam.
Tie a knot at the end to finish it off.
Just look at that smile.
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We recently moved into a house that was still under renovation. Most of our belongings were in storage for months while we waited for our home to be move in ready. While unpacking our kitchen, I noticed that a lot of our food was getting close to their expiration. I had open containers of flour & oats that I wanted to use up, so this morning I made a couple of dozen oatmeal mini muffins. They were a big hit by the way. I still had a little bit more flour & oats left, so we tried our hand at oatmeal play dough.
Ingredients:
2 cup of oats
2 cup of flour
1 cup of water
1-2 tbsp honey
Food coloring optional
Directions:
Add the water to the oats and add the honey. Stir well. Mix in the flour & then knead with your hands. It may seem like a lot of flour, but keep kneading well and it will absorb. (Add extra water a tbsp at a time if needed until you reach your desired consistency)
I loved the texture of this play dough. It was very firm & moldable. My daughter of course wanted to dive right in.
I was so excited about how well it molded. I asked Mai what we should make. She said that she wanted to make a pyramid. We sliced the play dough into rectangular pieces and constructed our own pyramid.
As if the play dough wasn’t messy enough, mommy added another element of mess & made icing to bind the pieces together.
This was a great activity for both of us. While Mai constructed her towers & googly eye cookies, mommy made a little something of her own too.
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We had a lot of plans for this weekend. My daughter had a birthday party for one of her best friends & we were throwing a Super Bowl party at our own house. Unfortunately, a case of the sniffles changed things a bit. Mai had a nasty cough & a runny nose, so we stayed in our jammies all weekend. She may have been a little under the weather, but it did not slow her down any. She was still running around like crazy. I wanted to get her to sit down & relax, so we sat down & did a quiet & simple activity together.
We cut the center of a paper plate out.
Mai loves using the paper hole punch, so she was excited when I gave it to her & let her punch around the inside & outside of the paper plate. I started it & showed her where to punch so that it didn’t clip just the edges.
I punched the outer edge of a paper bowl because that was a bit too tricky for her & then poked the bowl through the center of the plate and glued it into place.
We used a yarn needle to sew the bowl & plate together with yarn & then to sew lacing around the edge of the plate. I showed my daughter how to use the needle under & over, under & over. She skipped some holes at first & would ask me for help when it would tangle, but eventually she got into the groove & was able to do it perfectly without any help.
We had so much fun with our project that we made several.
She enjoyed the sewing so much that I wanted to see if she would enjoy weaving as well.
I took a paper bowl & cut around the edges like shown.
The weaving was similar. It weaved over & under, over & under between sections.
My daughter was not interested in weaving. I finished the weave myself. We glued the woven bowl into the center of another paper plate & then punched more holes around the plate for sewing.
She liked this hat the best of all. We had fun sewing our hats, sniffles and all.
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My daughter is slightly obsessed with yarn. We have a big bin filled with yarn & ribbon and she pulls it out all the time. She likes to cut it, tie it to things & make obstacle courses throughout the house with it.
I was a bit under the weather this weekend. It is tough to be sick when you have a child. It is even tougher to be sick when you have a child & are sharing a basement with that child, your hubby and a cattle dog while your house is in the final phases of construction. I spent a lot of time on the couch & trying to sleep and my daughter spent a lot of time drawing pictures with her friend that we were staying with. Here is a picture she drew for me while I was sick. There is me on the couch & my daughter next to me. The bald guy in the background is my husband with our dog.
She drew me a bunch of get well cards & drawings. It was very sweet. Shewoke up yesterday & grabbed more paper & kept drawing. This time it was a Christmas tree. When she was finished, she was so very proud. And just like in one of our latest crafts, she drew a little girl & boy and said they were looking out the window. So cute!
She was so excited about her drawing. She wanted to hang it up. She then said to me “Let’s make more Christmas trees. I was still feeling a bit run down, but I have a hard time saying no to crafts.
So we did!
TRIM THE TREE CHRISTMAS CRAFT
My daughter is big into using her safety scissors right now. She loves to cut up everything.
I wanted to give her the chance to practice her cutting skills.
I cut 4 triangles of different sizes out of construction paper for each tree being made.
I glued the top 1/3 of the largest triangle & pressed it down onto the bottom of a piece of blue construction paper.
I glued the next biggest the same way over lapping the bottom triangle & continued this way with the rest. The bottoms of each triangle should be loose.
I had two different ages & skill levels doing this project. My daughter used the scissors, while her younger friend glued her own shapes down without the use of scissors.
*Use your own judgment & operate caution when letting your child use scissors.*
Use scissors & cut upward like shown on all triangle sections.
Mai had her own method.
She just want to cut. She trimmed & trimmed some more. When she cut the bottom tier & saw her trunk exposed, she cracked up & said “It looks like I went overboard.” I laughed. Where does she get this stuff?
She used a marker to color in the gap.
I used a marker to curl my cut sections upwards.
After we were done trimming our trees, we used buttons to decorate.
Here are the girl’s finished products.
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