Tag

puzzles

Popsicle Stick Heart Puzzles


Make a sweet message of love for mom, dad or grandma and grandpa. Popsicle stick Valentine's heart puzzle. Arts & crafts for kids and preschoolers. Cute gift idea.

Love is in the air. Valentine’s Day is just a few weeks away and my daughter is loving all of the hearts. She has been making sweet Valentine’s every chance that she gets. She even learned to spell and write the word love on her own. It is wonderful to get love messages from my little girl now.

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Puzzle Piece Turkey Craft

Puzzle piece recyclable turkey craft - Thanksgiving and fall arts and crafts for kids - preschoolers.

It has been a hectic of couple of weeks. Between moving out of our house, the construction on our new house not being finished, our daughter starting preschool & just the regular everyday stuff, I have barely had a moment to think. We have had to slow down on our regular craft routine because we have limited supplies with almost all of our home still in storage.

This morning before school, Mai asked if we could do a craft. I promised her that we would when we got home. With Thanksgiving nearing, we decided to make another turkey craft and dug through our supplies to see what was available. The first bag we came across had some old puzzle pieces in it & that is what we decided to use.

What you will need:

Old puzzle pieces

Paint

Construction paper

Googly eyes

Markers

Glue

Directions:

Paint your puzzle pieces in the color of your choice.

Mai wanted purple, I chose red & Ashley chose to mix her colors.

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Ashley was so excited, she painted almost the whole bag of puzzle pieces.

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After you are done painting them. Let them dry.

Cut the turkey’s body out of brown construction paper. Also cut out a beak & feet.

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Glue the body onto a piece of paper. Glue on googly eyes, the beak & feet.

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When your puzzle pieces are dry, glue them around the body to form the feathers. Draw in the wattle using a red marker.

Mai made her whole turkey by herself.

Puzzle piece turkey craft

I did the bodies for me & a tired little Ashley.

Puzzle piece Thanksgiving turkey craft for kids. Puzzle piece Thanksgiving turkey craft for kids

This was a quick and easy craft

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Puzzle Pieces For Teaching Sight Words

Puzzle Piece Sight Words

 

One of our favorite learning tools in our home has always been puzzles. Picture puzzles of course are fabulous for teaching them problem solving & matching up their shapes & colors, but many puzzles have an extra layer of learning to them. Puzzles have taught our daughter her US. States, a good portion of her countries & all of her planets.

We have puzzles everywhere, board puzzles, jig saw puzzles & large floor puzzles that clutter up our whole house.

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The benefits have outweighed the mess.

We have been working on sight words & writing lately. Mai recognizes & can write & spell her name now. We have been trying to work on the other basics as well.

We used a blank puzzle that we have had lying around for a long time. You can purchase a blank puzzle for about a dollar at a craft store or you can just flip over your old puzzle & work on the back or paint over the front & let dry before adding in your sight words. As with most families of a small child, I am sure that you have several puzzles that are missing pieces.

Puzzle Piece Sight Words

Write out your sight word using magic markers or paint. Make a design across the pieces that you will be using to have a color & shape reference to join them back together. Make a small picture scribble of your sight word on the connecting pieces to help them understand what the word is. Mai knew right away that this was supposed to be her mama.

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“Who is that Mai?”

“It’s Mama.”

“How do you spell mom?”

“M. O. M.”

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We made an assortment of different words. We put each together & spelled them together. We also found another fun craft project with our extra puzzle pieces in the process. Stay tuned for our cute puzzle piece craft.

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Puzzle piece sight words - this would be  agreat way to use recycled puzzles

Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.

 

Related Posts:

http://dabblingmomma.blogspot.com/2015/02/dr-seuss-cvc-words.html

http://tinytotsadventure.com/2015/03/20-name-activities-and-crafts-for-toddlers-and-preschoolers/

What Puzzles Have Taught My Toddler & Me

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I think most mothers can agree that they feel a sense of pride when someone compliments them on their child, whether it is how cute they are, or well behaved, sweet or intelligent. It is nice to hear. I have been told for a long time how smart our daughter is.  I have even had a few friends of ours with children ask for our secrets. I would like to take all the credit for it, but I do think much of it she was just born with. Of course we want to help our little one’s mind along & we do so by reading to her often, answering her never ending list of questions and by doing puzzles.

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Kids learn to love puzzles from an early age. What’s not to love? They are bright & colorful with lots of pieces to play with and fun pictures. Puzzles aid in developing their fine motor skills, hand eye coordination and cognitive thinking. One thing that they taught me was I should not underestimate my child’s ability to learn based on her age.

At only two years of age my daughter knows all of her U.S states. She knows them by shape, location & name. She learned all of this from doing a puzzle. When we received the foam puzzle as a gift, I never imagined that she would actually be able to do it, but I would take it apart and rebuild it with her daily, pointing out and naming the states as I went. So sufficed to say we were shocked the day that she corrected her uncle as he was trying to place Idaho in the wrong spot. “No Uncle Pete, Idaho goes next to Washington.” From that day on she did her puzzle on her own without mommy’s help.

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Don’t mind the fact that Massachusetts is missing.

From there we continued with the geography lessons. We introduced a new puzzle with all of the countries. The countries were all represented by animals indigenous to their region. “Look mama, the Panda bear lives in China.” Yes it does, baby. Yes it does. We now try to teach her everything regardless of how advanced it might seem.  I will never underestimate my child again.

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