Circus Treats

Our theme this week is The Circus! Today we talked about all the yummy treats you can get while you are there and we made two crafts to go along with it.

Cotton candy and popcorn! For the popcorn craft, I cut out a shape that resembled a little box or bag of popcorn and drew a red line near the top. I also cut up strips of red paper. The kids glued the strips of paper to the white paper, by lining them up along the red line. (I trimmed the ends off later.)

When they were done with their stripes, they added glue to the top part (we used a glue stick) and scrunched up yellow and white tissue paper squares and stuck them on.

So simple! I got the idea to use tissue paper from an Oriental Trading Company craft. It actually looks kind of real from a distance. I could almost smell it!

The cotton candy craft was just made with puffy paint (Elmer's glue, shaving cream and food coloring). You could easily draw a triangle on a piece of paper and have the kids paint above that, but I wanted them to be able to make a huge thing of cotton candy, so I added a triangle to the bottom of a piece of paper. Then the kids painted on their cotton candy.

It turned out that most kids didn't make a big one, so I guess it wasn't really necessary. When it was dry I cut around it. But I think I mixed my puffy paint too soon. I made it in the morning, then we had circle time and snack. By the time we did art the paint was a little stiff. Not a huge deal, but after painting with it, it mostly ended up drying lumpy instead of nice and puffy.

The kids didn't seem to care, but in the future I think I will wait to mix the shaving cream and glue until right before we are ready to do the project.

It was hard looking at these treat crafts all day, knowing we couldn't eat them. So I promised the kids I would bring in popcorn tomorrow. I wish I would have done that today. It would have been a great surprise for them!
UPDATE: This year we also made lollipops! Found out how by clicking here!