Paper Plate Umbrellas

Anyone else dealing with a lot of rain lately? It's no fun to be stuck inside all day with the kids, but our theme this week is Weather so it actually works out! Today we learned about clouds and rain and then made umbrellas using paper plates. The kids covered the bottom of the plate with bleeding tissue paper.

Then they sprayed it with water. (Make sure the extra tissue paper is out of the line of spray!)

I set the plates up to dry and believe me, it was messy! Carrying the plates over from the art table to the drying table without getting colored water to drip down was not easy!

You should probably wait until the tissue paper dries before removing it from the plate, because I didn't and my fingers got stained. Just keep that in mind. After peeling the tissue paper off, I left the plates to finish drying. Then I folded each plate in half and cut a scalloped edge. (You can leave the straight edge, too. I was just looking for something a bit more fun.) After cutting the edge, I was left with two plate halves that were identical. So I stapled them together at the top and the two sides. Then I used large pipe cleaners to make the handles, and I just taped them inside the plate.

They turned out so pretty and I hung them from the ceiling!

And after cutting all the scalloped edges, I was left with little pieces of colorful paper plate. I couldn't just throw them away, so at the end of the day, when I only had a few kids, we used them to make flowers.

I cut stems and leaves out and they glued them to some blue paper. I also cut a circle out for the middle of the flower. Finally, the kids glued the paper plate "flower petals" around the circle.

Afterwards, I realized we made April Showers that brought May Flowers (2 days early)!