Turkey Craft

So a couple months ago I was looking at the tissue box in my bathroom and I really liked the designs. It reminded me of feathers and the blue made me think it would make a good peacock craft.

However, with Thanksgiving coming up, I decided a turkey craft would be a better idea. I also had tissue boxes in orange, brown and green, so I cut those up for the craft. Because I only started saving the boxes for a couple months, I knew I wouldn't have enough for my class to make these. So my daughter and I had another mommy-daughter craft night! We made the whole thing out of the boxes (except for wiggle eyes), but you could also use construction paper.

First we painted the inside bottom of the tissue box with brown paint. We used acrylic because that was the only brown paint I had.

I did help her spread it around because it was really thick. I almost left the box natural, but it was a little too gray for my liking. We also painted parts of the box red and orange, using tempera paint.

While that was drying, I cut out the middle circle of a couple paper plates and put a bunch of glue on them. Then we stuck on the feathers that I had cut out from the boxes.

With older children, you could probably let them glue the feathers directly onto the back of the turkey body, but I thought this way would be easier for my 20-month-old daughter. I let her put the feathers on any which way. She loved this part and kept adding more glue.

When she was done, we took a little break to let everything dry. The painted parts dried pretty quickly, so I traced her shoe on the brown one and cut out beaks from the orange one. From the red piece, I decided to cut out snoods (the red thing that hangs off the beak) instead of wattles (the red part that hangs below the beak), but you could do either or both. I also got out some wiggle eyes I received free from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

I brought my daughter back to the craft table and put some glue on the back of her turkey body and she stuck it to the feathers. Then I put glue on the back of the beak and the snood and I was SHOCKED when she actually stuck the snood on top of the beak! She's a genius, I thought! Then I put glue on the backs of small wiggle eyes and she put one up top and one down low. OK, so maybe she's not a genius.  Again, I waited for it to dry, then cut out all the parts of the paper plate that weren't covered by feathers. And this is what we got:

She's so proud of it! Here's mine:

I still plan on making a peacock out of the blue boxes someday, but I'm pretty happy with how these little turkeys turned out!

Glue and Chalk Creations

I saw these really cool spider webs at Pink and Green Mama. They used glue to make their spider on black paper, then when it dried they colored with chalk and the spider stayed black. I loved it! I tried it with my class a few weeks ago. I wrote their names with glue on black construction paper. The next day the kids colored over it with chalk.

Then they took a small pom pom and traced over their name. This made their name more visible and was great fine motor practice!

We had tried wiping the whole thing with a tissue, like they did at Pink and Green Mama, but it took off too much chalk from the paper. The little pom pom worked great!

I also let them draw whatever they wanted with the glue.

A couple days later they colored over it with chalk and used the pom pom again.

They turned out great and looked so bright on our wall!