Doctor's Kit

To end our Community Helper week, we learned about EMTs. (E was also our letter of the week so it worked out great!) I decided the kids could make little doctor's kits that I've seen several places online. But instead of using real items (I didn't want to "waste" our first aid supplies), I found clip art of different medical supplies and printed them out on one piece of paper. (UPDATE: If you want a free copy of this, please e-mail me at tippytoecrafts@gmail.com!)

That "toilet paper roll" (as my husband called it) is gauze, and my kids called the bandage wrap a sleeping bag! First the kids colored all the pictures.

Then they grabbed a doctor's bag (which I made by folding construction paper in half so it would open up), a white circle and two red rectangles.

They glued the circle and made a red cross on the front of the bag.

Then they cut out all their medical supplies.

They did a great job and never complained, even though it was a lot of cutting!

Finally, they opened their bags and glued all the pieces inside.

It was easiest to glue the two big pieces down first, then glue the smaller items around them.

On the handle of the bag, I wrote the child's name with "Dr" in front of it.

They turned out very cute and the kids got lots of fine motor practice!

Police Car Craft

We started our Community Helpers theme today, and first up was police officers. For our craft I found a coloring page of a police car and used that as my template. I cut out cars, wheels and windows from construction paper.

The kids glued the pieces together. I also used a star punch to make yellow and white stars so they could decorate the car. And they used markers to draw people in the windows and make doors!

Then they put some glue on that little thing sticking up on top of the car and sprinkled red or blue glitter on it.

That's how they made the light. They turned out so cute, especially with the faces in the windows!

Postage Stamps (and Police Badges)

We talked about mail carriers today and made our own postage stamps. I took pictures of the kids individually and then edited them in Picnik so they looked like pencil sketches. (I've mentioned this idea before here.)

I cut them into squares and added a "44" and "USA" in the corner. Then I cut slightly bigger squares from colored construction paper but used fancy scissors. Their pictures would be glued to these squares.

As you can tell, I had a hard time cutting in a straight line with these scissors. I don't know what it is, but the scissors never stayed straight! Anyway, the kids colored their picture with crayons and glued them to the colored squares. They were very excited to see themselves as a "stamp." Oh, it's the little things...

P.S. Yesterday we talked about police officers and made badges. It was such an easy project that has been done a million times, so I didn't think it was worthy of its own post. I'll just add it to this one. I found the badge here. Then I shrunk it down to the size I needed and wrote "Officer _______" on it. The kids wrote their names on the lines and painted them with watercolors. When they were dry, they added a couple star stickers and I laminated them.

P.P.S. This is my 100th post! Wahooooooo!!

Our Little Books

Today we talked about librarians and then we made our own books! We discussed how books have characters and usually some sort of problem that needs to be solved. Some kids followed this "rule" and others did not. But no matter how they did it, the stories were great! And for some reason, we had a lot of stories about princesses dying or being eaten. Hmmm.... Anyway, this is how we made our books. I just put together four small pieces of paper (about 1/4 the size of a normal piece of printing paper) and stapled them along the left side. I wrote "By ________" at the bottom of the front page. I let the kids draw some pictures as I went around the room asking them what was happening in their stories. I wrote the title for them and then a sentence or two on each page. On the last page I had written "The End" in dotted lines so they could trace it. Here's one of their stories:

Hot Air Balloon   By Morgan

 The hot air balloon crashed!

Then the airplane came and took the balloon to the hospital.

The hot air balloon got better and blew away.  The End

See? Short and sweet. I don't think my age-group could have handled a longer book, so I think four pages was perfect. Maybe if I could sit down with them one-on-one then a longer book would work. But in my experience, big groups mean shorter attention spans!

Five Little Firefighters

Today we talked about the important role of firefighters. Our craft project was based on a poem called "Five Little Firefighters." I got the idea from KidsSoup, but because I'm not a member I only had a tiny picture to go by. So I just made it up as best I could.

Yesterday I got a red hand print from all of the kids. I was so happy with myself for remembering to put the print near the top of the paper to leave room for the poem below. I completely forgot I needed to leave room at the top for the heads and hats!

Oops! Oh well, it was an easy fix. I just cut out the hand prints and put them on another piece of paper. Then the kids used a glue stick to add heads to the fingertips.

The heads are just circles I traced from a marker cap onto a few different colors of paper. Then they glued on firefighter hats.

The hats are a little silly. I did the best I could. I made two kinds, one with a short rim on one side and a long rim on the other (like the firefighter is looking sideways) and the other one with two short rims (as if the firefighter is looking straight ahead). But that was unnecessary because the kids didn't pay attention to that when they drew on the faces. So I would say you only need one kind of hat. After drawing faces, the kids drew arms -- basically just red lines coming off the fingers.

Finally, they drew the hose, which started at the pinky and went to the thumb. And then they used a glue bottle and blue glitter (say that 5 times fast!) to make the water coming out of the hose. I added a copy of the poem to the bottom of the paper.

These turned out pretty cute! Here's the poem I used:

Five little firefighters sleeping in a row.
Ring goes the bell, down the pole they go.
They jump on the engine and put out the fire.
Now they're back home, but they sure are tired.

**Linking up to TGIF Linky Party at Living Life Intentionally!**

Scrap Art

We are learning about community helpers this week and today we talked about garbage collectors. For art, I put out a whole bunch of leftovers from previous art projects.

I also made available our scrap paper bucket.

I didn't think it was right to call it garbage art, or even junk art. So this was our scrap art.

Nothing fancy. Nothing complicated. Simply simple.