Craft Stick Planes and Fingerprint Trains

We did a Transportation theme last week. I received some colorful jumbo craft sticks and white poms poms free from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

I thought they would be perfect for an airplane craft. The kids picked out two sticks and I used a glue dot to attach them together to make a plane. Then they made windows with a black Sharpie and added red and blue sequins for lights. They attached the sequins with mini glue dots.

If you have time to let the glue dry, you could use regular school glue instead of glue dots. But this way the kids could handle the planes right away and things didn't slide around when they were drawing on them. We also got out oil pastels and made a sky background on blue construction paper.

When the sky was done, they glued on their planes using regular Elmer's glue and then glued on some white pom poms behind the plane.

I love the little puffs of smoke!

We also made some trains using our fingerprints. My inspiration came from CraftoArt.com. First the kids drew a train track (or just a line) on their papers. Then, using that line as a guide, they made fingerprints to represent train cars. We used ink pads, but paint would work as well.

Then they used a thin Sharpie to add wheels and details to the train cars, as well as connect them together.

For the smoke, they dipped their fingers in gray paint and added prints starting from the front of the train, and then up and back.

They turned out pretty cute.

When the paint was dry, they could draw in a background if they wanted to.

Cork Boats

Our theme this week is Transportation, and today's topic was boats. I have a ton of corks lying around. I bought a bunch online when I made a wine cork wreath several years ago and then my dad gave me a whole bag of corks that he's been saving for years. So I dug those out and put them in groups of 3 so they were all similar in size. Then I hot-glued them together.

At school, the kids painted the corks.

They painted them on little pieces of paper so I would be able to carry them to the drying table without getting my fingers full of paint. They could paint the top and sides if they wanted, but they didn't paint the bottom. While the corks were drying, the kids went to another table to make a quick sail. I just cut out little sails from construction paper. The kids used paper punch pieces (that were left over from a project we did last week) to decorate their sails.

Then they picked out a colored toothpick and I taped on the sail. When the corks were dry, I stuck the toothpick in the middle cork.

And then, the best part -- we filled our sink so we could see them float!

The kids were amazed that they actually floated! And when I showed them what happens when you blow on them, they were all excited to get them home in their bathtub so they could have races! (And one sweetie even mentioned putting it in his toilet! I told them all not to do that or I would definitely be hearing about it from their parents tomorrow morning!)
Note: Some of the paint started to run in the water, so you might want to use waterproof paint, or at least not washable paint!

**Linking up to the parties on my sidebar!**

Name Trains

We made trains today to go along with our transportation theme. I got the idea to do Name Trains from PreKinders. First I cut squares from all different colors of construction paper. Then I used stencils to make letters on the squares.

The kids first drew a railroad track onto large white construction paper. (I cut them in half the long way.) Then they drew in a background.

After that came the letter search. The kids had to find all the letters in their name and put them on the track behind an engine. Once they had it all laid out, they glued it down. Only one name didn't fit onto the paper (Caroline), so we just glued on another piece of paper to the end. I also cut out a bunch of circles from black construction paper for the wheels.

The kids really enjoyed putting their trains together. They also colored the engine and added more of a background if they wanted to.

 

10/14/12 UPDATE:

We made these again this year and they turned out so cute, I wanted to share them again. What I did differently was have the kids use whole pieces of construction paper so they could draw more of a background. And the engines were bigger this year, as well.