Polar Bear Silhouettes

Today we learned about the polar bear. My art project idea changed several times throughout the day. My original idea was to place a template of a bear on white paper and have the kids spray different colors of paint over it, then remove the template to reveal a white bear. But after only finding one spray bottle, I decided to have the kids paint their papers with watercolors. I tried my best to explain the northern lights to them, but it's a pretty hard concept to understand! I told them to paint streaks of color on their paper.

 

Then I had a bunch of white cut-outs of polar bears. (I just did a google search for polar bear silhouettes and used a few as my templates.) But when I held up the white bears on the paper, it was hard to see the outline, especially if the child didn't paint their entire paper. You would think I would have checked this after cutting out one bear, but no. I had cut out about 15 bears. So I scratched that and decided to do black. After all, the northern lights come out at night and so the bears wouldn't look white anyway! Then I was going to have the kids rip black paper up to make the ground, but the torn look just wasn't doing it for me. It looked like mountains instead of snow or ice. So I straightened them out a bit with a scissors.

Finally, the kids glued on the bear silhouettes, which I re-cut in black. (Thank goodness for nap time!) There was enough room for one big bear and one little bear.

I hung them in the window so the sun can shine through the northern lights. They are much prettier than these pictures show.

 

 

Fun Fact: Humans are polar bears only predator.

Pine Cone Snowy Owls

I had a bunch of jumbo pine cones left over from my Christmas decorations. They are the cinnamon-scented ones. So as I was putting away all my decorations, I decided to hang on to them and use them for a craft with my class. Today was the day. I've seen many pine cones turned into snowy owls, and since our theme is Polar Animals this week, we tried it out. It was so easy! We used cotton balls, wiggle eyes and paper beaks.

The kids tore apart the cotton balls and stuffed them into the pine cones. No glue was needed!

Then we used glue dots to attach the eyes and beaks. Even though snowy owls have yellow eyes, I let the kids pick whatever color eyes they wanted. Look at these cuties!

 (Hee, hee -- love that one!)

Fun Fact: A snowy owl's legs and feet are heavily feathered to protect it from the cold.

Hey Diddle Diddle

We are practicing our rhyming this week by learning about nursery rhymes. We talked about Hey Diddle Diddle today and I was trying to decide on a craft for it. Should we do the little dog? The cat? The cow? What about the dish and the spoon? But then I saw this bulletin board display at Creative Tots and decided to make all the pieces! I googled Hey Diddle Diddle coloring sheets for most of it, but the dish and spoon I traced (using a plate and spoon from our kitchen area). The kids picked whichever one they wanted and painted it with watercolors.



When they were dry, the kids who made dishes and spoons added faces to them.

I cut them all out, made a big moon, and displayed it on the wall.

We had the cows,

and the cats and dogs.

But I think my favorite are the dish and spoon sets.

 

So cute! Check out our other Mother Goose crafts: Humpty Dumpty, Hickory Dickory Dock, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Mother Goose.

Winter Wonderland Class Display

I haven't been around much lately. Because of the holidays, I've had some days off and the days I did work we just did simple projects. But I was looking through some pictures on my computer from years ago and found an old class display that I thought I could share with you. This is from so long ago that I never took a picture of the completed display. It wasn't until several years later, when I dug it out of my basement, that I decided to take a picture just so I'd remember it. Then I threw it away. So I will try my best to describe how I did it, but I have no step-by-step pictures or anything. Here it is on my living room carpet:

I used white fleece and covered it with that sparkly, snow-like material. I cut two hills from it, overlapping one with the other. I cut out a little peanut-shape from the sparkly layer, and put in some blue material topped with a silvery see-through material. This would be an ice skating pond. I cut out all the clothes from felt. I also added a snowman and snowballs using styrofoam balls cut in half. I cut out a snow angel shape from the sparkly layer so just the white fleece would show. And the felt tree has little beads for ornaments. I took a picture of each child and glued on the heads.



 

When I hung it up outside our classroom, I used a starry night material for the top, so it looked like all the kids were playing on snow hills at night. And I titled it Winter Wonderland. I'm sorry I don't have a photo of the complete project, but I made this about 8 or 9 years ago. Long, long before Tippytoe Crafts. But I hope these pictures will be enough to give you an idea of what it was like, and maybe inspire other teachers. I don't think I'd do it again, because it took a long time making all the clothes. But it didn't cost me a cent. All the felt and material was from my scrap piles.



 

I remember everyone oohing and ahhing over it. This may have been my very first "class display." Now I try to make them a little simpler, and have more of the kids' work in them, instead of just mine. But it is really fun to come up with different ways to show off my class!

Top 12 of 2012

I thought I'd join in on the whole "12 in '12" thing that many bloggers seem to be doing. So without further ado:

12. Glow-in-the-Dark Fireflies

 

11. Painting with Marshmallows

 

10. Handprint Palm Tree

 

9. Wagon Wheel Pasta Prints

 

8. Horton Hears a Who Craft

 

7. Bubble-Print Fish

 

6. Paper Plate Clowns

 

5. Hickory Dickory Dock Mice

 

4. Snowy Owls

 

3. Pretzel-Stick Trees

 

2. Blubber Experiment

 

1. Killer Whale Craft

 

And the Young-at-Heart post with the most views was Pink Lemonade Cupcakes.

 

Happy New Year!!



YAH: Baby Shower Ideas

While I was with my family over the holidays, they threw me and my husband a baby shower.

It was very casual but we had a lot of fun so I thought I'd share some of the things we did with you. My sister Suzie made the bathtub/shower cake.

 

She made the cake in a bread pan and the shower head is the top of a small plastic champagne glass glued to a straw. The water is ribbon. It even had "claw" feet, which I didn't get a picture of. She made those with golf ball rings. And it tasted great -- pink lemonade! I also got my own cloth diaper cake (which I showed you how to make here) and baby booties (which I shared with you here).

My sister Sarah made hot chocolate sticks with marshmallows and snowman Peeps!

They were so cute! And my sister Suzie made us some onesie cupcakes!

They were onesies rolled up with a sock in the middle and they were in cupcake liners. Adorable!

We also played a few games. For the first one, everyone had to blow up a balloon to the size they thought my belly was, then put it under their shirt to compare it with mine. The kids loved this.

But the adults had fun with it, too.

My mom won that game. Another game involved cutting a piece of ribbon to the size they thought my belly was. Then everyone wrapped the ribbon around me to see if they were right. I didn't get any pictures of that because I was busy getting wrapped up! My 3-year-old niece won. She was right on. My husband, however, cut his ribbon way too long. It was almost able to go around me twice! Hmm....
The third game I want to share with you is a drinking game. But not that kind! Little plastic babies were put into lemonade ice cubes. When we had punch, each person got an ice cube for their glass.

The first person whose ice melted so the baby floated freely yelled, "My water broke!' My brother Peter got the prize for that game!
And there was one last surprise that caught me off-guard. My family sang us a song. We have a tradition of singing songs as a "gift" either for a wedding or a 40th birthday celebration. So I was not expecting one at the baby shower! It was sung to the tune of "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills & Nash, but the words were changed to fit our situation. It was written mostly by my sisters Kate and Sarah and my brother-in-law Kurt played the guitar.

And of course I ended up crying through the whole thing, even though there were some funny lines.

I think part of it was the surprise and being the center of attention (I'm not very comfortable with that), but also part of it was that I honestly never thought I'd make it this far in my pregnancy. I just kept thinking of everything we've been through to get to this point and I couldn't stop the tears. But it was wonderful and I feel truly blessed to have such an amazing family!