Easter Crafts

These crafts are nothing new, just a couple that we have seen on other sites and wanted to try. We did the Easter egg suncatchers as seen on Lucky Me!, but without the black border. I actually made a black border, but Amelia wanted to put the border back together with the middle and outer pieces of the black paper I had cut the border from, as if it were a puzzle, so the border never made it onto the egg.

We also tried foil eggs from the latest Kids Craft Weekly. She wasn't too interested in making lines in the paint with cotton swabs, as in the KCW version, but did try drawing on the paint with a pencil. Amelia really enjoyed this activity and painted her eggs for quite a while before moving on to painting her hands, feet, legs, arms, belly, etc., which is what she usually spends the most time doing!

Easter Egg Matching Game

Plastic Easter eggs have been one of Amelia's favorite toys since she was a young toddler. I have been surprised how much other kids who come over also like to play with them. One thing we have done with them is this simple matching game. I used crayons and colored pencils to color small circles of paper to match the colors/patterns of the plastic eggs I happened to have, then glued them into an empty egg carton. Amelia places each egg into the appropriate compartment. She doesn't spend a long time with this activity, but likes doing it every now and then. I think she would have liked it more if I had made it when she was a little younger and more interested in color matching. Once she had a good grasp of different colors, she kind of lost interest in color matching activities.

Golf Tees and Styrofoam

I have been wanting to try this classic activity for a while and finally got around to buying golf tees and finding a piece of styrofoam. Amelia has taken more interest in this than I initially expected. She likes putting the tees in, taking them out, and putting them back in again, but hasn't been too interested in hammering them. After putting all of the tees in, she will tell me what she has made. So far, it has been a table, a cake, and a pumpkin with goo (the tees are the goo and she pretends to be cleaning out the inside of the pumpkin while taking out the tees).

Grocery Day

We usually do our grocery shopping on Monday mornings, so here are a couple of grocery-related activities we have done recently. This morning I made Amelia a pictorial shopping list, using pictures cut from grocery store ads. First, I cut out pictures of items that were on my shopping list, then she helped glue them onto the rectangles I had drawn on the paper. I wrote the words for each item and as we shopped and found each one, she put a dot sticker on it. She liked this and it helped keep her busy in the store.

Last week, we did the grocery cart collage from Thrifty Craft Mama's site. I drew the cart a bit larger onto a piece of construction paper and Amelia chose foods to glue in the cart. This activity is great for times when you need a quick, non-messy, calming activity, which is often what we need in the evenings. She had fun doing this and since doing it, has enjoyed looking at it and talking about the foods in the cart.

Felt Board Fun

I got the felt board back out after having put it away for a while and Amelia has been very interested in it. Ours is very easy to make and, as you can probably see in the photos, has been well-loved! To make it, you just glue a square of felt to either the inside or the outside cover of a large pizza box. I have lots of felt board story pieces I made years ago when I was a preschool teacher, which Amelia likes, but lately she has been using the pieces to do felt board nursery rhymes and simple songs. I made some very simple pieces on the spur of the moment out of felt scraps I had on hand to go with several of her favorite rhymes and songs. The photos show pieces that go with Three Little Kittens and the Kookaburra song (the bird actually came from a library storytime, but would be very simple to make). You could obviously make much more detailed pieces than these, but not wanting to spend the precious little time I have when she is actually sleeping cutting out felt board pieces, I went for quick and easy and she doesn't seem to mind. She loves putting them on the felt board and saying the rhymes or singing the songs.

Styrofoam Sculptures

We did a couple of different styrofoam sculptures today. First, we tried the rainbow activity from Chasing Cheerios, but used our pastel pipe cleaners and did not have the book to read along with it. Amelia LOVES books, so we will definitely have to try to find Let's Paint a Rainbow or something similar at the library and try this again.

After we made the rainbow, Amelia remembered that we had also bought some craft sticks during the same trip to Michael's and asked me to get them out. She came up with the idea of sticking them into the styrofoam. Then she used her markers to draw lines on some of the sticks. She called them her "stick labels."

Rolling Things Down the Slide

Amelia has been enjoying rolling a toy car from her sandbox down the slide, so I brought out a variety of vehicles for her to try rolling down the slide. She had fun with this and after rolling the trucks and cars down a few times, started experimenting with other things, such as her shoes!

It has been interesting to see her enjoy this activity in different ways at different ages. When she was a young toddler, I would roll things down while she watched and she would laugh and ask me to do it again and again and again. Now that she is older, she likes to experiment with rolling them down herself.

We have done other fun variations on this activity, too, such as rolling different sizes of balls, rolling the vehicles backwards, driving them up the slide, talking about which ones go farthest, etc.