Bottle Bracelets

Yes, another craft project involving bottles. What can I say, I like my malted milk :-D Today I cut rings from the centre of a couple of bottles and Bubble made them into beautiful bracelets. This activity worked even better than I was hoping and we'll be doing it again, I think with some sparkly gems and sequins next time!

WE USED:

* empty milk bottles (we used the smaller size flavoured milk bottles)
* scissors
* craft glue (or 'gloopy glue' if you're a Mr Maker fan ;-D)
* paint and brush
* items for decorating (we used buttons and glitter)

To get our bracelet rings I cut off the top and bottom off the bottles, then cut the centre section in half. If your bottle is too big around your childs wrist you can cut one side of the ring and adjust the length, then secure with tape or similar.

We mixed our glue and paint together so the embellishments would stick to the plastic well. Use a large quantity of glue to paint. We used the bottom section of our bottle to hold our paint.

One of Bubble's creations.

Bubble turning her bracelet to add more glitter.

Beautiful!

She decided the top of the bottle looked like a volcano and painted it red as well :-)

Bubble modelling one of her new accessories.

“Come over to play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up”

Wiggles Activity Bags

It's no secret we love The Wiggles magazine in our household (and no, we're not being bribed in any way to say that :-D). The activities are great and Bubble looks forward to picking it up every month. We sit down together and do the craft projects and she loves to 'read' the pictures and do the mazes herself. After it has been read cover to cover and all interesting things have been coloured in and drawn on by both girls we often use the pictures to make collages or other crafty type things.
This week though I went through it after the girls were done and cut out all of the little gluing activities and made some 'project bags'. All the little bits are contained inside the paper bag and they can then be glued to the front when the activity is being done. I've packed some into our pram 'play' bag for when we are out and about, put some in our rainy day activities box and we also did a few of them today - lots of fun :-)

WE USED:

* children's magazine
* paper bags
* scissors
* sticky tape
* glue

Other ideas: These puzzles and activities would work well laminated so they could be used over and over again.

I put the pieces for each activity inside the paper bags, then taped the activity headings to the front as labels. There are puzzles, matching games, interesting pictures for making collages, eye spy games, number and counting activities - anything I could cut up basically :-)

Bubble completing a puzzle bag today.

Some of the other bags Bubble did today - the top one is an eyespy game that I also cut into pieces to make a puzzle from, and the other is a silhouettes matching game.

Toddler Gluing Activity

Squeak isn't too interested in either painting or drawing, but loves experimenting with glue. We use a childsafe glue in case of those taste testing moments (Clag or homemade with flour and water) and she loves squishing and smearing the glue as much as she loves sticking things to it. She is 18 months old and it does get very messy, especially when the paper tears and gets saturated in one place.
To fix this problem I've started giving her a newspaper to glue her bits and pieces onto, there are so many layers that it doesn't matter how soggy it gets and she finds the pictures and patterns interesting as well. I also try and find lots of things of different textures for her to glue, her favourites so far being;

felt offcuts
textured or corrugated papers/cardboard
flattened patty pans
popsticks
matchsticks
cellophane (very messy though!)
lolly/chocolate wrappers

Please note : Clag + Newspaper can = stained hands and other things! I always put down a waterproof tablecloth and keep a washer close by :-)

F is for Friends

This afternoon we made another sound wall activity for the letter 'F'. While Bubble was at preschool I cut some felt shapes so that we could make some toilet roll people when she got home. I based the hair colours/styles on a couple of her little friends at school and she thought it was the best thing ever making miniature versions of her mates! :-D
The superhero toilet roll dude was just for fun, I got a bit carried away with my felt cutting...

WE USED:

* felt (fabric, coloured paper, ribbons etc...)
* toilet rolls
* textas/markers
* 'googly' eyes
* glue/blutack
* scissors

I precut some felt hair and clothes.

Bubble got busy gluing it all together. She found positioning the felt tricky at first but got better and better as we went along. We ended up using blutack to attach the eyes instead of glue as it didnt stick all that well (and Bubble enjoyed moving their eyes around :-D).

Bubble's mini friends :-)

A mini superhero - isnt he cute!

“Come play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up”

F is for Fairies

These little fairy paper dolls were easy to make and perfect for our letter wall theme 'F'. I used a great template page I came across on the net (link found here), and think the alien is also pretty awesome and would love to give it a go sometime soon! Bubble chose to decorate them with texta, glue, glitter (oh so much glitter!) and felt pieces she cut with scissors.

WE USED:

* template
* scissors
* markers
* glue
* decorations for your fairies

I cut some paper dolls using the fairy template on some lilac purple scrapbook pages. I realised after Id cut the first one out that I should have drawn the template on the reverse instead of the front though! Luckily Bubble didnt seem to mind :-D
For anyone who has never made joined paper dolls, Im so sorry I forgot to take photos of the process, but this link is a great written tutorial:
eHow Making Paper Dolls

Bubble had a lot of fun using copious amounts of glitter on her fairies (getting the excess glitter out the rug was a tiny bit less fun)

She also used her scissors to cut bits of felt from strips we had.

One fairy has more felt decorations than the others because she is 'the Mum Fairy' aparently :-D

'E' is for Ears

We are up to 'E' on our sounds wall this week, and our activity today was a matching one. Bubble enjoyed it and had fun swapping the ears around before gluing them in the right places - quite hilarious :-)
There was also a lot of incidental learning going on - which animal had the biggest ears, what kind of animal they were (zoo, farm etc...), what their ears were used for (eg: the elephant uses his ears to cool down and display the way he is feeling as well as hear with).

WE USED:

* paper
* textas/pencils
* scissors
* felt sheets (you could just use paper or card instead though)

I cut our animal ears from felt, but you could easily use paper or card instead.

For our worksheet I drew animal faces and omitted the ears. You could also use net images and print them out, then cut the ears from the sheet.

Bubble matching and gluing her animal ears.

'C' is for Cookie

My Grandad is going to heavily disapprove of our use of the word 'cookie' instead of 'biscuit', but hey it's 'C' week :-) Today we made these cardboard cookies for the C wall and Bubble had a stack of fun doing it.

WE USED:

* cardboard
* scissors
* child safe glue
* things to decorate your cookies (we used wood shavings, felt shapes, small pompoms and foam shapes. You could also use buttons, sequins, beads, coloured salt or sand, glitter - just about anything really!)

Cookies cut from cardboard ready to be 'iced'.

Our wood shaving 'chocolate'.

Circles cut from felt made great icing, paper would work just as well.

Yum! A whole plate full of cookies! :-)

'C' is for Carrot

Our second 'C' wall project was a wet string picture of, what else, a carrot :-)

WE USED:

* cardboard
* textas and pencils
* coloured paper
* tape
* wool/thick thread/twine
* childrens glue (we used Clag)
* something to mix glue in (we used a paper plate)

I drew a carrot onto some card, adding a few paper leaves taped on just to add interest, then drew an outline around the edge of the picture.

We put the wool onto our paper plate and covered it with glue until it was all goopy and thoroughly coated.

Then Bubble carefully laid her wet string around the outline.

Bottle Lid Necklace (threading)

This activity was a big hit this afternoon, easy to make and set up and great for fine motor and co ordination development.

WE USED:

* milk bottle lids
* glue
* coloured pictures (we used old sticker books)
* scissors
* pen
* craft or paring knife
* pipecleaners
* thread/wool/string
* childsafe needle
* drinking straws

We used the covers of old sticker books for our pictures, but anything colourful like scrapbook or wrapping paper will work. The thicker the paper the better though. Use the lids to trace circles onto the pictures so that when they are cut out they fit inside perfectly.

Using your knife make a small hole in the side of each lid. Apply glue to the back of your pictures and secure inside the lids, making sure that the spot where you made the hole is at the top (this is where the pendant will be hung from). Some of our lids had bits inside preventing the pictures from being glued flat, but we found they pushed inside and stuck without being glued because of the ridges on the inner part of the lid.

I was very amused to see that out of all the pictures our maths loving Bubble chose the abacus as her favourite one :-D

Cut your pipecleaner into short lengths, then push an end through the hole in the side of your lid and twist closed (making sure to tuck in any sharp bits).

Cut your drinking straws into short lengths for threading.

You might like to tie the thread to your child's needle so that it doesnt come loose.

Bubble making her straw necklace.

If you cant find a child safe needle they are easy to make using pipe cleaners. Make a loop at one end of a cut pipecleaner and tie on your thread, then squash it to fit through your straws.

Our straw and milk bottle lid necklaces - beautiful!

Come play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up