Craft Catch-up!

The past few weeks have really flown by! I mean, how do we only have THREE days left in July?!

Here's a quick round up of some of the crafts Marshall has been making.  Two of his favorite things are paint and glue, so I try to include at least one of the two in every craft we do!

Baseball is a big topic of conversation in our house and 9 times out of 10, Marshall just wants to throw the ball up in the air and catch it with his glove.  He has gotten REALLY good at it!  So of course, I had to find a baseball craft for him.  This was really simple to do, but he absolutely loved it!

Marshall has also been on a Christmas kick lately, and NOT by any influence from me! 😂

It randomly started when he kept asking to watch Charlie Brown "Chris-Chris" every morning when he woke up, and even brought a Christmas book downstairs for me to read first thing.  Since then, we've watched several more Christmas movies, and I have no problem with that at all! 😉

We also made foam and popsicle stick Popsicles! When I kept telling him we were going to make popsicles, of course he was confused when I had to tell him we couldn't eat them. lol.

This was SUCH a fun and easy activity that Marshall loved way more than I thought.  I wrote out several of these sheets with numbers and letters for him to trace with Q-tips and paint, and he FLEW through them and kept asking me for more.  Not even joking, we probably ended up with at least 20 sheets of tracing that he did and loved so much! We will definitely be doing this again!

 

Finally, he asked me several times to do a shark craft, so I headed straight to Pinterest.  Marshall was eager to look, too, so he sat down beside me as I scrolled through "shark crafts for toddlers" and this was the one he chose! Coincidentally, we made it after reading Clark the Shark!

 

Fourth of July Crafts

This week, we did a different patriotic craft or activity every day, and even did the last one at the river yesterday!

We started off by painting some fun fireworks on Monday.  Super easy instructions here.

On Tuesday, Marshall loved making this hand print and fingerprint flag.

He calls his hand prints "high fives" and I love it 😊

On Wednesday, we did a counting worksheet and some coloring pages.

On the worksheet, I told Marshall to write his name on top of this line. He took what I said way too literally. 😂😂

At the river yesterday, Marshall made a necklace out of dried pasta noodles that I dyed red and blue.  Although, Marshall didn't hesitate at all to tell me they were more green than blue. haha

Yes, Marshall. No matter how much blue dye I kept adding, they still had a greenish tint. 😂

Hope you all had a fun Fourth of July!

Arts & Crafts Fun

I have a huge craft shelf with tons and tons of craft materials that never get used anymore. (Anyone else like me and used to scrapbook years ago, and now we just say we're going to scrapbook that later?) Most of my craft supplies are from my scrapbooking days, but there are also random things that have been mixed in over the years.  I decided to go through all of this and make a craft box for Marshall, with lots of things that he can use to do whatever he wants with. I had to pick up a few things like glue, more pompom balls and googly eyes, etc., but 95% of these materials were things I already had.  It's all in a box that he can easily go through himself now, and I love hearing him tell me daily that he wants to do crafts 😊

His favorite thing to do is simply glue things on a piece of scrapbook paper. Anything from those googly eyes and pompoms to other pieces of paper.  Because I said it so many times to him when we first started, he always says "tiny dots" every time he uses the glue 😂 

Here are some of his creations:

 

Yesterday, we started adding googly eyes and glitter to rocks, as well.

Another fun activity he enjoyed was Ice Painting. This was super simple to put together and actually lots of fun!

You mix 1 tsp of paint with 1 tsp of water and put a popsicle stick in it to create a handle.

Freeze for a couple hours and they pop out very easily.

Marshall painting "Mr. Sun" and the Christmas tree he asked me to paint.

He is definitely my child. 🎄 

Book + Butterfly Craft

Last week was Marshall's first week home for the summer, and we've already had so much fun! I'd already been brainstorming some activities for us to do, and the Type A in me has printed out calendars of June, July and August, and for each week day, I've written down what activity we'll do that day.

Our very first activity was a craft to go along with The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  When I went to find this book in his room, I found the second book as well, so we had two books for this activity 😊 After reading both books, we made a coffee filter butterfly 🦋

Supplies needed:

• 2 coffee filters
• markers
• pipe cleaner (not pictured below)
• tape
• cookie sheet
• water dropped/syringe (I used one from Marshall's medicine stash)

Flatten out the coffee filters, lay one of top of the other and tape down to the cookie sheet.

Color any kind of design (random scribbles and a yellow "circle" worked out just fine 😂).

Use the dropped/syringe to soak the coffee filters and allow the colors to bleed. You could probably just slowly pour water over it, but the syringe was easy enough for Marshall to help me with.

Once the coffee filters were completely wet, I put our cookie sheet on the back deck in the sun so it could dry quicker.

 

Once dry, fold each of the filters accordion style.  

I forgot to take a picture of this in between step.

Once you've folded both filters, place one on top of the other (one end of each "accordion" should be touching). I sure hope that makes sense, haha.

Bend the pipe cleaner in half, and twist it around the middle of your coffee filters. Shape the ends to make the butterfly's antenna.

  Finally, spread out the coffee filters to make the butterfly's wings! This took me a couple minutes and some adjusting the pipe cleaner to get a shape that actually looked like wings.

Voila!