Celebrating the New Year: Handprint Craft

Activity completed at the end of December 2015.

As 2016 drew closer I knew I wanted to do something to mark the new year with Tripp. We came up with this easy handprint craft. We painted his hand and made 4 handprints on a piece of paper. Then we used glue to write the numbers of the new year and added some pretty gold glitter. It was a fun way to ring in 2016!

Glittery Turkey Thanksgiving Craft

Project completed November 2015. 

This turkey jar was a fun Thanksgiving project. I got the idea from I Love to Create, which calls them "Gobble Gobble Globes." However, I switched up the order of the steps, because to me pouring the water in at the very end would risk getting the decorations wet! Here's the order we did it in with our supplies... these would be very cute place settings if you wanted to make a bunch of them!

Supplies:

• Empty, clean baby food jar
• Scrapbook or construction paper in various fall colors
• White glue or glue dots
• Gold glitter
• Water
• Googly eyes

Steps:

1. Fill the baby food jar with a generous amount of glitter and water.
2. Holding the baby food jar upside down, attach the googly eyes and a triangle of yellow or orange paper to the jar with glue.
3. Trace your child's hand on paper and cut it out. Use this template to trace and cut out multiple copies of their hand shape (we used 4).
4. Once the glue for the eyes and beak has dried, use glue to attach the "feathers," fanned out, to the back of the jar. Allow to dry.

Free, Random Play

I have been working on setting up our extra bedroom as a playroom for Tripp, and in doing so I've decided to keep my old Ikea Expedit desk as a craft station. Slowly I'm consolidating all of the random craft supplies in the house into this one spot (I have more than you'd think, for someone who doesn't really consider herself artistic). It has worked so well, with tons of storage, and has been a spot for many fun activities and crafts. It's really nice to have a little corner of the house set up just for creativity.

The other day I was looking through some craft supplies and Tripp spotted some dowel caps. Add to that some beads, air dry clay (could have used play dough, too, but I decided to use up the rest of the clay), and some Lakeshore implements he got for his birthday from his cousin, and why not have some creative open ended fun? I put it all into a disposable aluminum baking sheet and let him do what he wanted.

He had fun putting the beads into small plastic containers and dumping them out, asking me to form balls of clay and then picking them up with the tongs, rolling the dowel caps around and pressing beads into the clay. The air dry clay we used was from Crayola and was sparkly, too, which added a fun dimension to his explorations. So fun!

He spotted some glitter glue from the same cousin at the end of his play and of course we couldn't stop without trying that!