Glittery Jesus Fish Mobile

This is quite possibly my favorite craft to date…a glittery Jesus fish mobile.  I found the idea here.  Now if you’re like me, the thought of setting your kids loose with glitter will make your stomach turn.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not a bad clean up at all.  The kids absolutely loved painting glue and sprinkling glitter.  And Colton adores the Jesus fish anyway, so this craft was right up his alley.

And the finished product…  We wrote I Heart Jesus on the cardstock.  Colton did a great job writing his own!

The other craft we did this week was a paper plate bird.  They’re cute, but they weren’t nearly as big a hit as the Jesus fish mobiles.

Mother's Day Kids Crafts

For the week of Mother's Day, we did a foam house family portrait.  It’s just foam tacky glued to poster board with family pictures.  The kids had fun with this one and it looks cute.  Then we did curlicue signs for my mom, sister, and grandma.  These are cardstock backings with decorative paper on top.  The “writing” is strips of construction paper rolled up.  Those little curlicues took forever to make.  So this ended up being a mostly me project since the kids lost interest pretty quickly.  Both of these ideas came from a craft idea magazine my parents found.  We also made Mother’s Day cards.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of those.  But they were inspired by a craft from Oriental Trading.  We cut out the kids’ handprints and a folded flower pot shape from cardstock.  We glued one handprint on the inside of the front flap of the flower pot and the other handprint on the inside of the back flap.  Then we decorated the fingertips with foam flower stickers.  It turned out pretty cute…wish I had remembered to get a picture….

Wood Animal Craft

Here is a little frog and a butterfly made out of little wood shapes (they sell these in a large bag at Michaels).  The original idea called for painting these, but we are doing a lot of painting this week, so I opted for just having the kids use markers.  I helped fill in the color a little bit.  Then we just used Alene’s tacky glue to put them together.  You can also add a magnet to the back.  I was going to do that, but the kids are enjoying carrying them around and playing with them too much.

Weather Chart

This is a fun little weather chart we put together several months ago using printouts from the Nick Jr. website.  It’s been an awesome tool for the kids to learn about weather and days of the week.  I’m thinking a laminator would be a good investment, though, since it’s showing some wear and tear.

Zoo Crafts

 

In honor of zoo week in our homeschooling, we made cute paper plate and construction paper lion masks.  Both kids drew the faces on…Colton’s on the left, Kaitlyn’s on the right.  I love them!  As far as kid friendliness of the craft, I would say it’s pretty good.  They enjoyed drawing the face and curling and gluing a little bit of the mane, but they lost interest in the mane pretty quickly.  Once the masks were done, they had a blast roaring at each other though!  We also printed up some animal pictures from our recent trip to the zoo and made a collage.  That was a fun lesson in identifying animals and learning to spell their names.

Four Seasons Chart

This is a cute four seasons poster the kids and I made using printouts from the ABCJesusLovesMe curriculum.  It’s a fun way for the kids to visualize the seasons and learn how to spell them.

Birdhouse Painting

I picked these cute little houses up at Michaels for $1 a piece, and the kids had a blast painting them.  Kaitlyn chose to go all brown for hers.  Colton, on the other hand, wanted to try every color.  I love how they both turned out.  We also did a short lesson on feather pens, using some feathers and paint to try writing.   The feathers I had weren’t great for the project, but I think it got the point across.