"Make it Kid Friendly" Idea: Bottle Snowflake Craft

These are bottoms of pop and water bottles, can you believe it?

They are beautiful snowflakes that are probably sitting in your recycling bin right now!

Let's upcycle them!

Check Artest to see the tutorial to make these beautiful winter creations.

These are pretty detailed and probably too 'controlled' of a craft for a child. But we can make it more kid-friendly and still get a similar and still beautiful effect.

What can be done to make it a kid-friendly craft:

• Cut off the bottoms of bottles. [Probably still done by the adult.]
• For the youngest crowd - just dip the bottle bottoms in white paint!
  For a little bit older ones, use a q-tip [fine motor skills] and let them paint designs in any way on them!
  Do a non-messy version and put it in a box with some white paint and shake it up!
• Use a hole punch and make a hole on one end of the snowflakes. [This may be hard for the child, but let them try and just help them with a little extra squeeze.]
• Thread some yarn through that hole to make it an ornament! [Whoa, more fine motor skills!]

Inspiration can be found in all places! Don't limit your options to just kid-friendly crafts and art projects that you've seen done already. Take a look at adult projects all around, and think to yourself, "How can I tweak that to make it work for my kids?" 

Want to see more adult projects with suggestions 

on how they can be tweaked for your kids?

Henry is 3 years. George is 1 year.

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Parenting: Learning to Let Go

Guest Post by    Ever feel like this project just isn't turning out? Let go. Remember the process. A post is written and shared by Ali at At Home with Ali.

  
Learning to Let Go

Doing art and craft with young children can drive anyone crazy. Paint going everywhere except on the paper, glue on fingers and in hair, mountains of glitter spread out for no purpose, oil pastels having their wrappers ripped off and smushed into the couch... frankly it was all too hard for me.

However, one day I turned around and realized I had limited my 2 year old daughter's art and craft activities to a set of waxy crayons, a glue stick and some paper – no paint, no pva glue and no glitter.

I love art and craft so how did we get here?

Luckily, I was fortunate to have a mother-in-law trained in the field of early childhood education and we had many conversations about the importance of process over product and child-centered play... which really got me thinking.

You see, I am a graphic designer and all my working life has been focused on the product, sure there is process but I am not happy if the end product does not look great. This sort of thinking had transferred to my art and craft activities with my daughter, Cakey. Time for a different approach – I stopped trying to create beautiful things with Cakey and let her lead the way.




First up, I changed my meaning of a 'successful' activity – I started to measure success only in terms of time spent [the longer the better] and fun had. I stopped whipping away collages when I thought they were finished [i.e. looking lovely with heaps of bits and pieces glued on]. I left them out for Cakey to destroy. She seemed to get more pleasure from ripping the pieces off than she did from sticking them on.

I also re-introduced paint but I took away the easel. Instead, I set the paint up on a big table and supplied a variety of different materials to paint on – bark from a paperbark tree, little canvasses, coloured paper of various sizes, stones from the garden. This stopped her from painting on the table or pavers. And I gave myself a break – on days when I couldn't cope with cleaning up the mess from painting I pulled out our little tray of watercolours instead.

As Cakey got older [she is now 3.5], I introduced good quality [i.e. sharp enough to actually cut paper] child-friendly scissors. I let her experiment with these by cutting up strips of thick paper. I also used to sit her at the table with a magazine and let her go to town on it.

But by far the best thing I have done [in terms of independent arts and crafts go] was to teach her how to use the sticky tape dispenser. I bought a decent tape dispenser and the most expensive sticky tape because it breaks off easily for little fingers. It was well worth the investment. Cakey will happily sticky tape together amazing creations for hours with no help and is always so proud of her results. I do have to buy sticky tape in bulk now though.



Handing control over to Cakey has been hard. I realized that I have many pre-conceived ideas about what are the right and wrong ways to do something, but Cakey doesn't see the world in the same way. She doesn't want me to tell her how to do something, she wants to discover it herself. As I have slowly loosened up, art and craft activities have become loads of fun for both of us and I am learning the difference between supporting her rather than directing.

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I am a graphic designer and a stay at home mother to my two beautiful daughters - Cakey [3] and Boo [1]. Cakey wants to make things all the time - sometimes it is fabulously fun and sometimes it makes me want to pull my hair out. I love the challenge of trying to channel Cakey's interests and ideas into activities we can do together. I also love watching Boo's personality come out and am intrigued by what her interests will turn out to be.

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It's Playtime! Indoor Activities

Its that time of year.
When we all duck our heads and hibernate for a couple of months.

Granted, we try to get outside as much as we can.
But most days its not for long, if at all.

So...
What indoor activities can we do on these cold days coming up?
[Really, its been pretty nice here lately, I can't believe its in the 40s in January in Iowa...]

[Make Do & Friend: Playing in the Dark]

A flashlight does wonders!

Make, Do & Friend Found a way to calm a fear of the dark! Play in it! Take a flashlight and find lots of things shiny and see how it reflects! My kids loving playing with their flashlights, adding shiny objects would definitely be a hit!

Above, from left to right:

• De tout et de rien shows learning in a spot I never thought of , and we all probably all have one. Adding beads to a baby bottle drying rack! There's so much learning that could be done... it could go on and on, and plus keep the kids' hands busy, busy, busy!
• Play with plastic! Drawing on and cutting plastic, a definitely time-waster for the kids, I'm sure! Happy Little Messes has more in store for these plastic creations on a light machine!
• Another dark post, but this time with the aide of a black light! The Mommies Made Me Do It when on a glow hunt in the dark! Shut off the lights!
• Play dough is a go-to activity, especially when we're stuck indoors. Here's some yummy chocolatey play dough! Make birthday cupcakes from play dough and add pasta for candles! A sweet idea from What's Fun Today?

High Five to these play friends!

[Go leave them a playful comment!]

[Please grab the featured badge on the right if you were featured]

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It's Playtime is a community for play loving bloggers to share ways to play.

Head on over to my playtime co-hosts:
The Imagination Tree, Messy Kids, Quirky Momma, Let the Children Play.

New to It's Playtime? Read How to Play to get all the details. 
Basically, share your play ideas at the party below and browse for more play ideas from others! 

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[No blog? You can leave a comment here to share, too!]

Be sure to LIKE your favorite play ideas!

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Henry is 3 years. George is 1 year.

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Activity: Snowman Fridge

A very large snowman for your kitchen!

This is so easy to do!

I made ours an interactive snowman.

I cut out the following pieces from craft foam sheets.

• 2 large black circles [eyes]
• 3 medium black circles [buttons]
• 5 small black circles [mouth]
• 1 orange triangle [nose]

If you don't have the craft foam sheets, construction or scrapbook paper would work for this too! That's what I saw done at "Crafting" my Talents.

My foam is self-adhesive. Potentially, I could have just stuck them onto the fridge like that and would have been even easier.

Instead, I cut out a little circle in the middle of the sticky paper and stuck on a craft magnet [Thanks Craftprojectideas.com for them!]. It would be even easier with self-adhesive craft magnets!

A snowman needs a scarf too, right?

Take some of that leftover wrapping paper, the scraps work well, or just a 3 inch strip off the end of a roll does the trick too.

Simply cut the wrapping paper in long strips to form the scarf. I taped the scarf in place.

Ta-da, you've made yourself a snowman!

Now let the kids have fun making silly faces with the pieces!

Counting pieces adds a little learning to the activity!

Henry counted the number of mouth pieces and buttons on the snowman!

Bonus: It made me clean off my fridge! I think this will have to be done every year just for that sole reason!

Shared at Come Together Kids Winter Fun Ideas Party!

Henry is 3 years. George is 1 year.

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Learning Activity: Cutting Snowflakes

Henry's been on a cutting kick lately.

Since its winter, I decided to take advantage of this and cut snowflakes!

I tried my best to make this as preschooler-friendly as possible.

We used coffee filters for our snowflakes.

Coffee filters are easy to cut, plus they're already round!

And they were really easy for Henry to cut. He didn't struggle cutting through them at all. 

He has a Crayola sharp pointed child scissors that work perfectly for him. 

And they cut really good.

[Seriously, we've tried many others that don't work worth a hoot.]

I folded the coffee filters into eighths [in half three times].

-- You could add in another degree of learning by talking about fractions with your kid.

So Henry would know where and how to cut the snowflake, I drew marks in a simple pattern on the folded coffee filters.

We did several snowflakes, and I learned how to best draw the lines. [For example, don't draw marks to cut right across from each other, they very may well cut a little to far and cut through the coffee filter.]

We had a mishap with one snowflake being almost completely bare. 

I had almost crumpled up the coffee filter and threw it out.

But, Dad had stopped me, and told me to open it up to show Henry.

[Ah.... see, there's a consequence for an action....]

We decided to keep the mishap snowflake and hang it up with the rest.

Dad even made his own coffee filter snowflake! 

[Can you believe, he had never done this before? Seriously! Even as a child!]

-- Sorry, I don't have any pictures of Henry actually cutting because I had to hold the folded coffee filter as he cut out the snowflake.

Henry is 3 years. George is 1 year.

Current sponsors :  Fudoo Boards  :  A Mom with a Lesson Plan  :  CraftProjectIdeas.com
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