garden

Today’s project is a good example of why you need to flexible when planning kids’ crafts.  The plan was tissue paper flowers:

I thought they would be pretty easy, and sort of an instant-gratification thing.  But they were completely beyond Anna’s abilities, and Carolyn didn’t like how hers turned out compared the ones I made to demonstrate what we were doing.

So, now I had a bunch of cut-up tissue paper, frustrated kids, and some time to fill.  Luckily, I also had green paper plates left from Anna’s birthday party, wax paper, and tape.  Oh, and glue!  I cut out the middle of paper plates, cut a square of wax paper, taped it to the back of the plates, and let them glue tissue paper all over the wax paper.

And now we have pretty tissue paper flower suncatchers!

Our birdhouses, according to Anna, needed birdies.  So I bought a big bag of assorted pompoms and pulled out a few other supplies:

A little glue here, a little cutting there…

…and we had fuzzy little googly-eyed birds!

And then we made some name caterpillars because gluing pompoms is kind of addictive.

After that, the girls went to town with glue, pompoms, googly eyes and construction paper.

I think the message I need to take away from today’s project is that I need to go hit the back-to-school sales to stock up on more glue.  The girls love glue almost as much as paint.  Especially if it involves googly eyes!

This week’s theme is “In the Garden”.  I spotted these cute little wooden birdhouses (I keep wanting to call them “dollhouses”!) at JoAnn’s for $1 apiece the other day and thought it might be fun to paint them.

Conveniently enough, they were located right next to a display of Delta Soy Paint.  I let the girls each pick out a few colors, so we ended up with Pink Carnation, Pink Hibiscus, Sunflower, Kiwi, Blue Sky and Wisteria.  Even the paint colors fit in with the theme!  (Although maybe not so much Kiwi.  It sure wouldn’t grow in a garden around here…)

I learned my lesson from the last multi-color painting project and gave each girl their own palette of colors and cup to rinse brushes in so Anna could mix away to her heart’s content and Carolyn could be more particular about her colors.

I think they turned out very cute!

And I already have a glimmer of an idea of how to make birds for them.  Need to go check the random craft stash for pompoms…