peep, peep!

Happy Easter,

friends!!!

recycled egg crown tutorial

We wanted to celebrate Earth Day AND Easter, so we decided to make some festive eggs crowns using materials from our classroom recycling bin.  It was sort of a fusion of two projects I'd seen on the Crafty Crow:  Sew Together's Easter Egg Crown and El Hada De Papel's Easy Yarn Easter Egg Tutorial.  The children LOVED making these eggs.  Sometimes I feel like crafty projects require a little too much adult assistance, but this one was just right for the 3 to 4-year-olds in my classroom.  Anyway, anyone who's anyone around here wants one of these crowns, so I decided to put together a little tutorial.  Here it goes!
 

  What you'll need:

• broken down cracker boxes
• old catalogs, magazines, paper, etc.  {we also used unclaimed child artwork}
• sissors
• glue
• marker

DISCLAIMER:  I keep forgetting to take photos at school, so I put this tutorial together at home.  At school, we used a glue stick rather than Elmer's and we most definitely DID NOT use a Sharpie marker for tracing!
 

Draw an egg-shaped oval on the inside of the box.  The one above is free-handed; at school, we used a stencil.  

Cut up magazines and paper into strips.  Our strips were all 1/4 to 1 inch wide.  It doesn't really matter how long they are - it's kind of fun if they're different lengths.

Cut out the egg-shape and apply glue to one side.

Stick paper strips to the egg-shape until it's entirely covered.

 

At this point, the children were pretty curious about why I had covered up the egg-shape...

They were SO excited to see that the egg was on the other side - it was a little like a magic trick!  Love them!

Cut around the egg-shape, using the edge of the cardboard as a guide.

Turn it over, and now you have a lovely paper egg!  Oooooooo! Aaaaaaahhhh!

AND, if you are so inclined, staple, glue, or tape several of these eggs to a longer strip of paper attached at the ends, and you'll have a fabulous crown!

I picked Hubs up from work wearing the crown and these sunglasses, and he was definitely impressed! 


Happy weekend!

chicks {real ones coming soon...}

We saw lilla a's cute, felt chickies over on The Crafty Crow this morning, and just had to make some.  Not only are they fun to put together and sweet to look at, but they double as fab finger puppets, too!  Check out lilla a for the photo tutorial. 

peep, 

     peep!

busy hands

the ridiculously popular

bead work lesson, 

in action

building towers 

with the knobless cylinders

 skip counting by eights 

{can YOU do this?}

building and writing a useful word 

with the moveable alphabet 

{useful words are words that get used frequently, 

but you can't quite sound them out - the, is, of, are, was....}

exploring objects from the 

"l" drawer of the alphabet box

{explore OUR alphabet box here}

clip-on koalas

Are you tired of strengthening your fine motor control 

with those same old clothespins????

We have been loving these cute little koala clips!  When you squeeze their backs, their arms and legs open and you can clip them onto lots of things.  We have been clipping ours onto this wooden spice rack.  These koala clips are the perfect challenge for the child who is working to strengthen his pincer grip AND build coordination and control of his movement.  They are not easy to open - you really have to have strong fingers - but they are so much fun, even the littlest hands in our classroom will manipulate them all morning long.  

I remember having lots of  clip-on animals like these koalas when I was growing up.  The 80's were just rad like that, I guess.  I found some koala clips on amazon, but they seem a little on the spendy side to me.  Click here if you want to check them out. 
 

Does anyone have any other ideas where you can find animal clips?  

We want more!!!