Jingle Bells!

Well after 6 days of antibiotics, I can sadly report that Logeybear is still not recovering well.  However, Monkey is definitely starting to get back to himself.

While we were making our egg carton snowmen, I had Monkey paint a few extra single egg cartons.  He had no idea why he was doing this, but I kept telling him he needed to wait a few more days to get to them.  So I gave him green, red and white paint to get them all covered.  It takes more paint that I thought to get those cartons covered - the paint soaks into the material.

So when I told him to really put a LOT of paint on them, this started happening!  The paint would stick to the cartons and the paint brushes.  We weren't using the greatest brushes either, but that was what I had grabbed the first time I went to get the paints, and I wasn't walking back downstairs again (sick Logey still in my arms 24 hours a day!!)

Once they all dried up, I got out a pack of bells (or Jingle Bells as Monkey calls them).  We cut pipe cleaners in half, and looped them through the opening on the jingle bells.  This was actually kind of hard so Monkey would get the first half in, and then I would have to get it back out.  Then we pulled the bells tight and poked 2 little holes through the egg carton and attached the pipe cleaner at the top.  It looked like this:

Then we finished up the rest of them, I think we made about 8-10 of them!  Monkey likes to do things in bulk, so I always have to have lots of extras so he can do the craft over and over again! 

So here they are all hanging on our Christmas tree.  We are finally starting to fill in the voids from the poor broken decorations! We used sparkly silver, gold and blue pipe cleaners and some regular old green and red one.

Egg Carton Snowmen

Well, the kids are still really sick and both boys are on antibiotics, but we are still doing some nice and easy crafts!  Monkey was really wanting to make some snowmen (like I said, he is really into Frosty right now)  I kept telling him that once we finished the eggs, we could make some really cute snowmen with the egg cartons.  Well, yesterday the day finally came.

First thing I did was cut the cartons so that I had three in a row.  Then I set Monkey up with some white paint and told him to get it completely covered in snow.

Once it dried up, I set Monkey up with some pipe cleaners for arms and scarfs, googly-eyes, pompoms and Sharpies.  First thing we did glue on the pompom buttons, and the googly eyes.  Monkey asked me to draw the mouth on his.  Then we cut our brown pipe cleaners into 4 pieces (sneaky Mommy with those scissor skills). It turns out that pushing pipe cleaners through the egg cartons was more difficult than I thought, so I used the exacto knife and pushed little holes through first.  Then Monkey was easily able to get the arms through.  We then cut the sparkly pipe cleaners in half.  He wrapped half around to make the scarf.  As we finished, I realized (or rather Monkey pointed out) that I had forgot about hats!  Monkey then suggested that we use the other half of the pipe cleaner. This was a great idea because the 'hat' actually served as a hat and a hook to put it on the tree.  The pompoms weren't sticking that well the egg carton, we ended up hot gluing them to make sure they stayed put! 

Here are Monkey's 2 snowmen, a Mommy and a Daddy snowman.

Here is the Daddy hanging nicely in the tree.

These little guys were really easy and I was able to do it with Monkey while holding Logey (who is just plain miserable!!)

Popsicle Stick Tree and Stars

This was an EXTRA easy craft that was PERFECT for Monkey.  I loved it because I did not have to prepare anything for it.  I just grabbed some popsicle sticks and glue, and a few cut pieces of yarn!  Our great friends over at Happy Hooligans gave me this idea (again!!!!)

Generally I would have got none-coloured popsicles sticks, but these were left over from our Thanksgiving turkey crafts (I wasn't blogging then so you can't see how cute they were)  All we did was put some glue in the centre of the sticks and then stick 3 or 4 together!  Like I said super easy!

 

Here is how they turned out!  Monkey just kept wanting to do more and more, so I figured why not (Our Christmas tree is still looking a little bare due to half the decorations breaking last year)

Once they all dried we used the glue gun to glue some yarn to them so we could hang them up.  I got Monkey to cut the pieces of yarn to size, so he could again practice those scissor skills!!

Here are some on our tree!  (Side note: up in the left hand corner is our glue gingerbread man from last year.  So easy to make, just glue and glitter and cookie cutters!  We will be making some more of them this week too!)

When we were done, there were a few Green popsicle sticks left over, and out of the blue Monkey said it looked like a TREE!  So we used the scissors again to cut them down a little bit more on each one.  Then he said we needs a "truck"...took me a few tries to figure out what he was talking about and then I realized he meant TRUNK!  (Side note: speech therapy FINALLY starts on Dec 22!)  He picked up a broken piece of yellow that was sitting in the bottom of the box and said it was the Star.  He glued them all on and VOILA a beautiful Christmas tree!

So, two really easy Christmas crafts which worked on great skills!  We always need the scissor practice and anything I can do with scissors is great!! 

Last Day of Octopuses!

So our last day of Octopuses has come (Because we NEED to start Christmas crafts!)  I made Monkey a tub of water and put all his Ocean creatures out around it for him to play with in the water.  I added some white Lego pieces to be icebergs (but Monkey thought they were better as boats)  His pirate Little Person also joined in the fun.

 His Walrus' sat on the icebergs and then jumped into the water.

 

 And of course, cars, trains, and helicopters ended up in the water too.

We then had our Octopus TP rolls to finish as well.   The paint was finally dry, so all we had to do was glue the googley-eyes on, and cut the tentacles. 

 Didn't they turn out cut! Monkey didn't want to put smiles on them because in all the videos we couldn't see the Octopuses mouth, so he said they didn't have a mouth!!

Once we were all done making them, Monkey wanted to put holes in them and hang them up with the other "Silly Octopuses".  So Monkey punched two holes in each one and we threaded them onto the yarn and added to our collection!

So we are done with Octopuses for now.  But we still have to watch some videos every now and again!  Octopuses are great for teaching many things.  In the last 3 days, I have taught Monkey about Camouflage, the Ocean, counting to 8 (which was pretty easy for him), learning about tentacles instead of legs,  the Letter O - plus had some great messy crafts to go along which helped with scissor skills!

Octopuses Day 2

So today was Day 2 of learning about Octopuses!  Most importantly for Monkey, it was craft day!  I had 2 octopus crafts planned for today.  Both are the same idea, but done differently. We are going to making Octopuses with Toilet Paper rolls and with  paper.  We started with the toilet paper rolls because we had to paint them, and then worked on the paper ones while we were waiting for the paint to dry.

First thing we had to do was paint 4 TP rolls

I set out a variety of colours, because as we learned yesterday, Octopuses are masters of disguise!  Monkey had blue, green, red, orange and pink to paint with.

Once he was done painting all the rolls, we put them aside so they could dry while we worked on the next set of octopuses.

However, Monkey started painting the paper....

...and then the finger painting started....

...and then the body painting started....   So we had to do a bit of a cleanup before we started the paper craft!

Ok, so I printed out this template on some card stock in different colours.

I thought that since I had printed on different coloured paper, that would be good enough, but of course it wasn't!  Monkey coloured all the tenticles and, of course, the smiley face!

And then came the tricky part...Cutting along the dotted lines.  Monkey really has trouble with scissors.  He really wants to use both hands to cut, so I figure I will let him go with it for now and hopefully his hands will get stronger so he can use one hand.

Then we taped them together and VOILA!  Super cute Octopuses!

Of course, like everything Monkey does, as soon as he was done he said "Lets hang it on the playroom wall"  This is a little tricky with circular octopuses, but we came up with the idea to hang across the window with some string.  So we cut the string to (almost) the right length and then we put 2 hole punches in each octopus.  Monkey laced the string through the holes and then we tapes the ends up to the wall!

Now, the TP rolls took a whole lot longer to dry than I anticipated, so we are going to finish that one tomorrow.  So stay tuned to see how they turned out!

While we were waiting for them to dry, Monkey asked to watch more Octopus videos.  We found an ABSOLUTELY AMAZING video that you all need to see.  The end (starting at 1:30 right until the final second of the video) is by far the most spectacular thing you will ever see...well maybe not ever be it is really COOL (as Monkey said)

Here is the video: