Car painting

So my daycare kiddos are starting to transition this week and Ethan has taking a trip to Grammie and Poppa's house for the week!  The theme for this week is PAINTING!  I love painting with the kids and it is pretty hard to find a kid that doesn't like painting!

Today we did painting with cars!  When you have 2 boys that are obsessed with cars and one that isn't as obsessed with doing crafts, you need to be creative!  I figured I could use his love for cars, and incorporate it with Arts and Crafts!

This one is pretty simple.  All you need is Paint in small containers, Paper, a few cars, and a drop sheet to save your table!

I wanted to keep their attention, so I only went with three colours

Mr. Brody (not so arts and crafts interested) LOVE IT!  His cars BRRRRRROOOMMMM and VVRRRROOOMMM all over his paper!  At first it took a little convincing that it was OK that his hands got some paint on them...but once he figured that out he was good to go!

VRRROOOMMM

 

Adding colours

 

BRRRROOMMMM

(Yes my kitchen is bright orange! - yuck I know, but we will get around to painting it one day!)

 

CRASH!  He started crashing the cars together and laughing because paint was splattering

Getting Brody interested was pretty easy today! And he had lots of fun painting!

Logey on the other hand...he would sit and paint all day if I let him!

 

He had all 3 cars going at the same time on his paper!

He started crashing his cars together too, after seeing Brody do it!

 

And of course, it started turning into a little finger painting by the end of it!

 

This was a great little activity to peak the boys interest in painting and get them ready for the other painting crafts I have planned for the rest of the week!  Shockingly, not that mess either, if you have a cloth on hand for when they are done!  I'm happy that my kids starting daycare because my bare walls are still driving me crazy and I need pretty art work like this to get them covered!

Once the boys were done, and I was putting the stuff away, I noticed they were sitting in the playroom having a 'conversation' looking like this.....

I just couldn't not take a picture of the two bucket heads!

Watch for more painting theme crafts this week! :)

Jello Sensory Bin

I have been trying to get back into doing my messy sensory bins lately, because they are the most fun for the kids and because I would much rather do them outside that inside!  I had a ton of Jello boxes in my pantry and had just been waiting for something to do with them.  Alas, JELLO SENSORY BIN!

  

Grab all the Jello you have and different sized and shaped containers.  Make all your Jello the night before!



I tried using ice cube trays too, it didn't really work, so I wouldn't waste your time!

Next, get the container you usually do sensory bins in! I suggest you make sure the bin is clean, because the kids will likely be 'testing' the Jello.  Add all the Jello and utensils to play with it.  It was 45 Degrees here again yesterday and I thought the Jello would melt REALLY fast, so I added some ice cubes too!

NOTE: my container is really big for this activity, but I know my boys and I knew exactly what was going to happen once they were getting close to being done with the bin!!

Next, give the bin to the kids and let them go wild! This was also a good time to go over the colours of the Jello! Monkey has his colours down pat obviously, but little Logey is just starting to learn them!

Logey was having trouble keeping it on the spoon at first! Notice the green/red piece falling down

Sooooo...he started using his hands! Exactly what I wanted.  Fine motor skills and Sensory

I love the look on Logey's face here!  I think he is seriously shocked that Ethan is attempting to taste the Jello!

"What are you doing E?"

 Logey then realized he could taste it too!!

YUMMY!

Exactly as I expected, once the boys started getting bored of the Jello (which, by the way, was at least 45 minutes later) I introduced the hose!  My boys love water, as you have seen in pretty much every other post!  Monkey started filling the bin with the hose.  We learned that when he sprayed the water harder, it made bubbles from the Jello.  Who knew?  And so, our Jello bin turned into a BUBBLE BATH!  The boys started to wash all the utensils we were playing with....

And then....you guessed it....they got in the bin!

And you thought the cooler was small!

By the end of the activity the boys were soaking wet, I was pretty much soaking wet...but being wet actually didn't feel so bad since it was 45 degrees Celsius!  This was a super easy Sensory Bin, and gave the kids at least an hour of pure joy to play with!
 

Two happy boys!

Felt Play Christmas Tree

Well, my tree is still standing, and has yet to come down this year, however, I have re-decorated it about 50 or so times!  I can't keep the boys hands off the decorations!!  I went to Pinterest to find something that could solve my problem!  This is what I found! Play Felt Tree and Ornaments

So after a friend kindly made a trip to Michael's to pick up a big peice of green felt, I was ready to cut!  Turns out I can't really cut a tree all that well, but the kids sure don't mind.  I added a little trunk to the tree to make it a little more real for them.  I cut bulb shaped ornaments, and some garland. and a little star for the top.

I left the tree out on the table for Monkey, so when he came down in the morning, it was a nice surprise for him to decorate!  He got right to it

And re-decorated....

...and re-decorated...

We moved it to the floor so Logey-Bear could play as well.  I was really close to him because I suspected that the peices would go right into his mouth....

..."What, I don't have anything in my mouth!!!"

..."Oh wait....yes I do!!!!"

So all in all, Monkey loves the tree and decorates it over and over and over....and Logey, well he likes to try and eat it, so not so great for him.  Monkey has decorated it by putting all the same colours together in each section, and by mixing up the colours.  It is amazing to watch him keep going back to it, to make it just right!   HOWEVER, I have still re-decorated our REAL tree about 15 more times, so it really didn't solve my problem!  But still cute nonetheless!

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:

Octopuses!

Recently, a friend of mine posted a video on Facebook of an Octopus that heaved itself up onto the rocky beach, walked around, regurgitated a LARGE crab, and then casually walked backed into the ocean.  Monkey watched the video with me, and then asked to find more videos about Octopuses.  So we started on youTube looking for videos, and found some amazing ones!  I decided that since Thursday is December 1st, we have 3 days that we can study Octopuses before we start our Christmas activities.

NOTE:  The plural of Octopus seems to be really controversial!  I looked in up on many websites!  Seems like people use Octopuses, Octopusses, Octopi, octopods, octopoids, octopodes, octopussies etc etc etc!  So I'm going with Octopuses!

Here is the video we originally saw. Especially pay attention at 2:07 of the video

We ended up watching youTube videos for close to an hour after seeing this one.  I started reading him amazing stories about how Octopuses had escaped in Aquariums/Zoos to go to other tanks, eat the marine life in those tanks, and then go back to their own tanks as if nothing ever happened.  We came across this interesting video of an Octopus that was actually eating sharks at the Seatle Aquarium in USA.

So I did some research and found lots of Octopus activities to cover over the next few days!  First, I printed quite a few colouring pages, so we could colour them in different colours since Octopuses are the masters of camouflage.  We talked about how they have 8 tenticles and they had no bones like us.

We got some good colourings from here and from here

Here are SOME of the pages we used.

Here Monkey is working on colouring inside the lines, something we are making a little bit of progress on.

Since we learned that Octopuses can change colours depending on what is around them, Monkey decided to colour each tenticle a different colour, well almost each tenticle :)

This Octopus picture conveniently had a turtle on it, so I had to use it!

After we coloured all the pages, Monkey decided he wanted to trace his hand.  So we traced his hand and then he pointed out that it looked like an Octopus!  So we turned it upside down and drew a face on it.  This one I helped him with the eyes and mouth and tracing his hand...

But this one he did completely alone!  (Hence the face is upside down)

We decided this Octopus was the best camouflaged one, since he could hide almost anywhere with colours!

Octopuses can be really great teaching tools.  We learned about ocean animals, counting to 8 (tenticles), the letter O, colours and camouflage,  that sometimes creatures can do things they aren't supposed to (walking on land) and we learned that animals are smarter than we give them credit for.  Stay tuned for tomorrows Octopus crafts!