Wooden Models

This is something that is quick and easy and that I didn't think of trying until recently because I assumed (as it turns out, wrongly) that it would be too expensive and my kids were likely too young to get the most out of it.
There is a Japanese store near us called Daiso and they sell many many different wooden model kits from cars to dinosaurs, to dolls house furniture and more. Each of these kits has loads of little pieces and although quite complex and fiddly, costs only $1.50 a pop.
This afternoon just one of these kits occupied four kids between the ages of two and four for around an hour. They diligently painted each tiny little piece all different colours with watercolour paints and then I fitted it together for them, to their delight.

Recycling castle. Dejavu?

Well, I know I posted about a castle we made from recycling some time ago, but I'm Welsh, so obviously I have a castle fettish that I am forcing upon my children. My excuse is that this time we made a realistic Edwardian castle with a moat, rather than a fairytale one.

We collected toilet paper cardboard tubes (I might have pestered some freinds to get more faster. They are used to me rifling through their recyling now) and a couple of snack boxes (I think they were Annies cheddar bunny snacks or something, but any cracker type box/cereal box will do)

Here's a scribble showing how we cut the turrets out of the loo roll tubes and another scribble showing how to squeez four large walls and four small walls out of a snack box.

The kids painted the castle pieces first and then while they were drying we painted the base with brown and green and a nice blue moat to surround the castle.
Then everyone ate lunch and ran about like they were deranged while the base dried.

We glue gunned the castle pieces together and then the kids played with a load of toy animals and cars in the castle (I think we might have to have a project where we make knights and peasants and a king and queen to actually go in the castle, because as entertaining as it obviously was, driving cars around the moat and storming the castle with a giant polar bear is neither historically or geographically accurate.)

Mermaid Tail

My older daughter is going to be turning four years old in a month and she has her heart set on a "pirate-mermaid-superhero party". It took a while to get our heads around what she meant, but I think we have is sussed now. I drew her a pirate-mermaid-superhero to go on her party invite and we printed out a few copies of the black and white line art for her and her little sister to colour in at home. Here's what a pirate-mermaid-superhero looks like...

So, first thing is first. We need some mermaid tails! I went to goodwill and picked up a gigantic pair of old sweat pants that looked to be a suitable green colour and a similarly gigantic gypsie skirt in lighter green with silver trimming all around it at three levels. I didn't think to take a pic of the garments before I made the first tail, so here they are with one leg and the bottom section of the skirt missing. You get the idea.

I sewed one level of the gypsie skirt to the end of the bottom half of a leg of the sweat pants and then threaded in some elastic for the waistband. I had some very very old and slightly congeled silver fabric paint that I painted the scales on with, but it seemed to work ok.

The kids really like it. The littlest one insisted on wearing it for most of Friday. I have enough material from the two garments to make four mermaid tails I think.

Paper Shoes

Instructables recently had a great tutorial up by Tissuepapers for making slippers out of paper. The tutorial showed you how to make adult sized slippers out of sheets of pretty paper. I thought it would be a nice and cheap decoration activity for the kids if we used smaller sheets of plain paper.Each shoe was made by folding a piece of letter sized printer paper. My older daughter has got size 10.5 feet and we managed to make shoes for her just fine. Much bigger than a size 11 and you'll have to use newspaper or anything you can find larger than the letter size though.

It took 4 staples to secure each shoe. You could do it with three though if you had a decent stapler, rather than a teensy weensy cracker toy one that I've got. She had fun painting her slippers and then putting stickers on them when they were dry. I made sure that we put stickers over where the staples showed on the inside of the shoes, so they wouldn't scratch her.

I think we're going to do this activity again, because the girls have a lot of dressing up gear and it would be fun to make shoes to go with the outfits.

We painted the shoes with watered down food colouring by the way.

Rolling Pin Printing

One of my RSS feeds turned up a cool tutorial on print making with a rolling pin from Craft Chi. I thought it was a really great idea, so that evening went and got a couple of old rolling pins from the local Goodwill. The next day me and the kids stuck a load of those little foam shape stickers all over the rolling pins. We got the self adhesive flower ones from the Dollar Tree and the self adhesive little people from the dollar section in Target.

Next we mixed up some kiddy paint that was watered down a little with a tiny bit of liquid dish soap added. Poured the paint on a sheet of aluminium foil and rolled the pins in it until they were coated evenly in paint.

Then the girls took turns rolling the pins over some brown paper and some butchers block paper we had handy. I was surprised at how easily they were able to manage it by themselves being only two and three years old, and they were fascinated by the patterns coming out.

When the little people papers were dry we decorated the people by adding hair and faces and clothes to them. We cut out our favourite ones and glued them to lollypop sticks to make cute little puppets.

I'd love to do this with slightly older kids and mix up a load of different skin tones, print pages of people of all races and then decorate them in the national costumes from various countries. Here are a few I did for the kids to play with while they were busy making thiers.

Phew, this is a long post isn't it! Here are a few of the flower prints too. I think we are going to use them for wrapping paper.

Rolled newspaper tubes

A couple of weeks ago I came across a great blog called Pepper Paints. One of the projects on there uses rolled up tubes of newspaper to make a pretty sturdy structure from triangles. Couldn't resist trying it out and it was a great success with the kids and the resulting bedouin tent goes quite well with the melon box shantytown that's already in the livingroom.

Whilst we were rolling up all those tubes I thought to myself that they might make quite nifty pirate rapier type swords (kids are going through a pirate phase right now), so I taped the end of one back on itself and slid on an oval of cardboard with a hole in it, then taped on a little strip of card at the bottom of the blade to hold the guard in place.

They seem to work rather well in that they have stood up to a fair bit of battling without falling to bits and yet the kids have been unable to seriously maim each other with them, because if you hit too hard then the paper blade just buckles and because the paper is rolled on the diagonal, the end of the sword isnt many layers of paper and so you can't really poke anyone hard with it either. I like them because they look really cute though.

Newspaper hats

I came across a neat little craft project on Mayamade the other day, which showed how to make quick, easy and quite durable hats for kids out of newspaper and a strip of tape. We had a go at this today with seven preschoolers and they all really got a kick out of it.

Each hat was made by plonking broadsheet newspaper, three sheets thick on a kid's head and then taping around thier forehead to make the bowl shape of the hat and then rolling up the brim and scrunching it in place. You'll need some wet wipes for the newsprinty faces that come out from the hat fitting proceedure.

The kids painted their hats and then when they had dried, decorated them with all sort of stick on bits and bobs that we had lying around, including some flowers from a dollar store lei that had broken.

This would be great fun as a craft activity at a little girl's birthday tea party. I couldn't stop giggling because my youngest looked like a crazy old lady in her hat.

Watermelon box wendy house

We made a trip to Costco the other night and managed to squish a deconstructed watermelon box and three huge sheets of cardboard that were between layers of cans on the pallets there into our lickle car, along with the whole family and our purchases. It was a tad claustrophobic on the way home, but it isn't far.

When we got home and the kids had gone to bed I set about fashioning a wendy house out of it all. For the cost of a roll of gaffer tape the kids woke up to a wendy house with doors, windows, shelves, their artwork framed on the walls and it looked quite cute after we'd put all the teaset/toy microwave/baby dolls/bath mat rugs and some other random stuff in there. The roof was just one of those elasticated crib sheets that are like mini fitted sheets, so I didn't have to tape it on or anything. All in all it was quite easy to put together, very cheap and only took one person one evening to do and now it looks like we have a shanty town in our livingroom, which is classy.
I'm hoping that it lasts a little while before we need to put it out with the recycling, but the bottom box is so sturdy that even if the top part gets mangled then we can make the bottom into something else like a pirate ship or a train or something

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