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Showing posts with label Kid fun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kid fun. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Kid Art: Coffee Filter Easter Eggs


As most of you know I enjoy helping Liam and Chloe make homemade cards & art for the holidays. With Easter right around the corner I figured we should get-to-making some cards prior to this weekend.

Last year was Chloe's first Easter and we made cute little cards using Liam's and Chloe's finger prints: Little Chick Easter Cards

This year Chloe ended up just 'advising' us (watching and giggling at us) while we made some Easter eggs out of coffee filters. I'm planning on saving a few and hanging them on a window, and then we'll mail the rest out to family members this week.

This was something I thought of as I was pulling out art supplies for Liam. It was very easy and we only needed 3 supplies to make these:

1) Coffee filters, any size
2) Do-A-Dot markers

and 3) Plastic water droppers


I laid out some paper on the table to absorb the expected watery mess. Then Liam decorated the coffee filters with an assortment of Do-A-Dot colors. 

Then I gave him a little bowl of water and a plastic dropper. He gently (ha ha...who am I kidding) messily dropped water onto the coffee filter and watched the colors 'bleed' together. 



This was a bit of an art AND science experiment all in one :)

Once he realized how fun it was to squirt the water we were on a roll. He made ten of these in one sitting!



Then we laid them out to dry. They were dry in about an hour.


I cut them into egg shapes, trimming two sides of the filters off.


And here are our eggs!


Now we have to write "Happy Easter Grandma" etc on the back of them, stick them in envelopes and address them. And I'll have Liam and Chloe stick Easter stickers all over the envelopes.


A couple of tips:

- These took very little time and it was perfect for a 3 year old to do.

- If you don't have Do-A-Dot markers I'm pretty sure washable markers would work just as well.

- If you don't have plastic water droppers I bet a paint brush dipped in water and 'dripped' over the filters would work well too.


Let me know if you try this too!

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Noodles and balls


Liam has a fair amount of toys. Most of them he's received as gifts from family members and us at Christmas time, for his birthday and other exciting events (Valentine's Day, Easter, etc). He enjoys his toys, books, puzzles and play dough. But guess what his absolute FAVORITE things to play with are? 

If you guessed Mr. Potato Head, you're wrong.
If you guessed Little People Farm, wrong.
If you guessed his Matchbox cars, wrong again.

His favorite thing to play with is uncooked elbow macaroni.
Yes, you heard me correctly. He loves to play with noodles.
Inexpensive, simple noodles.

And little fuzzy balls.

And pieces of string.

The elbow noodles are definitely his #1 thing though.

This little boy insists on playing with the dang noodles at least twice, sometime three, sometimes four times a day! He will bypass a pile of cool Legos and go straight for the jar of noodles.

Over the past few months we have discovered an astonishing amount of ways to play with noodles.

Noodles in a tray.
Noodles on a train.
(Much better than 'snakes on a plane')

Noodles tossed all over the place.

This morning Liam apparently wanted to take a NAP in his noodles :)


He also loves playing with little fuzzy balls that I picked up at Hobby Lobby for like $2 a few months ago. The balls keep his busy for a long time. His Nana brought him a little red kitchen set (pots and pans) this past weekend as an early Valentine's Day gift, so he's been busy cooking up "meatballs, snowballs and popcorn balls" the last couple of days.

Oh my God, I LOVE these little legs :)

Noodles and balls together.
It's REALLY fun to clean up. Not.
I store all of these creative objects in little glass jars. The most recent addition to the jars is one of wooden dowels (left over from various IKEA furniture put-togethers).

Balls, noodles, string, letters, dowels and pipe cleaners. What more could an almost-2-year-old ask for!

This photo was taken just this afternoon. What a little busy-body he is. (Note the deck of cards thrown around in the background. Yet another simple, cheap thing that he loves to play with).

Have a good week :)

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Yo yo yo, look who made play-dough


I made some homemade play-dough for Liam today.

What's cool about this recipe is that all of the ingredients are safe and edible, so if your kid just so happens to try and eat it, it's not going to hurt them.

Of course the first thing Liam tried to do was eat it! But it was so salty that he spit it out right away & stopped trying to eat it :)

Simple, safe ingredients

All you need is a bowl and a spoon

Our dough was blue. And it smelled like Kool-Aid!


Since it's such a nice day outside, I thought it'd be fun for Liam to play & tinker with it outside on our deck:


Checking it out

Mushing it into some measuring cups

From Liam's perspective....

After he was done playing with it I wrapped it in plastic and stuck it in our fridge. I'm not sure if we'll be able to use it again, but it's worth a shot, right! We'll see if it's still usable tomorrow:


My mother-in-law, who used to be an elementary school teacher, gave me the recipe a while ago. She used to make it with her students in her classroom:

Mom B's Homemade Play Dough Recipe:
3 packets of Kool-Aid
3 cups of flour
2 T. of vegetable oil
1 cup of water (boiling)
1/4 cup of salt
Mix it all together in a bowl & knead it into a dough

(whatever color Kool-Aid you choose is the color that the dough will be)


Have fun!