Long-Weekly Unplugged Project: String Easter Egg Decorations

This weeks Unplugged Project was: LONG.

We made string Easter eggs.

I have been wanting to do this craft for some time now, and it seemed to fit nicely in the "long" theme.

For this project you need:

"long" pieces of cotton yarn

water balloons

1 part white glue to 1 part water

Cut the yarn in 12 t0 18 inch lengths.

Put the yarn into the glue/water mixture. Make sure the yarn is very saturated and then with your fingers, wipe the remaining glue off.
I liked using water balloons because they seemed to be the size I wanted my eggs to be, but you could use any size balloon.

Tie the balloon with thread and hang it up, (we just tacked it into the ceiling-this made it very easy to work on.)
Wrap pieces of yarn around and around the balloon--it is pretty messy--we hung our balloons right over the table to catch the mess.

Becky was very creative, and instead of just wrapping the yarn any which way, she wound the yarn around the balloon.

Let this hang and dry for about 24 hours.

After completely dry, pop the balloon. The egg makes the most wonderful crackling noise when the yarn releases from the balloon.

Hang them up and enjoy!!

Make sure to check out all of this weeks Unplugged projects.

Next weeks theme is : BOOKS

I shared this project over at the We Made It: Saturday Showcase. Make sure to check out all of this weeks great crafts.

Old MacDonald Had a Farm-activities

Today we had fun reenacting Old MacDonald Had a Farm with our farm animals.
I found these great printables at Kidsparkz. We made this a game by turning the cards over and as we sang "Old MacDonald" one of the kids would pick a card and then that is the animal sound we would sing.

We then put the card down on the "farm" and we found the matching toy animals and put these on the correct picture.

The kids all enjoyed this song-game. They wanted to play it over and over.

These cards also include baby animals to match to their mothers.
We laughed a lot as we read Cock A Doodle Moo!

Of course, we needed a craft to continue on our farm theme, so today we made paper plate cows.

We usually do all our crafting from "scratch", but this time, with so many farm crafts I want to make, I purchased this kit which contains everything we need to make three different animals--- and these were already cut out!!

I needed to help Kimmy with hers, she was a little under the weather today!

But, as Gracie made her cow, Kimmy pepped up and read Grace the directions.

I love how Mark made his cow's eyes.

Our "farm" wall is beginning to fill up!

You can find our first farm post here

and the second farm post here.

Mrs Wishy-Washy and piggy crafts

Our "fun on the farm" has continued, and over the past week we have fallen in love with

Mrs. Wishy-Washy. She is so careful to keep her animals on the farm nice and clean, we decided that we should keep out animals nice and clean too.(this means if you give a little child a bunch of plastic animals and some water, they will be kept busy for a very long time)

We now have a very large supply of Toob farm animals.

Kimmy has a lot of fun sorting out all the animals into their families.We made piggies today for our "farm" board, piggies that are in desperate need for Mrs. Wishy Washy's tub! First I printed out piggies and the kids painted them pink.
After they dried, I outlined them added thier faces and then cut them out.

We then needed our pigs to play in the mud. We used shaving cream and brown paint.

These two ingredients make such a neat combination. The paint turns into "puffy" paint. The color mixed in easily and when it dried the color became darker.

We used our fingers to get our pigs all dirty!

Luke's piggy "played" in the mud for quite a while.

When the paint-shaving cream mixture dried it really looked like dirt. Very--cool!
We have added our pigs to the farm themed wall.

We also made pig magnets today. For each pig you need light pink foam sheets, dark pink foam sheets, wiggle eyes and pink pipe cleaners.

I used this basic pattern for the idea of our magnets, but instead of just paper we used foam, wiggle eyes and a pipe cleaner for a tail.

When I do these projects with the littlest kids, I always put the glue onto the area I want them to stick their pieces too. This helps with "positioning" and helps the littles achieve a result that makes them happy.

These piggies make everyone happy!

Stay tuned for more "down on the farm" activities over the next few days.

Happy 19th Birthday, Matt!!!

If you see Matt today, wish him a Happy Birthday!!

You are a wonderful son and brother and we all love you very much!

I Heart Faces-Adult

This weeks I Heart Faces theme is: no flash. I always love to take candlelight pictures, especially on birthdays.
Make sure to check out all this weeks great photos at I Heart Faces.

I Heart Faces--Kids

This week's theme is "no flash", and I knew immediately what group of pictures I wanted to choose my entry from. It was a beautiful sunny day is the winter, and I just love the shadows on Kimberly's face and the breeze blowing her hair.

Make sure you check out all the entries in this weeks IHeartFaces contest.

Tot School

Luke is 46 months old

Kimberly is 34 months old
I can't believe that we missed Tot-School last week, but we did! The weather was nicer, I buckled down and got real busy with the elementary homeschool kids, and I was tired, real, real tired.

But, I did manage to document a little of this weeks "work"

First and foremost, we were blessed with a few beautiful days. These days are very rare in March in upstate NY, and when they come we try to savor them.

On this day, we headed to the state park a very short distance for our house.

That is a frozen lake behind Luke, and although the temperatures were in the 50's on this day, the lake is still frozen and we got to see some ice fisherman . Look at that lovely, warm sunshine. This is Tot-school at its best.

Snow melt is a lot of fun also.

We have begun a farm unit. We are learning about farms, farmers, tractors, farm animals, and we are loving nursery rhymes with a "farm" theme.

Our first nursery rhyme is Little Boy Blue.

I found this very cute Little Boy Blue craft a First -School.
I cut out the pieces and Kim and Luke were both very successful at gluing the parts onto "Little Boy Blue".
I just had to share this wonderful picture that Kimberly drew one day. She spends a lot of time drawing pictures, something my other 34 month olds never cared to do. When she finished this picture, she brought it to me and told me that she had drawn a beaver. I looked at the picture and realized,--SHE DID!

We have a new game for our "farm" study. It is very simple: draw a card and move to the correct animal or color. If you land on an animal, you put that animal in your barn. This is also a great puzzle activity for the youngest tots, and is great for learning colors and shapes as well.

We have been learning about rainbows and we made these cute pipecleaner-pony bead rainbows. I made one as a pattern for the kids to follow, and then they took over.

I have seen this done on many places all over the internet. Most of these used styrofoam to secure the pipe cleaners, but I made blue playdough instead. This made a very easy "blue sky" spot to put our rainbow pipe cleaners. I also had the kids only put 5 beads onto the pipecleaners so that they wouldn't get overwhelmed.

Kimmy was very proud of a job well done.

Also, to go along with the rainbow theme, we made a rainbow snake.

A printer, crayons, and brass fasteners were all these cute snakes needed.

Make sure to check out all of this weeks great Tot-School ideas.