Pinterest inspired.

Thanks for Pinterest for being such an awesome place to find cool crafts to do! Here are some I found and did recently!

Paper Mache Hot Air Balloons

The recipe I used was very simple. There were a lot of recipes out there some with hot water, some without. I personally think when you use hot water for things like this and like play dough it works better so thats what I did. It obviously was a huge mess but I knew that getting into it. We did some bowls as well but I really think our hot air balloons turned out the best! I put everyone in the cleaned out sensory tub and showed the little dude how to do it. I sprayed the balloons with cooking spray but really you are supposed to do vaseline I just didn't have any. I had also taped half a roll of a toilet paper roll to the bottom of the balloon to give it more of the hot air balloon shape.  I then started mine and watched the little dude do his. I finished mine, and helped his while he started just wanting to squish up all the paper shreds in the paper mache paste. Oh well. Can't win them all and he did do a lot of the work! For the basket I hot glued felt to a strawberry basket! We then painted out hot air balloons and after they were dry we hung them up in the play room!

                      

Papier-mâché

-2 cups boiling water

-2 cups cold water

-1/2 cup flour

Mix flour and cold water. Then pour into boiling water and take off the heat. Mix all together and then pour in a bowl for it to cool down. It will thicken up as it cools down so don't worry about it if it is watery. I thought at first it looked like two much but we used just about all of it!! Although I also had a 3 year old who just wanted to stick his hands in it and get the paper all wet and mushy to play with so that may have been why as well. 


We have also made cinnamon and applesauce ornaments which I will thank to Pinterest for showing me how its done but I know for a fact it has been around for years and years. While I wanted to make ornaments out of cookie cutters the little dude just wanted to play with it so I let him do some of that before we started making the real shapes we would end up baking. 

Cinnamon/Apple Sauce Ornaments
1 cup of applesauce
1 1/2 cups cinnamon

Mix together until it starts to form a dough. No heat. If it seems too wet add more cinnamon, if it seems to dry then add more applesauce. This is also a dough you will most likely just need to mix with your hands. I LOVE the smell of cinnamon and I had to even  stand as far back as I could while mixing because the smell was so strong at first. When it has reached a dough I broke it off into pieces and started to knead it. If it was still too sticky to roll out I just put a little cinnamon in a bowl and rolled the dough into a ball and then coated the ball in the cinnamon. 

Playing with the dough

Cinnamon to dunk the dough in

           

I then rolled it out and started cutting out shapes. We did letters, dinosaurs and hearts. Pretty much anything we wanted. You are then going to need to bake it at 200degrees. I did about 2 hours and then left it in the turned off oven over night. You want them to be hard like a rock. You also do not want them so thin because the thinner they are the easier it is for them to break. Since I was doing this with a three year old so did turn out pretty thin but we will just have to be careful with those. I also used a pen to poke a hole through the ornaments before cooking them so we can use their as gift tags or put them on our tree. I kinda want to stick some in my car to have my car smell like delicious cinnamon!

November Crafts

I didn't get as much done in November as I would have liked to. But with Thanksgiving and family it just seemed like the whole month rushed by. It was fun to do some fall crafts though and keep busy with other activities.

We lucked out and the little dudes mom brought us back some great leaves from her trip
They look great as part of our leaf sun catcher. 

We made a hand tree with a traced hand, some paper leaves and a paper plate!

Our fall corn project!

Again we did our word match for November

My curriculum for November. I wish we would have been able to do it all but for now it is time for Christmas crafts!!

Counting Apples

I decided for a fall project we would make apples and glue on the amount of seeds each apple would take. We did 1-20 with the first apple having 1 seed, the next having 2 seeds and so on. As you can imagine it could seem to be tedious work for a 3 year old so I spread out the project and it actually took us quite awhile. When we first started I started with apples 1-5 but as the numbers grew larger we did less and less apples each time. I cut out apple shapes from red and green paper and cut out a bunch of little "seed shapes". It definitely was not the most exciting project to boot but I could tell it really helped the little dudes counting skills because it was a lot of repetition, especially for the larger numbers. But finally! we are done and it turned out so cute! As you can see I made a fast little tree form on his wall. I then put up 20 pieces of tape and told him we had to stick on all the apples in order. We started with 1 and went from there until we finally had 20 apples on our tree!