Bat Puppets

While the boys were not feeling well, we watched a lot of PBS's Sprout channel and saw this easy craft.   The boys and I created our bats and now we are waiting for Daddy to make his bat so we can have a bat family.

Materials:

construction paper

wooden sticks

glue

sharpie

scissors

To make:

1.  Fold paper in half

2.  Trace your hand--fingers together, wrist along fold

3.  Cut out hand

4.  Glue to stick

5.  Decorate bat

I have one more Olympic themed activity that I will post early next week.  Just not enough time to get everything done this week.  

Roll and Color, Ice Skater

Today we had some friends over to play that we haven't seen in a long time.  The older kids really liked this ice skater.  Bam's favorite color is orange so a coloring sheet is not complete without some orange.  White ice skates would have been boring :).

Cotton ball Snowmen

I have been meaning to make these snowmen for months now and today we found the time.  I am always surprised how much Bob enjoys doing these activities.

Materials:
construction paper
sharpie
white paint
glue
cotton balls


Prep work:  I drew an outline of the snowman and a hat on the paper.  Then I painted on the snow.

The boys filled the circles with glue then added cotton balls.

Bob's cotton ball snowman (Daddy helped Bob).

Roll and Color, Olympic Rings

This activity uses a color by number sheet, but you roll the dice to see what number you color.  

The olympic rings color by number sheet can be found here. I still have more olympic activities I want to do with the boys so stay tuned.   

Baking a birthday cake

Tonight we are celebrating Daddy's birthday so the boys and I had to make a cake.  Bam wanted me to make a dump truck or an excavator cake.  I suggested we do something a little simpler.  We decided on a car cake. Before we start baking we had to get things set up:

This a common fixture in my kitchen--the two chairs because Bob must have one too.

Bob really wanted to help today so I gave each one a task.

When I started assembling the car, the cake completely fell apart and I could not ice it.  The cake was too light and fluffy.  Since I did not take any pictures of my disaster, I will post Bam's firetruck birthday cake instead

Note to self, use the eggless, milkless chocolate cake recipe when making 3-D cakes.  It is a much denser cake.

Dot to Dot, olympic style

I found several activities with an olympic theme and I am really excited to do them.  But we are taking things slow because Bam is feeling much better but not very energetic.

I printed the dot to dot olympic torch from this site.

These activities work well for Bob also.  I do the dot to dot for him, then Bob gets to color the picture with Bam. 

Cooking and Counting

I needed to make a dessert to bring to a friend's house so Bam and I whipped up some chocoholic mint truffle kissed biscotti from picky-palate.

This quickly turned into a counting exercise.  I laid out all of the ingredients and gave him the ingredients list.  Next he counted all the ingredients and then the number of ingredients to see if they matched.

The recipe calls for kisses so I gave Bam the job of unwrapping the kisses.  While unwrapping he started counting,  he needs to work on counting above 20 so this was a good exercise.  Finally I helped him out to speed things up.  

As always Bam had fun helping. Fortunately Bob was asleep and I was not in a rush.  Everyone enjoyed the biscotti.      

Handprint Hearts

This is my last Vday post.   I saw this idea on the Sprout channel.   I thought it was cute and easy so why not try it.  Originally I was going to send these to the grandparents but decided not to because they are too cute.  A perfect page for the scrapbook.

Handprint Hearts from Sprout online

Materials:
red paper
pencil
white paper, cardstock, fancy paper
safety scissors
glue

Trace their hands with closed fingers.  If Bam had more energy I would have let him cut out his hands, but to speed things up I did all the cutting

Then interlace the thumbs and glue one hand to the other.

 Finally glue the heart hands onto a background.  I took the easy way and created a background in power point then printed it on cardstock.

Valentine's Day Cards

The boys haven't been feeling great so we did several craft projects this week.  They were excited about these projects despite their low energy levels.


I had leftover hearts from making the borders of the sun catchers, so I decided that we should decorate them.

We kept it pretty simple, stickers and pom poms.

I did one other Valentine's Day craft which I will post soon.  I need to take a few more pictures before I can post it.

Painting

We do not do a lot of painting because I do not want to clean up the mess, but Bam asked to paint so I gave in. To me painting means using washable tempera paint, but I had forgotten that we had washable watercolors and that is what Bam wanted to use. We used the Melissa & Doug Coloring Book (Boy) which was perfect for this activity.

We both had a lot of fun. Bam usually started painting a sheet then I finished it while he started a new sheet.

There are a lot of coloring sheets left so I see more painting in our future.

Heart Shaped Sun Catchers

We made heart shaped sun catchers during one of the many rainy days last week. I improvised because I forgot to buy clear contact paper twice last week. I used wax paper instead. They came out great and Bam had a lot of fun making them.

Materials:

wax paper

red paper

glue

glitter

stickers-we used an assortment from our local dollar store

I cut out 2 identical wax paper hearts. Then Bam decorated one of them with stickers, glue, and glitter.

Once he was finished, I glued the hearts together and placed a thin red paper edge on both sides of the heart.

Now the sun catcher is hanging up in Daddy's office.

Introductions

So who are we? I am a stay at home mom of 2 young boys. My oldest, who I will refer to in this blog as Bam, is a preschooler. Bam is into anything that has an engine especially fire engines although recently he is talking more and more about Coast Guard helicopters. My youngest, referred to as Bob in this blog, is a toddler who is into doing everything his big brother does. Bob is also interested in animals and trains. Although I think Bam was into trains at Bob's age too.

During the month of December, I started doing crafts or coloring with them almost everyday and we had so much fun. Now I am trying to incorporate more of these activities into our day. Also I discovered that if I give the boys a coloring sheet well I am making dinner or cleaning up after dinner things go more smoothly.