Spring Craft - Life Cycle of the Honey Bee Interactive/Play "Hive" from Cereal Box

Spring Crafts - Life Cycle of the Monarch Butterfly (Painting & Writing)

Spring Craft - Butterfly Life Cycle - Learning about Metamorphosis

*when finished the butterfly folds accordipn style down into a "caterpillar"

Butterfly Life Cycle Chart- cut into strips small enough to glue to individual Popsicle sticks
http://www.classroomfreebies.com/2012/04/butterfly-life-cycle-poster-charts.html

Basic How-To Here (use the 2nd craft listed for caterpillar-to-butterfly model)
http://www.daniellesplace.com/html/caterpillarcrafts.html

Blue Paint
Popsicle Sticks
Googlie Eyes
Construction Paper (to make antennas) - I could not get pipe cleaners to glue and stay put for anything!

Pipe Cleaner for body and pom pom for head
Sharpie (to draw wings before painting)
Various Paints & Q-Tips - To dot on colors onto wings
Elmers Glue
Mod Podge - to cover over Life Cycle Chart so it stays put
Masking Tape

This craft was mainly one that I did, having my son dot on the colors of the wings.  He wanted to do this craft but I knew he would be impatient for each step to dry/finish.

In the end, this is a craft that doubles as an activity and also a teaching tool for the life cycle of the butterfly and metamorphosis

Spring Craft - Practicing Cutting - Pollination Flower & Insects

Insects to Cut Out
http://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/butterfly-insects-bee-ladybug-vector-760492

Flowers to Cut Out
http://www.vectorious.net/img-hyacinth-vector-art---abstract-background-with-daffodil,hyacinth-and-tulip-10694.htm

Pollination Chart
http://kidsgrowingstrong.org/Pollination

Have child cut out insects and then the flowers

Help put glue tape to back of each thing cut out and let child place flowers and insects on paper

Tape pollination chart to top of picture

Spring Craft - Life Cycle of the Frog - Frog Catching Fly

 Materials

Large Paper Plate
Markers - Green and Red
1 Party Blower
1 Black Pom Pom
2 Small Googlie Eyes (for fly)
2 Large Googlie Eyes (for frog)
Elmers Glue
Frog Life Cycle Chart, found here http://theteacherladies.blogspot.com/p/life-cycle.html
Green Paint
Masking Tape
Adult Scissors

How-To

Use Elmers glue to glue pom pom to end of blower, add googlie eyes with glue (I laid a magazine over the extended blower to hold it open and in place so pom could dry on it, about an hour before we began the craft)

Fold paper plate in half

 Have child color inner circle red for frog mouth, outer rim green

Paste or tape frog life cycle chart to back of paper plate, allowing room for hole for blower
Cut hole for blower


Insert blower and tape in place with masking tape

Paint top of plate and back with green paint (we used a foam brush and acrylic paint), let dry 

Draw on nostrils and affix googlie eyes

Once it is all dry, you can let the child play with the blower

Also, don't forget to go over and explain the life cycle of the frog and metamorphosis  :)

Spring Craft - Life Cycle of the Chicken - Hatching Baby Chick

 Materials

Card Stock (we used blue)
Orange Construction Paper
Yellow Construction Paper
2 Googlie Eyes
Scrapbook Glue Tape
Brass Fastener (or ribbon)
Hole Punch
Markers

How-To

Print out this egg on Blue Card Stock

http://www.sweetclipart.com/easter-egg-coloring-page-799

Cut it out, and cut the egg in half at the midway zig zag

Have child color in the egg

Attach 2 pieces of the egg together either with a brass fastener or by punching 2 holes and tying it together

Cut a bowling pin shaped "chick" out of yellow paper

Have child help you affix the beak with scrapbook glue tape and the Googlie Eyes
Use glue tape to affix chick to back of the bottom of the egg, so it is peeking out

Life Cycle of  a Chicken Chart
http://learningenglish-esl.blogspot.jp/2010/11/life-cycle-of-chicken.html

Coffee Filter Craft - How Flowers Grow & Photosynthesis

Materials:

1 coffee filter
Food coloring in a little water
Small paint brush
Child scissors 
Glue Stick
Construction paper - green for stem & leave, brown for dirt, blue base
11 Beans, dried (we used lentils)
Elmers Glue
Black Sharpie

How-To:

Have child paint the edges of the coffee filter, leave middle white

We used a blow dryer to dry the coffee filter

When it is dry, glue it to the blue construction paper

Have child cut out stem and 2 diamonds for the leaves and the "dirt patch"

Have child help apply the glue stick to stem and leaves and dirt and affix to paper


Add 10 Elmers glue dots to the middle of the flower

Have child put a bean on each glue dot (10 beans)
(Save 1 bean for "underground")

Put one bean on the brown paper with a dot of glue

Draw roots underground and label the flower parts

Copy the photosynthesis chart and paste into Word,  to your size preference and print
Find Photosynthesis Chart here http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/earth3.htm

Then discuss the photosynthesis process with your child

Other resources:

Bill Nye has a great episode on Plants, discussing the process of photosynthesis.  There's even a segment where a car is covered in grass!  My 3 year old loves to watch it and requests it often.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD8L83LOy4k

You Tube is a great source of songs for anything but here are 2 on photosynthesis we like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1_uez5WX1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgYPeeABoUs

Spring Craft - Feeding Worms to Baby Bird/Nest - Fine Motor

Yesterday we made a clothes pin "Robin" mama with "worms" from pipe cleaners

Today, by my son's request, we made a nest and a baby bird to feed

Materials

 Nest
Small Paper Plate
Brown and Yellow Construction Paper
Glue Stick
Scissors
Popsicle Stick
Brown Crayon
Blue Construction Paper

 Baby Bird
Small white paper plate cut into the shape of a baby bird (kind of a bowling pin shape)
Orange and Black Crayons
2 Googlie Eyes
Elmer's Glue
2 Feathers
Small Diamond-Shaped Piece of Construction Paper (or better yet, card stock)
Hole Punch
Scrapbook glue tape


How To:

The night before - 

with Elmers Glue
Glue the Popsicle stick to the back of the baby bird that you cut from a paper plate
Glue the 2 feathers to the baby bird shape
Let dry overnight

In the morning -

Baby Bird -

Have child color the bird orange and black
Fold diamond shape in half to form an open beak
Affix with scrapbook tape to bird's face
Attach Gogglie Eyes
With hole punch, punch 3-4 holes inside the mouth, large enough to fit a pipe cleaner easily with minimal dexterity (your child has to be able to insert the worm while holding the clothes pin "mommy bird")

Nest -

Use scissors to cut a small slit in the center of the paper plate using adult scissors (to insert Popsicle stick so the baby bird can sit in the nest)

Have child color the paper plate with a brown crayon (I forgot this step)
You cut brown and yellow paper into strips and apply glue stick to the strips
Have child place the gluey strips to the paper plate to build the "nest"
Once you do that, you can insert the "baby bird" so that it can sit in the nest and wait to be "fed by the mama bird" - the Robin from yesterday's craft

Also, cut out several blue ovals and apply glue stick and have child put the eggs in the nest. 

Now you did a craft together but it's also an activity!

Your child can have fun picking up worms with the clothes pin mama bird and feeding them to the hungry baby bird.

Works on fine motor skills and it's fun!

Spring Robin and Worms Craft and Activity - Fine Motor Skills, Counting, Sorting, Cutting and Painting

Robin with worm in her mouth, in the grass

Materials:

Clothes Pin
Empty cereal box
Green and Brown construction paper
Acrylic paint - Black, Orange, Yellow
Q-Tips and thin paint brush
Googlie Eyes (smallest)
Pipe Cleaners in variety of colors
Child scissors and adult scissors
Scrapbook tape roller
Green crayons

Have child help as much as you think they can handle...

Bird/Robin -

Have child help you paint the clothes pin with a Q-Tip and small brush in orange, black and yellow
When it dries, affix Googlie eyes on either side

Grass Patch -

Cut side off of cereal box
Have child color a brown piece of paper with various green crayon shades for "grass blades"
Cut paper to fit inside cereal box, glue down with scrapbook tape

Use long and short pieces of construction paper (green and brown) to cut "patches of grass", let child cut paper into blades, glue down with scrapbook tape to bottom of cereal box where you glued the brown paper before (bend the blades of grass to make them more "grass-like")

Worms -

Cut pipe cleaners into 3" pieces and fold the pointy ends down in a loop against the pipe cleaner to make rounded tips on each side (so it's not so sharp to play with)

Bend pipe cleaner to make it "wiggly" shaped

Activity

Fine motor skills of "catching" worms with the clothes pin, finding them in the "grass"
Sorting worms by color
Counting how many of each color worm

Ocean Page - English and Spanish (Handprint and Fingerprint painting)

Have child help you paint the ocean, clouds and sun
Use their hand print to make a boat, add construction paper sails once it dries
Use fingerprints with paint to add sea creatures (once the ocean dries)

Draw on faces and features to creatures in the ocean
Label in Spanish and English

Learning Spanish - Bug Garden Page (Fingerprint Painting)

Find and print out a coloring page of a garden with flowers, sun, clouds, fence etc.

Label all of the coloring page with Spanish words

Decide which bugs you'd like to feature and look up the Spanish word for those and jot down somewhere

Use a brush to paint your child's fingertip in a color and make a bug on the paper (red for ladybug etc.), wipe off paint from finger between each "bug" painting

Let paint dry on all bugs and then with a thin black Sharpie outline and add features to each bug

Then label each bug with the Spanish word

Learning Spanish - Ant Picnic Page

 Print out a tablecloth page from Google images onto white paper
Tape or glue on a napkin and small paper plate and I printed a little rhyme on a label

The top left label says:

"10 Ants

Diez little hormigas
Went looking for comida
And they found..."

Then I went to Google images and found and fit onto 5160 labels various fruits we wanted to learn, as well as utensils and the word for napkin, and wrote on the Spanish word for each fruit

After the napkin, plate and labels were affixed
We used a Q-Tip to dot on 3 dots to make 10 ants, drawing on legs and antenna when they dried

Learning the Alphabet - A - English and Spanish

Draw a picture of an "A" alligator on a lake scene with a lowercase "a" to make a turtle
Use Q-Tips to dot on paint and paint the scene
We mixed colors red and yellow to make orange and blue and green to make aquamarine

Learning the Alphabet - A - English and Spanish - Apple Page

We painted the tree leave top green and let it dry

Then we painted his finger tips red and he made dots on the tree and then we added a line to make them a lowercase "a" once the paint dried

The rest of the picture he colored in with crayons and labeled the picture in English and Spanish

Learning Spanish - A is for Avion (Airplane) and Azul (Blue)

Easiest done in the bathroom!

Paint child's foot blue, have them step onto paper

Get that kid into the tub and rinse off foot and get dressed for the day!

Once paint dries, draw outline of airplane and write on any other info you want, in our case, the color blue and words in Spanish and I added some clouds after the fact (not shown)

Learning the Alphabet - Z is for Zebra (paper bag puppet)

I painted a paper lunch bag white (or start with a white bag), let dry
Have child help you cut out 2 ovals for ears and cut some black paper into fringe for the hair
Color inside of ears pink and inside of mouth red
Have child help you draw or paint on stripes and face, tongue etc.
Add googlie eyes or draw on eyes too

Y - Learning the Alphabet - Yellow Submarine Craft etc.

 Paper Tube "Yellow Submarine"

1 Paper Towel Roll
1 Toilet Paper Roll
Yellow and Black Paint

Cut hole in paper towel roll and insert toilet paper roll
Affix with masking tape
We painted tubes yellow together, let dry
Cut "door" in submarine so toy figures can go in and out
Draw on circular "windows" or stamp on with sponge (that's what we did)

Then we watched the Beatles video for 'Yellow Submarine' and talked about who the Beatles were in music history.  The instruments in the song led us to talk about other music...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrs5DjHNUOE

And since we just got it from the library, we also read Wynton Marsalis' book "Squeak, Rumble, Whomp" which is all about how music can be heard in everything we do
http://www.amazon.com/Squeak-Rumble-Whomp-Sonic-Adventure/dp/0763639915

and then we watched Wynton Marsalis on Mister Rogers and listened to all the musicians on that episode
http://www.amazon.com/Celebrations-1563-Visit-Wynton-Marsalis/dp/B004C5GA08

Spanish Books We Like

Books

Say Hola to Spanish, Otra Vez (Again!) by Susan Middleton Elya

Eight Animals on the Town by Susan Middleton Elya

X - Learning the Alphabet - Xylophone paper craft and water xylophone activity, science lesson on sound and music

Cut out paper strips in varying colors and some smaller strips in black

(Have child help you cut if they are able to make clean lines, mine is not quite there yet!)

He did help me glue on the paper strips to the paper and lay the mallets into an X

We then did a "water xylophone" activity where I filled 4 small glass bowls with differing amounts of water, adding food coloring to each, similar to this http://playathomemom3.blogspot.com/2011/06/water-xylophone.html

He used wood chopsticks to hit the different bowls to listen to the different sounds they made, which was higher, lower etc. and then just went crazy playing his own songs

Then we watched Bill Nye's episode on Music & Sound (I can't find the full show online but the show ended with this song and was a favorite of my son's)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvJHDejD3mo

We didn't have much time before leaving for preschool so he just played his drums after the show and we briefly talked about the different parts of the ear and how sound waves work.

W - Learning the Alphabet - Hiding Worm Craft, Science Lesson, Color Mixing

Cut a "W" from red paper (preferably hard cardstock but I just glued my construction paper to an old cereal box and then cut it out again), draw a worm's lines and face on it (I also used a googlie eye)

Lay worm on brown construction paper and lightly trace 2 lines where the bottom of the "W" hits the paper, then cut 2 small slits there large enough for the worm to sit down into

Draw a horizontal line across top of paper, denoting the grass line

Have child paint the area above the line green, let dry

I then used some color mixing with him, to mix yellow and green to make a lighter green (or as he learned on Blue's Clues, it is called "chartreuse"...I swear I never would have taught him that but leave it to good old B.C. to fit in things I'd never even think of!)

Once the dark green had dried, he used a small brush to brush on "grass blades" of the lighter shade, let that dry

Once the paint is dry, have child use child scissors to cut grass into strips for "blades" (with some guidance so they cut into straight lines) and the paint will naturally make the paper curly but you can bend the blades if you want to make it "grassier"

Then we watched Bill Nye's episode about invertebrates - animals without a backbone, like worms

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU-pqs6gVPc

 Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5xvagTFrv4

Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehSaCnf-nxw

To illustrate this, Bill Nye showed an octopus pushing itself through a tube, so we did our own "experiment" using a toy lion and a scarf (the scarf being the "octopus" and the lion being the vertebrate) - The one with bones couldn't fit but the one without bones could squish down to fit through the tube

This led to us talking about exoskeletons, which invertebrates like insects have, that are hard, and therefore a bug or crab couldn't fit through a tube unless it was small enough since they are hard, but just on the outside, unlike a worm or octopus.

Then we got out all of his plastic bug figures since bugs are all invertebrates and he played with bugs until time to go to preschool

V - Learning the Alphabet (Volcano with removable "lava")

Fold brown construction paper into a pocket V shape and glue or tape to large sheet of paper, drawing the "V" shape

Draw rest of volcano around the "V"

Have child draw with red, orange and yellow marker some "lava" spraying out of the volcano

Cut orange, yellow and red construction paper into "lava/flames" to fit the pocket opening of the volcano

U - Learning the Alphabet - Umbrella Craft

Have child color small white paper plate
Fold paper plate in half, taping the edges together
Cut folded half of paper plate so that it's a jagged long slit, like the edge of an umbrella
Cut a J shape for the handle from a white cardstock or another paper plate, tape inside umbrella
Draw person or animal on cardboard and cut out
Person can be inserted inside pocket of umbrella - this is a craft they can play with afterward!

Valentine's Day Craft - Paper Roll Butterfly or Elephant - Color Mixing/Cutting

 Materials I used:

1 Toilet Paper Roll
2 Q-Tips
Paints of various colors (I used red, blue, and white and we did color mixing)
Googlie eyes
Construction Paper - Red for large hearts, White for small hearts, which we painted, White paper for the "proboscis"

My son loves bugs so this craft was fun to do.

We practiced color mixing by mixing red and blue to get purple and then we painted a toilet paper roll purple

I traced 2 large hearts and 2 small hearts on construction paper

He used child safety scissors to help me cut the hearts out, with me guiding his hand (so they acutally looked like hearts in the end!)

We painted the small hearts purple but left the large hearts red, only dotting with pink paing (we mixed red and white to make pink)

We painted 2 Q-Tips blue for the antennas, which I taped inside the roll once they all dried
We attached googlie eyes and painted on a red smile

Then, since my son is into nature and keeping things "real" I cut a paper strip from white paper and using scissors I had him help me curl it and glued it, with curl facing downward, to form a "proboscis" so the butterfly can drink nectar when he pretend plays with it later.

We have plastic flowers from Michaels that he uses for his bug figures to play with.

*This craft could easily be altered slightly to make an "Elephant" for E day for the alphabet, or for Valentine's Day.  The "proboscis" would become the trunk and you'd leave off the antennas.  

T - Learning the Alphabet

T is for Turtle -

2 small paper plates
Tape
Crayons
4 legs and 1 head and neck cut from green construction paper
"Accordian" the neck and legs and tape inside the bottom paper plate
Tape on top plate
This allows for the head and legs to "hide" if the turtle gets scared, like a real land turtle
Have child color the shell with crayons
Draw on turtle face (I was going to use googlie eyes but then the head wouldn't retract)

S - Learning the Alphabet

S is for Sea Snail

 

http://blogs.familyeducation.com/parenting/moms/allison-mcdonald/color-mixing-snail 

S is for Skeleton

http://www.artistshelpingchildren.org/kidscraftsactivitiesblog/2011/10/how-to-make-q-tip-skeletons/

Skeleton

Using Q-Tips

http://www.artistshelpingchildren.org/kidscraftsactivitiesblog/2011/10/how-to-make-q-tip-skeletons/

R - Learning the Alphabet

R is for Raccoon

 

Print out an "R" on grey paper (I only had white to color it in with pencil), cut it out

Attach it to another color paper

Draw a tail, ears, eyes and nose on grey paper, cut out with your child

Attach to paper and draw on whiskers, extra face markings etc.