Frog Hand Puppet

I found a hand puppet making craft kit for my 3 year old to do. 

Here are all the parts.

Now she has glued them all onto the puppet and is ready to put on a puppet show for me.

Paper Hobby Horse

In the course of playing dress ups during the week we uncovered a major failing of the dress-up box - there are no horse costumes. Since it has been hot and humid this week, I didn't feel like bringing out the sewing machine to whip up an amazing horse costume (I'm not even sure I could make one without a pattern, anyway!). I remembered my fabulous friend Irene making these paper hobby horses a year or two ago, so I thought I would give it a go.

First I drew a horse head (not one of my better skills!).

Next James cut out two heads and started sticking clumps of wool to the inside for the mane.

Then he glued the two heads together. This was a slight problem because he glued ALL of the heads together. He went back and pulled apart the neck so we could slide the cardboard roll into the head.

Now we have a complete hobby horse to ride around the house and pretend we are galloping off to rescue distressed damsels and compete in horse races around the garden.

A Friendly Echidna

We collected some leaves while we were out today and decided to use them to make an echidna. First I drew an outline of the echidna.

Then I gave the children the leaves and some glue to finish making their little echidnas. I had thought that the gum leaves would create fantastic spines...and so they did, only the spines the children wanted to make were lying down because the echidna is our friend.

Cotton Ball Sheep

My daughter loves to use glue, so I sat her down to happily stick the cotton balls all over this sheep shape I had sitting in my useful box. It kept her entertained for a good half hour while I was hanging the clothes on the line. 

Handprint Hedgehog

My son has been learning all about animals from around the world for the last 12 weeks at school. One of his homework activities is to teach his family something he had been doing at school. Today he decided to teach us how to make simple hedgehogs (and Macaws)

 First we took a small hand and traced around it - notice the little hands helping to trace the even smaller hands :-) Then we cut out the hand print in different coloured cardboard (paper is easier, but since we have heaps of old folder dividers in the cupboard we used those instead)

Then we take a paper plate. I finally managed to find paper plates at the Reject Shop just in time for this craft otherwise you would be seeing my attempt to cut out a circle. I assure you that that is not a pretty sight! 

Then we arranged the hand prints in rows along the plate. We cut out two eyes and coloured in the middle, and a rain drop shape for the nose. Here we have our hedgehog all ready to hang up.

And here we have the example that our 'teacher' made for us to work from.

Animal Shapes

Today we have a couple of animal shapes that Imogen decorated while I had a cup of tea. Now we have a sheep and a unicorn to begin a poster farm with. I wonder what other animals will join them over the weekend...