Cats {Nursery Rhyme Fun}

 

I recently shared about a terrific book, Origami for children, by Mari and Roshin Ono, so I was very excited to find Origami Club, a fantastic website, with lots and lots of ideas and great instructions. You can print the instructions, or watch a video if the printed version is to tricky to understand. All ideas are also rated, so you know the difficulty level before you start.

As part of our cat theme, I focused on some popular cat nursery rhymes...

 The Three Little Kittens

For some fun related to this nursery rhyme, we traced around Little One's hand and then created three sets of mittens. He loved sticking on the cotton balls. Little One loves glue, and calls it "gloopy glue", like Mr Maker does.  He gave this bottle of glue a good squeeze (great for those little fingers), but in the end I needed to help squeeze the glue out. We then played a game of hide and seek with the mittens. Just like in the nursery rhyme, we "lost" the mittens and had to find them. He really enjoyed this! (The mittens and the kittens are great for counting practice too.)

For some more fun, I made origami puppets (see above) to act out the nursery rhyme and we once again used our mittens as part of the play. I made a happy and a cross face for the Mommy cat, which I stuck back-to-back to a craft stick, so that the face could easily be flipped over during the story. This was also a great success!

Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, Where have you been?

Acting out this nursery rhyme also turned into a great learning activity, with me focusing on prepositions. In my version, the pussy cat frightened and chased the mouse under, over, and onto the chair.  

PS. I'm linking this to...

Tot Tuesdays @ My Delicious Ambiguity 

Show and Tell @ ABC and 123 

High Paw @ the best toys for toddlers

For the Kids Friday @ Sun Scholars
We Play @ childhood101 

Speckled Hearts

 

These were our Valentine's gifts for the awesome grandparents we are so blessed to have in our lives.

We took an A4 sheet of red paper and Big One wrote an "I love you because..." note on it. We then wrapped this around a nice slab of chocolate and decorated with speckled hearts (I don't know what else to call these :)). 

I think everyday...any day...is a good day for an "I love you" note...don't you?

To make our speckled paper, I gave Little One a toothbrush and some watercolour paints. He found the toothbrush spraying rather tricky, so this was a good fine motor workout for those little fingers! 

I found the origami heart pattern in an amazing book, Origami for children, by Mari Ono and Roshin Ono. I also found a similar pattern here, if you would like to make some of your own.

PS. I'm linking this to Tot Tuesdays @ My Delicious Ambiguity.

Ribbit Ribbit

At the beginning of March when I started blogging, I thought that it would be fun to have a colour theme every month to use as inspiration for art and crafts and other educational activities. I chose the colour green and had all sorts of wonderful colour-green related ideas, but for some reason, Big One and I got stuck on FROGS! We just couldn't get enough of them.

So here is some froggy fun we got up to. We read Axel Scheffler's book Freddy the Frog. Little One received this little pocket library for his first birthday, but these books are available individually and are cute and catchy rhyming stories.

We also made these frog masks. I saw this idea on the photo header of  Let's Explore. We used paper plates, green paint, green craft paper, green glitter glue, contact paper and pegs. We squished and smeared the glitter glue onto the craft paper, which we then covered with contact paper. The idea was to create a bit of a slimy effect. We then cut this up into squares and stuck it onto the painted paper plate. To finish off, we added eyes and the pegs. Big One decided to also add a nose and mouth. The nose is the inner seal of a milk bottle (how's that for recycling and being green).

We also decided to try our hands at origami frogs and got a pattern from Enchanted Learning. They unfortunately don't hop very well. They do do wonderful back flips though.

Well, March has long come and gone and we have of course got side-tracked by all sorts of other projects and the monthly colour theme never really got under way! We did manage to do a few other green activities that didn't involve our slimy friends, but more about these another time.

So on a "hoppy" note, have a great week!