Friday, April 6, 2012

Making carrots

I decided that it'd be fun for the kids to make a small Easter basket for my parents since we won't be here to celebrate Easter with them.  So the kids helped make these super cute and super easy carrots!  I saw these online somewhere, but don't recall where. 

Here's what we used:

plastic sandwich baggies
green yarn
scissors
Goldfish crackers (num num!)


We started off by putting some Goldfish into the baggies.... not much.  Get them into the corner of the bag.


Next, twist the extra part of the bag and shape the Goldfish into a carrot shape as best you can.  It's not perfect, but everyone will get the idea. Tie a piece of yarn around the top of the carrot to keep it closed.


Then I trimmed most of the extra plastic off the top (the zipper wasn't too pretty). 

Next, I cut pieces of yarn.  Ours were about 6 inches long, but you can make them however you want.  I would guess I used about 20 pieces on each carrot.

I tied the bundle of yarn pieces around the top of the carrot and voila!  We have carrots!

I plan to make some of these for the kids Easter baskets.  They don't REALLY need any more candy.  There will be some in the baskets... don't worry, but anything I can put in there that is not sweet is a bonus!

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Theme days

I  LOVE things with a theme.  Parties with a theme, activities with a theme, rooms with a theme.

I like to come up with different activities for the youngsters that all tie in together... so we basically do lots of stuff around the same subject.  Here are a few of the theme days that we've had and the shenanigans that went with them. lol!  I had to throw that word in there.

Owl theme day
  • Talked about owls and the sounds that they make.  My son went through a phase where he liked to pretend that he could hear an owl outside so that's what started this theme for us.  We got out a book about owls and looked through it. 
  • This day occurred shortly before Valentine's day so we made Valentine's day cards for the grandparents using the heart owl craft found here.  We adapted it a little by letting the kids finger paint some card stock, used that as the "card" and then glued our owls onto that.  I thought it gave it a cool artsy look :-)


  • While I prepared the pieces for the heart owl craft, the kids colored this page The Letter O is for Owl
  • They ate "owls" for lunch.  I just used whatever I could find to make the body parts and cut the sandwiches free hand.  Beautiful, I know!  lol

  •  We finished off the day by watching The Fox and the Hound.  Only because there is an owl in the movie.  I was grasping a little on that one, but its the first movie I could find that had an owl in it.  ;-)

Fish/ocean theme
  •  We started the day off by making an ocean sensory bin!  I read about the idea on this awesome blog Inner Child Fun.  I have to admit theirs looks a heck of a lot cooler than mine, but I wasn't going out and buying anything special for this.  It was fun... and that's all that matters!  My son actually played with this thing lots of other times.  My daughter ate the "rocks"  so she didn't get to play with it much after the first time. lol.  We used assorted pony beads for the rocks, and threw in anything else that reminded us of the ocean!  Filled it with water and we were good to go!

We even had seaweed!!!
Hard at work!  I think finding stuff to put in was his favorite part!



  • We read The Rainbow Fish
  • Decorated a "Rainbow" fish.  I drew a fish on card stock, cut it out, the kiddos decorated it and we glued them onto craft sticks (the wide Popsicle sticks... I am not sure the technical term for them). :-)


  • After nap time/lunch, the fish were dry enough to play with while we watched Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo is the perfect end to any day.  Love that movie!  :-)
 We'll leave it at that for now.  We have a few others that we've done, but I don't wanna give you an overload!  Plus the itty bit is up from her nap now!  Have a great day... make the most of what's left!