Celebrating Japan!

this week at the library we took a look at Japan....

in the spirit of Japanese arts, I watercolored with the grade school kids...Some selected images from books and some simply used the paints.

a finished Mt. Fuji!

with my preschoolers, we made Japanese fans.  

from card stock, i cut a traditional fan shape and glued popsicle sticks on the back...

some colored their fans with markers....

and some collaged with origami paper!

emmett wanted to make his all blue and asked if he could paint his..

we used sticks & leaves (a trick we learned from our days at art & school preschool!)

the completed fan has traveled well in our HOT summer!

Tutorial: Butterfly Ornament Paper Craft

start with two square pieces of paper.  i used origami paper.

facing the corner toward you begin to fold diagonally back & forth like you are making a fan

it'll start to look like this...

and end up like this

do the same with the second piece of paper and then glue the center together

with a thin piece of paper, wrap it around the center.  glue the end once its wrapped.

"fan" out the top of the wings and glue at the top

do the same for the bottom

* i found it best to hold the glued area with my fingers until it dried....otherwise, depending on the weight of the paper, it would come apart.

loop a string threw and you have your ornament!

you can also do it with three pieces of paper....

Caterpillars & Butterflies

butterflies on the mind...

to celebrate mexico at the library, we learned about the monarch's migration from the north all the way to mexico by fall....(in time for day of the dead)

that was a little complicated for the average toddler so we started by simply creating caterpillars with old paper egg crates....

another day...i cut old pieces of felt into circles for our clothes pin caterpillars.  

emmett loves to practice with his scissors!

and loves to use glue too!

our caterpillars came out great & now it was time to grow our wings....

inspired by this post...we colored coffee filters with washable marker...

and sprayed them with a water bottle...(perfect for a HOT day!)

the marker spreads and then dries super fast on a laundry line in the sun....

i love the tie dye effect!

don't have clothes pins?

pipe cleaners work just as easy!

we hung them up to fly...

i came across this template and decided to make sequence cards for emmett for the book, the very hungry caterpillar by eric carle.  this was one of his all time favorite board books as a baby.

i never tried any kind of flash cards with him or even anything that felt "intentionally" educational but this seemed like fun and he enjoyed helping me make the cards!

putting the cards in order according to the order of the book...

i then decided we needed a party...a very hungry caterpillar party!!

Inspired by this post, i began planning...

first we made the bean bags.  i cut everything the very hungry caterpillars eats in the book out of felt, sewed them & then stuffed them with mung beans.  

this turned more into a sensorial experience for emmett!

our bean bags...(my sewing is far from perfect...i challenged myself to let it go & get the game made!)

throw the bean bag!

i brought the party to the preschoolers at my library story time!  after we read books, played the game, made a coffee filter butterfly...we enjoyed a special snack!

my older kids at the library made these beautiful butterfly ornaments using origami paper.

for the full tutorial click here.  paper crafts are very popular fiesta ornaments too!

Russia

to celebrate russia in my preschool story time, 

we learned about nesting dolls or matryoshka dolls.  

we then made ornaments....

i downloaded this template & printed it out on card stock.

we layered them on top of one another, put beads & a colored ribbon.