Hammering Out Flower and Leaf Prints

I saw this idea on Build/Make/Craft/Bake, and had to give it a go. I mean seriously, it's using a hammer to squash the colour out of natural things. How much fun could that be?

Nature Rainbow Tree

A simple nice art activity. First we had a play outside and collected things of all the colours of the rainbow, plus some twigs.

I had thought we would just make a rainbow, but Miss 4 was quite determined it would be a tree. Just as determined as she was about the order of the rainbow; Red and yellow, pink and green, purple and orange and blue. I can sing a rainbow... I drew some lines to glue between and she did the rest.

But regardless of our differences in taste, it was a lovely art activity to do together and she was proud to show the results to Mr Crafty when he got home.

Thaumatrope

Making a Thaumatrope is a fun little activity perfect for a rainy day or holiday. All you need is some paper, sticks (I used kitchen skewers) and a bit of imagination. 

The classic picture is a bird and a cage. Draw the bird on one piece of paper, a bird cage on another and stick them together around a stick. When you spin the stick, the two pictures seem to merge together and the bird appears to be in the cage.

I tried a few more, a face and some face paint, and a tree and it's leaves. Miss 3 concentrated on her passions: butterflies and rainbows.

Solar Fairy Night Light

I've been very busy recently with winter colds, children and making up some things for a craft stall for a fundraiser at our school. Mostly wings, but now I'm also working on some solar powered night lights. The one above was my first prototype and still needs some final touches, but perhaps you can get the general idea.

Nature Printing

Miss 3 had decided to collect some things from the garden, and so I got out the paints so we could paint pictures of them. We put all our colours on the plate (red, yellow, blue, green and white) and carefully mixed the other colours we needed in order to paint the flowers she'd collected. As usual, as we painted the colours got slowly spread out, and mixed together and the hand painting started.

Towards the end of the hand painting, we had a tray of semi-mixed colours, and so we decided to do some prints of the garden things. I had been wanting to do this for a while after reading this post from 2 Craft and 2 Create. However I wasn't feeling enthusiastic enough to get cardboard to glue things on to and we had no paint rollers around. Instead we just pressed the leaves and flowers into the spread out paint on the paint plate, and pressed them onto the paper.

The leaves made a beautiful pattern (and quite different depending on which side of the leaf you used). The lavender made a pretty splodge and at the same time smelled fantastic.

Weather Collage for a Story Box

This time our inspiration came from Inner Child Fun. Miss 3 took one look at their lovely spring branch picture and said "I'd like to do that, can we do that, please?"

So we started with a sunset picture.

And a green leaves picture. With pink mountains.

From there she got more creative, with a rainy sheep picture and a couple of snowy pictures.

Next we stuck them all on a story box, one picture on each side of the box. The idea is that you turn the box around while you tell the story. We used toys to act out the characters in the story.

A Fairy Playground

After being inspired by the amazing fairy gardens other people have created, I decided we should have a go at our own.

I cleared a corner of our overgrown vegie garden and started making a little house. Miss 3 took one look at it and declared it was too dirty for her fairies, so we found a grassy patch and started again.

We collected stones and shells for the kitchen area and flowers for the house, I made a swing from some twigs and cotton thread and then the kids set to making a whole obstacle course, complete with straw trampoline, balancing beam, slippery slide, tunnel and sandpit.

Finally we got ourselves some fairies to play with in their new home, by sticking paper wings onto some Lego Friends dolls. 

Not as elegant as the other gardens I'd seen, but definitely heaps of fun and imagination.

Playing with Ice

This is a great activity for a warm sunny day. First we filled a couple of muffin trays with water. We put food colouring in the water, mixing up a slightly different colour for each hole (although the colours were difficult to see against the dark muffin tray, it did make them prettier in the water). We then collected a variety of small things from flowers and leaves to plastic toys, old shells and coins, and dropped one in each hole.

And then for the most difficult part of this activity: waiting for it all to freeze.

Once the ice was frozen, we filled a tub with water, put the ice cubes in and watched them melt. It was interesting for the kids to see what would float and what would sink, and they though it was very exciting to watch the ice melt and see what melted first and see the treasures re-appear. But above all, they just enjoyed getting their hands wet and cold.

They enjoyed this activity so much we immediately made a few more batches, and we even made a couple of bowls of ice to take to kindy for their water play table.

Making a Tree

This is such a simple and satisfying craft activity. So much so, that this time Miss 3 came up with the plan herself while we were out walking. Both kids collected leaves. I drew them a simple trunk shape on a big piece of paper, and then they spent a happy half hour gluing leaves on.

We even used a corner of an egg carton for the glue pot and cotton buds for glue sticks, so the tidy up time was minimal.