Popsicle Stick Love Bugs Valentine's Day Craft

We are currently obsessed with making love bugs. There's just something so cute about little bugs filled with hearts! Today we are sharing this popsicle stick love bug craft that is sure to bring a smile to your child's face. It's glittery and filled with hearts making it a perfect Valentine's Day kid craft. You can even attach a magnet to the back of it and proudly display it on your fridge for Valentine's Day. 

Balloon Print Spider Craft for Kids

Creepy, crawly spiders make me cringe in real life, but I can never resist a fun spider craft. For some reason in craft form they just don't look as scary to me. We've made spider crafts with a variety of different materials like cupcake liners, paper plates and plastic fruit cups, but today we used one of our favorite painting techniques with balloons and make this adorable balloon print spider craft for kids. It's a fun and simple craft for Halloween that kids of all ages will enjoy. 

Cupcake Liner Spider Craft for Kids

Funny story...I am horridly afraid of spiders in real life (true story!) but I love, love cute spider crafts. Totally weird I know. We made this cute Cupcake Liner Spider Craft for Kids last summer but never got around to sharing it with you. What I love about this craft is how kids can get creative with using different colored cupcake liners and eyes to make each spider craft truly unique. 

Cupcake Liner Snail Craft for Kids

Remember how I mentioned the other day that I was suddenly obsessed with snail crafts? Don't kill me, but I have one more fun snail idea to share with you. This Cupcake Liner Snail Craft for Kids is so simple to make (we're talking 3 easy steps) and the use of glitter glue gives kids an outlet to be as creative with decorating the snail as they want to be.

Balloon Print Ladybug Kids Craft

I am excited to be sharing this cute Ladybug Kids Craft over at Cooking with Ruthie today. We tried to make it extra fun with balloon and finger prints. Stop by to read the full tutorial.

12 Dragonfly Crafts for Kids

It's getting to be spring time when all the creepy crawly and flying insects start to appear outside. One of our favorites is Dragonflies. I love their big eyes and how their wings shimmer in the sunlight. Here are 9 Dragonfly Crafts for kids to get you inspired to get crafting this beautiful insect.

Love Bug Valentine Card

Since Valentine's Day is less than 2 weeks away, we've been making some fun Valentine Cards for some of our family members. We've already made a Bee Mine Card and now we decided to make cute little Love Bug Cards. These are simple enough for kids to put together themselves so they make a great Valentine's Day Kids Craft.

Leo the Lightning Bug Craft

On our latest trip to the library we picked up Leo the Lightning Bug. It's a darling story about having confidence and believing in yourself. As a child I struggled with my own self-confidence so I love reading books to my children that act as a reminder for them to believe in themselves and their abilities. I especially love the concept in this book about "practicing" since we shouldn't expect ourselves to excel in all things on our first try. We made this cute Lightning Bug Craft to go along with the story.

Ladybug Craft

Ladybugs are such adorable bugs! Head over to PBS Parents where I'm sharing a tutorial of how to turn a recycled plastic fruit cup into a ladybug craft.

Beaded Dragonfly & Lightning Bugs

My kids love all the creepy crawly and flying insects that come out in summer. They get so excited when they spot a butterfly, ladybug, potato bug (which we like to call rollie-pollies), and especially Dragonflies. One night this fun idea hit me of how we could make our own Dragonfly and Lightning Bug (aka Firefly) out of pony beads and pipe cleaners and I'm thrilled with how the idea came together!

Leo the Lightning Bug

  We picked up this cute book from the library last week.   Leo the Lightning Bug by Eric Drachman, illustrated by James Muscarello

It is an award-winning book so I expected it to be good and it did not disappoint. It is a touching story about believing in yourself. Little Leo captures your heart as you read about him building self-confidence in his struggle to make his very own light glow.

 

The book came with an Audio CD that has the author and other voices reading the story. It even has fun sound effects throughout the story. All 3 of my kids sat on my bed with me and we all enjoyed the story with the CD.
 

I actually made this craft for my toddler to play with (she loves it!) but it would be great for preschool and elementary age kids to make themselves (they will require some assistance with a hot glue gun).

 

You can download my pattern HERE.

 

 

What makes this craft fun is that it's made on a clothespin. The clothespin gives it more of a 3-dimensional effect and also makes it more sturdy to play with. I cut my lightning bug body out of purple cardstock paper and my wings out of silver cardstock paper (you could use white). Then I cut 2 pipe cleaners into fourths, hot glued them on the back of the purple body as legs and antennae. You can see that I bent the pipe cleaners some to give the legs shape. To finish off Leo's face, I attached wiggly eyes (received from Craftprojectideas.com) and used a black marker to draw a mouth and eyebrows. 

 

Next I hot glued the body to the front of the clothespin and the wings to the back of the clothespin. To finish the lightning bug I painted the bottom of his body with bright yellow paint and then sprinkled neon yellow glitter all over the paint while it was still wet. The glitter makes his light really glimmer.

I have several of these glitter caddy's from Craftprojectideas.com, and that is the glitter I used. They have one specifically with fun neon colors that you can pick up at your local Wal-Mart.

Below you can see how the lightning bug is assembled on the clothespin.

 

I hot glued a magnet to the back of the clothespin so we could hang it on the fridge when Lila isn't playing with it. You could also just use the clothespin to attach it to something.

 

 

This is such a fun book. I highly recommend putting it on your library list!!

 

 

*I received my wiggly eyes free from Craftprojectideas.com, but all opinions are my own.

 

Five Little Ladybugs

I found this adorable "Five Little Ladybugs" cubby book in the Target dollar section (I think it was actually $2.50) and purchased it to include in my toddler's Easter basket.

It has this little cubby in the back of the book that holds a 12-piece puzzle to go along with the book.

My daughter loves it! She isn't quite old enough to complete the puzzle all by herself but she is quickly getting the hang of it.

The craft was so simple and fun for her! She glued 5 red mini cupcake liners onto a green sheet of cardstock paper. We chose green so it would look like they were on a leaf or grass. Next she glued on the black faces that I had pre-cut before starting. At this point I used a black marker to draw a black line down the center of the cupcake liner dependent on where she placed the face.

To finish she glued black dots (made with a hole punch) onto the ladybugs and wiggly eyes onto the faces. The cupcake liners I purchased were the Wilton brand and they came in a pack of primary colors (red, yellow, blue) so I was able to get both the ladybugs and chicks crafts out of the same pack of cupcake liners.

Ants at a Picnic Kids Craft

Last week my kids had an afternoon filled with non-stop fighting. I couldn't take it anymore...so we did a craft. It seriously works every time! We picked up some books about Ants at the library a few days ago so making this Ants at a Picnic craft was perfect!

Eric Carle Inspired Lady Bug Craft

I saw a darling Eric Carle Inspired Lady Bug Craft at Artsonia Art Museum made by a Kindergartner named Weston. I absolutely adore this craft! We literally tried to re-make the masterpiece exactly as I saw it pictured because it was so amazing! I watched one of my son's friends for a couple hours today so both her and my son made one. They turned out frame-worthy for sure!!

Story time "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" with Crafts

We had fun today being inspired by the famous Eric Carle book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". I've seen some awesome caterpillar prints around blog land lately using a balloon and thought my boys would really enjoy this technique.

Anyways, on to our balloon painted caterpillar. Here is mine pictured below. They are so simple to make.

Simply dab a small balloon into paint and place it onto your paper. The caterpillar in the story has touches of blue in his body so we put some blue into our green paint and swirled it around a bit before dabbing our balloon into it.

While we waited for the caterpillar to dry we had fun watching some You Tube videos of caterpillar's transforming into butterflies. I just love the time lapsed clips that show the whole process. My boys were amazed by it. And since we didn't actually have any cool caterpillars around our house to watch the process, You Tube was next best. haha

Then we came back to our caterpillars and added some finishing touches like eyes, nose, antennae, lets. I love that my children are very artistic! They didn't want to stop at just making a mere caterpillar like I did. They had to create the whole scene. 

And this is why I enjoy creating things with my children. Not only are the paintings simply stunning, but it shows the creativity and color of a child. I just want to soak in their sweet innocence and beauty every day. My children are my greatest blessing!

So now that the caterpillars are done, we wanted to do something with a butterfly so we decided to make some wax butterflies. We did this last Fall making leaves, but I thought it would be fun to make butterflies.

1. Start by printing out a butterfly clip art picture from the Internet. I printed mine 4x6 size.

2. Place a sheet of wax paper on top of the butterfly and use a permanent marker to trace the outline of the butterfly.

3. Place the wax paper onto your ironing board and put crayon shavings over the butterfly print.

4. Place another sheet of wax paper on top of the crayon shavings, covering the entire butterfly.

5. Place a kitchen towel over the wax paper and apply your iron to the towel. Just enough to melt the crayon shavings below.

6. You are left with what looks like a big mess. haha But just turn it over and cut along the outline of the butterfly you drew.

7. And you are left with this. Pretty fun stuff!! You can even punch a hole in them and hang them some where with some string if you want to.

Story time Tuesday "The Very Lonely Firefly" with Craft

So I'm a day late posting my usual weekly story time & craft. I've been away enjoying the mountains of Star Valley, Wyoming with my family and just returned last night. A couple weeks ago I saw the most adorable Firefly craft at No Time For Flashcards using Band-Aids and I knew I had to try it out with my kids. Luckily, I had the perfect book in mind to go along with it.

Eric Carle's stories are so creative and are a MUST for Preschool. Eric Carle describes his book "The Very Lonely Firefly  is about belonging. We all want to belong to a group, a family, our own fellow creatures." After talking about the meaning of the story we set out to make our own firefly families.

Mine turned out differently than No Time For Flashcard's simply because I couldn't find yellow Band-Ads, but we made some adjustments and I am very pleased with our take on the fun craft.

Materials you will need:
-Black sheet of construction paper
-yellow and white crayon
-colorful band-aids
-plain band-aids
-glue
-wiggly eyes
-yellow puffy paint

Directions:
1. Draw a moon and stars on the left corner of your black sheet of construction paper.

2. Place your regular Band-Aids on your paper to make the Firefly bodies.

3. Take the colored Band-Aids and place them over your Band-Aids making an X to form the Firefly wings.

4. Dab some glue on the top of the Band-Aids and put the wiggly eyes on.

5. Use the yellow crayon to draw antennae on the Fireflies. We also filled in more stars around the Fireflies at this point but I didn't take a picture of it.

6. Use the yellow puffy paint to paint the bottom of the Band-Aids to make them glowing.

7. You can be done at this point, but we decided to use a fine tip black marker to add some details to the face.

Storytime & Craft--"The Very Busy Spider"

Truth be told, I HATE spiders!! Even the thought of them makes the hairs on my arms raise in alarm...Yes, I am that terrified! But despite my fears, I simply couldn't resist the book "The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle.

One of the highlights of this book is that the spider web throughout the book is made with raised paint so you can actually "feel" it. The boys had fun feeling the spider web on every single page as we read the story.

We thought it would be super fun to make our own beautiful spider web and spider, so this is what we came up with:

Materials you need:
- 3 craft popsicle sticks
- hot glue gun
- white paint
- paint brush (we used the foam kind but any will work)
- white yarn
- 1 pipe cleaner (color of your choice)
- scissors


 Directions:
1.  Use the hot glue gun to glue the craft sticks together in a criss cross pattern. This obviously needs to be done by an adult. I used the hot glue gun because it dries so quickly but you could use a different type of glue if you choose.

 2. Paint the assembled craft sticks with white paint and let dry.

3. Now it's time to start making the web. Wrap the white yarn around one of the craft sticks and tie a knot to get the web started. (see photo below)

4. Start to wrap the yarn around the craft sticks in a spiral pattern. Basically, wrap it around one stick then the next stick, etc. Wrap it fairly tight to keep it in place. My children didn't have enough patience to do all the wrapping themselves so be prepared to basically wrap the web yourself. (Lesson learned! LOL)

5. Once the craft sticks are full, tie the yarn in a knot to secure the web and cut off the excess yarn.

6. Turn it over and your spider web is finished.

7. Take the pipe cleaner and cut it into 4 equal length pieces. (cut in half and then cut the halves in half)

8. Twist the pipe cleaner pieces together in the middle (one piece at a time) to form the 8-legged spider. See pictures.

9. Bend the ends of the pipe cleaners to make spider legs.

10. Place the spider on the web. To secure it in place, twist 2 of the legs together on the back of the web.

11. At this point you are finished but you can tie more yarn to it to hang it somewhere, or I hot-glued a magnet on the back so it could hang on the fridge.

I ended up doing lots of the work on this project myself but the kids enjoyed it (especially the finished project) so it was worth it!

Happy Crafting!