Marbled Art Earth Day Craft for Kids

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Huggies® because “Kids Outgrow Diapers, Not Messes™”. As always, all opinions are my own. We hope you enjoy celebrating Earth Day with your kids by making this Marbled Art Earth Day Craft.

If I had to choose a favorite type of mess it would definitely be the kind that comes along with crafting. I figure if we’re going to make a mess, why not create a piece of artwork and some fun family memories while we’re doing it, right? One of my favorite messy art activities is marbled shaving cream painting. Have you tried it? Since Earth Day is just around the corner, we decided to hug the messy side of crafting this week and made this gorgeous marbled art Earth Day craft. Don’t worry about the mess though because we have Huggies®Wipes on our side today, so I’m going to show you how to help contain the mess while making this fun family art activity! 

Preschool Space Crafts and Activities

We love learning about Space and the Solar System at our house. It's such a fun theme to learn about with preschoolers! Last week I shared how my preschooler and I enjoyed making Marbled Planets Art and my creative preschool buddies also shared some amazing ideas related to a Space theme. In case you missed any of them, today I'm sharing all 6 of the out of this World Preschool Space Crafts and Activities! Summer is the perfect time of year to try out some of these fantastic hands on learning activities all about Space.

Preschool Space Craft: Marbled Planets Art

I love how the different atmosphere's of the planets give them all a different marbled look about them. Our creative preschool buddies are focusing on a space and solar system theme this week and I decided it would be fun to focus on my love for the colored planets and create a preschool space craft with my daughter. We used a popular marbled shaving cream painting method to make this beautiful Marbled Planets Art. 

Cupcake Liner Earth Day Craft for Kids

Our love for cupcake liner crafts continued today when we made this fun and simple Earth Day Craft for Kids. Since Earth Day is coming up next week it's the perfect time to talk about our beautiful Earth and create a craft to go with it. 

10 Beautiful Earth Crafts for Kids

Earth Day is coming up quickly on April 22nd. Not only is it the perfect time to learn about reducing, reusing and recycling, but it's also a fabulous time to make an Earth Craft to remind us of how lovely our Earth is. I love how there are so many fun materials you can use to create an Earth Craft too. I've put together a round up of 10 Beautiful Earth Crafts for Kids that use a variety of materials including magazine scraps, cereal boxes, tissue paper, cotton balls, straws, pasta noodles and more.

A Happy Homemade Space Shuttle Craft

Some amazing bloggers I know have worked together to create an ebook full of fun kids' projects and crafts. I excitedly get the chance to show you a sneak peak of the book today. 

Glow in the Dark Play Dough

Welcome to another edition of the 12 Months of Sensory Dough. This month is all about Glowing Dough. This past week as I've dropped my boys off at school we've been able to see the moon off in the distance in the sky in front of us. The other day it was so big and seemed so close and my daughter leaned over to one of my son's and said, "I'm going to ask Mommy to get a big, big ladder and climb up and get the Moon for me." True story! It was pretty adorable! As I thought about our Glowing Dough challenge and our recent excitement over seeing the moon in the sky each morning, I decided to make Glow in the Dark Play Dough and combine it with moon and star cookie cutters to make our own pretend night sky.

Coffee Filter Sun Art

Summer is in full swing and the temperature has been toasty outside! We went swimming the other day and even though we reapplied our sunscreen once we still all ended up with an unpleasant sunburn. Ouch! Since we've been kicking it indoors in the AC recouping the last couple days we decided to make some sun art using a coffee filter and some fun painting techniques.  

Coffee Beans "Space" Sensory Bin + 40 Days of Sensory Bin Fillers

I love the smell of coffee beans! Their rich, deep, flavorful scent makes them such a perfect sensory material. Something about their dark brown color reminded me of the darkness of Outer Space so I rolled with that idea and as my contribution to the 40 Days of Sensory Bins Series at Little Bins for Little Hands I made this Coffee Beans Space Sensory Bin.  

Eric Carle Inspired Moon Art (touch and feel textured Moon)

My little girl has been enjoying this Eric Carle book this week so we decided to create some art to go along with it.

  Papa, please get the moon for me by Eric Carle

Monica wants the moon to play with, so her Papa sets out to get it for her. It isn't easy to climb all the way up to the moon, but he finally succeeds -- only to find that the moon is too big to carry home! The way in which this problem is solved is a joyful surprise.

 

To make our Eric Carle inspired art project, we started by painting the background for our moon on a white sheet of cardstock. I put a dollop of dark blue and bright blue paint right next to each other on a small paper plate and we swirled it a little and painted our entire sheet of paper.

While our background paper was drying, I cut out a large circle from of another sheet of white cardstock paper for our moon. Using school glue, we drew circles and lines all over our moon to act as craters and texture. If you look at the cover of the book, the moon actually looks like it has a face on it, so you could make a face with your glue instead of circles. You will have to let your moon dry completely before moving on to the next step.

After the school glue was completely dry and translucent, I diluted some black liquid watercolors with water (to make gray), and we used it to paint our moon. You can see how the school glue creates a texture on the moon. It is really neat looking and fun for the kids to touch and feel.

After your moon is dry, glue it onto your blue background.

We decided we wanted to add stars like in the book, so I ended up painting a piece of our scrap paper (from the moon) the same way as the blue background, but with yellow and a light skin tone color. After it was dry, I cut some stars out reminiscent of the book and we glued them on to our moon artwork. You probably could just use yellow construction paper or cardstock paper if you were in a hurry to achieve the same look.

There are several different steps to this project and some waiting time between each but each step was fun for my toddler so the waiting wasn't a big deal at all. You could break down this project into a couple days during a solar system unit.

Cupcake Liner & Foam Sticker Space Craft

My love for crafting with cupcake liners continues! This time we used them as planets and coupled them with fun space themed foam stickers to create an outer space scene.

 

 

Let me start by telling you that this craft was inspired by the book "The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot" by Maragaret McNamara and Mark Fearing. It is a spin on the familiar Three Little Pigs tale. I was worried the text would be too advanced for my toddler, but she actually sat and paid close attention the whole time. She seemed enthralled by all the illustrations throughout the story.

 

 

My toddler (2 1/2) is at the beginning stages of crafting so using simple materials that don't require cutting is perfect for her. These glow-in-the-dark Space Foam Stickers from Craftprojectideas.com are perfect for toddlers.

 

 

To make our project, I let my daughter pick out three cupcake liners to use as her planets. We used 2 mini liners and 1 regular-sized liner. She started by using crayons to add details to her planets. I obviously didn't expect much out of this since she's only 2, but I thought adding some scribbles would add some dimension to the planets.

 

  Next glue the cupcake liners to a black sheet of cardstock paper.  

Lastly, use the space themed foam stickers to finish your outer space scene. I've got to be honest, I think my little girls turned out waaaayyyyy better than mine!

 

 

This little polka-dot alien planet just warms my heart. It's too cute!

Did I mention that the foam stickers are glow-in-the-dark??!! Yep, BEST PART!! It doesn't get any more cool than a space craft that glows in the dark!

 

*I received the glow-in-the-dark Space Foam Stickers for free from Craftprojectideas.com, but all opinions expressed are my own.

By The Light of the Harvest Moon

Did you catch the harvest moon last week??

 

I picked up By the Light of the Harvest Moon by Harriet Ziefert at the library last week and fell in love with the illustration on the front cover of the book before even reading one page.

 

As the harvest moon shines down, the wind picks up, sending orange, yellow, and crimson leaves dancing, until they settle in a pumpkin patch. One-by-one, leaf people emerge to celebrate the autumnal equinox.

While the story focuses on leaf people celebrating the autumnal equinox, I decided to focus our craft on the beautiful, bright harvest moon just as displayed on the amazing front cover of the book. Our artwork turned out beautiful!

 

My oldest, Andrew (7yrs), made this craft with me. He often stays up past his bedtime on weekends with my husband to catch a glimpse of the Moon, stars and planets in our telescope on clear nights, so this craft was right up his alley.

 

We started by tracing a bowl with yellow crayon onto a dark blue sheet of card stock paper. Then we used purple paint to paint the hue around the moon.

 

 

Next, using orange and yellow paint, we painted the Moon. Don't worry about covering up the yellow crayon.

 

Once the paint is completely dry, we used a yellow oil pastel to draw a thick yellow line around the Moon to make it stand out even more. Then squeeze some gold glitter glue all over your Moon and use a paint brush to spread it over it's entirety.

To tie into the theme of the book, we also added glittery Fall leaves dancing around the Harvest Moon. (I found these at Michael's last year and we are just now getting around to using them.)

Here is Andrew's completed artwork:

 

The pictures don't really do justice to how bright and stunning the artwork looks. If you haven't taken a couple minutes to stand outside at night and take a look at our beautiful Moon in a while, you should totally do it!! Somehow it's pureness and brightness always brings peace and serenity to the soul. 

 

Thanks for stopping by!!

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Earth Day Craft with Writing Prompt

Since Earth Day is coming up in a couple weeks we decided to make a craft for the occasion. We started out just making the ever popular Earth coffee filter craft but then one thing led to another and when we were finished we had a pretty cool Earth from space art display with a writing prompt attached to it.

If you haven't made an Earth coffee filter yet, they are soooo simple and fun! Have your child use a green marker to scribble areas of land on a coffee filter and then fill in the rest of the filter with blue ocean scribbles.

Then use a squirt bottle to spray the coffee filter with water. The colors blend and fill the entire coffee filter.

While our Earth was drying outside we started talking about what color paper to glue it on to. Andy suggested we put it on black paper and spray stars on it just like we did in our Out of this World Craft (pictured in my header). I thought the coffee filter was too big for a single sheet of card stock paper so I ended up gluing another piece of card stock to it to make it bigger. Not sure if it was necessary, but we like it. To make the stars, dilute white paint in a spray bottle and lightly spray a couple sprays onto your paper.

After we glued the Earth to our starry paper, it was beautiful, but we wanted to do more. I folded up a paper lunch sack and cut out some paper dolls holding hands to glue onto the Earth. We also looked through an old magazine and found a page with lots of red on it and cut out a little heart to add to the middle of the people. So cute right?!!  :)   I also wanted to use some recyclable materials in our craft so the paper sack and magazine worked perfectly!

Since we had just finished reading about how we can help our Earth I got out some writing paper and the boys wrote how they could help the Earth.

These would look so beautiful hung up on display in a classroom!

I'll be sharing one more Earth Day Craft tomorrow so make sure you stop by!

Happy Earth Day!

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"Out of This World" Craft

Since we learned some about the Moon this week, I thought it appropriate to learn about the Solar System and our Planets. My boys love Space! They love looking up at the stars at night, they love talking about how the Sun is lava hot, and they love to fight debate over which Planet is the coolest. Sometimes it's difficult for me to find a craft that I know my 6 yr old and 4 yr old will both fall in love with but this week I found it! We created our very own Universe.

I am a HUGE fan of art that has several different layers to it like this one. I think it really gives children a chance to be imaginative and create exactly what they want to. After we finished this project my 6 yr old said, "Can we make this again tomorrow?" That is how much they loved it!

This is how we created this cool project.

Materials you will need:
-Black sheet of card stock paper
-spray bottle (I bought one at Wal-Mart for .97)
-white paint
-water
-a variety bright colored pieces of card stock paper
-glue stick
-crayons
-glitter glue
-star stickers

Directions:
1. Put a small amount of white paint inside a spray bottle and dilute it down with water.

2. Spray a couple sprays onto your black sheet of paper. This creates that Galaxy look to your picture. Let the paint dry completely. It was sunny outside so it only took like 10 minutes to dry.

It really only takes a couple light sprays. Ours looked liked this after spraying.

3. Draw different sized circles onto a variety of bright colored pieces of card stock. These are Planets so we didn't want them all to be the same size.

4. Cut out the circles and glue them onto your black paper.

5. Add whatever details you'd like to your Planets with crayons and glitter glue.

My boys loved using the glitter glue for a ring around a Planet.

Andy suggested we make shooting stars. He even came up with the idea to add the gold star on the end of the tail. He is a Genius, I know! hahaha And I totally copied HIS idea on my own Universe, I'm such a copy-cat. LOL!

And there you have it....An "Out of This World" Craft.

Oh, and here are a couple books you can use with this craft.

"The Planets in our Solar System" by Franklyn Branley.

"There's No Place Like Space" by Tish Rabe.

We love all the Dr. Suess Books at our house like this!

Happy Crafting!!

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