Rainy Day Arts and Crafts

Typical summer weather and R had friends unexpectedly pop over as they were bored at home.  We broke out the crafty box and used glue, tissue paper, paper plates, pipe cleaners, egg boxes, ice cream tubs, straws, feathers and dried pasta to create decorated plates, shakers, fans and treasure boxes.  All the girls did their own thing and were allowed to use anything and everything in the box which was "so cool" to quote one friend. R even decided that the straw offcuts made excellent pan pipes when stuck together with masking tape - that's my girl!
Here is  just a small selection from the two and a half hours where they amused themselves.

Fine Motor Skills and Scissor Practise: Playdough and cotton bud hedgehogs

Thanks to A for this activity!  He appeared with the first one in his hand and R and B immediately wanted to make their own.

 This is A's

B decided to join in

This is his first one

R decided that she wanted her spines short so cut them in half

B then decided that he wanted his cut with the scissors - especially if he got to do the cutting.  Soon we had a small hedgehog family.

Recycling Crafts:Windsock

The wind has definitely decided that it is Autumn and is blowing for all it is worth - it's almost like being back in the UK.  This was a quick weekend craft make to take advantage of the weather.

You will need:

large plastic bottle, ours was about 1.5 litres

ribbon or string to hang the windsock up

plastic carrier bags

Cut the bottle into rings each about 4-5 inches high.

Take a hole punch or pair of scissors and make two holes in the top edge of the bottle opposite each other.

Cut a length of string or ribbon and tie each end to one of the holes to give a hanging loop.

Punch holes around the bottom edge of the ring.  We did eight holes (even number) to be able to use two colours.  How many holes you use will depend on how big your bottle was to start with.

Cut the bags into strips and poke through the punched holes, tie each one with a double knot at one end to make a long tail.  All of this is good practise for little fingers.

Hang somewhere it can blow in the wind.

Medieval Make

Take several cardboard boxes, some tape, glue, paint and tissue paper.
Add one fantastic 8 year old and leave undisturbed for a weekend.
This what you get.

For more creative makes head over to Mama Jenn and

Junk Modelling: My Town

A good way to spend a rainy afternoon. You can make your own town, your dream town, somewhere you have visited, somewhere you dream of visiting, and even any time you dream of visiting.
All you need are assorted cardboard boxes, paper, glue sticks and pens plus any other decorative items you can think of and it can take you to anytime, anywhere.

kids costumes: elephant and giraffe

Words to bring dread to every parents heart - "we need costumes". Usually this is around Christmas when mums and dads across the UK are busy turning their offspring into kings, shepherds, sheep,angels etc etc etc. When we were in England this would be me too. The envelope would arrive stating which part your child had in the Christmas play and what costume they would be. The mums (and some dads) would start to gather in little groups as they discussed where little Lucy's angel costume came from last year and could anyone borrow it. Old curtains turned into capes, teatowels into headdresses, E-Bay scoured for any castoffs. This Christmas just gone we were at an International School and so there was none of this; it was quite surreal sitting in the hall hearing all the carols for the Christmas show, they have just started to play the ocarina in music lessons and so I watched my daughter play exactly the same songs as the previous year in the UK (where she started learning last year with exactly the same book!) but without all usual costumes and plays that have been part of every Christmas since they were in Nursery (so about 6 years since R was 2).
What they have here in Germany instead in the run-up to Easter is Fasching. This is a kind of carnival season. Each town has a different day for the childrens carnival the shops fill with costumes, wigs and face paints. There is even a womens night when women go out armed with scissors and are allowed to cut the tie off any man they meet. The school had a Fasching day when everyone had to come in costume and the theme was "jungle". Not particularly helpful when you have a wardrobe full of princess costumes and such. However the good news was that we were told about a month in advance so we had plenty of time to make something spectacular.
R and A chose what they wanted to be; a giraffe and elephant respectively. Having had a similar "the only thing I want to be is a triceratops" experience last year at World Book Day I decided to make animal hats for them to wear out of papier mache.
The first thing I did was collect together lots of cardboard and lots of tape.
Out of some corrugated cardboard I made a kind of "arch" to fit over their head from jaw to jaw. The end of the "arch" was then closed off with tape so that the measurement from front to back is the same as their head front to back. (the corrugations in the cardboard run front to back to allow it to curve in the arch shape)

Then I constructed a cardboard head for each animal that went on the top.

I used cereal box thickness cardboard for most of the head with corrugated cardboard wherever I thought it might be used to carry the thing (like the trunk or the jaw). Lots of tape is the key to holding these together. The trunk was made from rings of cardboard that I overlapped and stuck together to make the trunk curl upwards away from A's face so that 1. he could see and 2. he was less likely to hit anyone with it when he moved around.
What followed was a family craft activity with everyone helping stick about 3 layers of torn up newspaper over the heads. We used PVA adhesive that was watered down to the thickness of milk to do the actual sticking. There are many recipes for home-made papier mache paste involving flour and water that are cheap to make and easy to use but you have to take the time to "cook" the stuff in the first place and then it starts to stink if you keep it for more than a few days so you have to make several fresh batches if you want to do just a little everyday for a few weeks. Just watering down glue from a bottle is an awful lot more spontaneous. Then followed a final layer of torn kitchen roll. This helps "kill" the newsprint ready for decoration.

Painting came next and was again done by us all.


Finishing touches. For the giraffe we added a fabric neck with spots made from brown fleece and a mane made from fleece too. For the elephant we added big floppy ears made from grey fleece (attached to struts that I stuck on a part of the papier mache). Both hats then had ribbons glued in place so that they could be tied under the kids chins to make them secure enough for them to move about with them on.
They were a huge success and the drama teacher even wants to borrow them to use as inspiration for the Lion King production in the Upper school as the kids could move around so easily in them. The digital gremlins have apparently eaten some of the step by step photos I took of the process so I hope the above makes sense if you are inspired to make your own.