Candy Corn Art

Fall is my favorite season! I love the colors, the smells, kids being back in school, and all the excitement that it entails. I also love Halloween crafts. I love doing the crafts, saving them, and using them year after year for my Halloween decorations. My mom did the same things when we were kids. Like mother like daughter I guess! It is no wonder that I am constantly looking for new fun crafts that kids ages 3 and older can do. I went through my Pinterest Halloween page and decided on a craft.

Here is a summary of one that we did this week.

This is my finished candy corn. 

Candy Corn Artwork

Materials Needed:
Craft glue sticks or wet glue
Black, white, orange, and yellow construction paper
White crayons
Scissors


Directions: have either you or the kids, depending on their ability to use scissors, cut small squares out of the yellow, orange, and white construction paper. The amount of squares you will use will directly correlate to how many kids your have. If you only have one or two children doing the craft, then I'd only cut on page of each color into squares. You can always cut more if needed. We had plenty left over when we were done.

This is my 3 year old daughter's candy corn.

Next, using the white crayon, draw a candy corn shape (triangle with rounded edges) on the black construction paper. Then instruct the kids where the colors "should" go (orange on bottom, yellow in the middle, and white on top). And if you are anything like me, just let go of color placement perfection preferences now, or you will be pretty stressed out when trying to get a 3 year old to follow your color instructions perfectly.








Now and let the kids have fun! And remember, the idea of all crafts for children is to have fun, enjoy themselves, and develop important fine motor skills in the process.

This is how my daughter decided she wanted to craft instead.

Activity: All About Me

This is a fun activity that can help the children figure out their likes and dislikes, do a craft project that is centered around them, and learn to take the initiative with only a little help from an adult (in the form of cutting and gluing).

Here is what you need:

Magazines (particularly kids ones)
Old Catalogs (kid or toy centered)
Old books
Family pictures
Markers
Glue/paste
Colored paper
Scissor

Now you can let the children cut out the things that they like and glue them to pieces of paper. These papers will become a book, so you may want to cut them in half or in quarters first. As it looks like the kids are starting to finish up, serve some sort of healthy snack (you can find ideas here and here) and allow the glue to finish drying. once dry, staple the pages together and you have a book all about what your child likes and/or dislikes. As a genealogist, I think it would be awesome to do with every year close to the child's birthday. But of course what I wish I could do and what I actually do don't always seem to match up, but we shall see.

What do you think? Have you tried anything like this?

The Thankful Tree!

Seeing as Thanksgiving is at the end of this week, I thought it would be fun to do an activity about being thankful. I got out my supplies and got to work. Here's how it all went down.

Items needed:

Constuction Paper (I chose fall colors because of the season)

A large paper bag (I grabbed one on my way out of the grocery store)

Scissors

Writing Utensels (crayons, pens, dark pencils, etc.)

Clear Tape (such as scotch tape, or masking tape would also work)

Large paper bag from the grocery store.

     I cut off the very bottom of the bag, and then along one of the side seams. Then I cut "branches". I don't think that there is a right or wrong way to cut the branches.

I taped the tree to the refridgerator.

  I cut out the leaves ahead of time so that I didn't have to deal with kids and scissors.

Here are Mia and her cousins. I'm getting the tape ready, and they are waiting to put more leaves on the tree.

We're just about done! I can't get them the tape fast enough....

     I think that this activity worked really well. Brooklyn (almost 5) was able to write some of her "thankful" words by herself, but the grownups had to help the littlest kids (2 and 20 months) . The only problem that I had was not being able to get little rolls of tape ready as quickly as the kids wanted. They were very good at waiting for their turns though.

Here is a list of some of the things we were thankful for:

Fishies (gold fish crackers)

House

Clos (This is how Brooklyn spelled Clothes)

Family

Mommies and Daddies

Bed

Love

Forgiveness

Church

Scriptures

Sun

Heat

Animals

Toys

etc.

Have you tried something similar? How did it go? What suggestions or ideas do you have?