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: Indoor Drive-in Movie

This activity has a lot of different components that can make it really fun. Here's a super brief summary of what the activity is.

You are going to create your own drive in movie theater, complete with box "cars". To make the box cars, you first need boxes, preferable big enough for a kid to sit in. If you have long boxes, you could double up kids as well. Once you have a box for each kid, get out the crayons, makers, colored paper, newspaper, paint, etc. and let the kids decorate how they want to. If the weather is nice enough, you may want them to paint while on the lawn, or at least put a large plastic table cloth down on whatever surface you choose. You can help the children draw windows, doors, lights, steering wheel, etc.

Once the cars are drying (if you used glue or paint), you may want to turn on some music for a dance party, have the kids help make cookies, or blend up some fun smoothies or fruit drinks to have during the movie.

And now the next part is where the difficulty lies. What movie to watch is a difficult choice for myself to make alone, and when you factor in the opinions of a number of kids, it can be even more difficult. So my suggestion is to choose the movie before hand, preferably either one that was just released on DVD or an old one that likely no one has seen before. Here are some of my favorite suggestions for girls and boys:

Girls
Sleepover (Alexa Vega)
Wild Hearts Can't be Broken (Gabriel Anwar)
Princess Bride (Cary Elwes)
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Alexis Bledel, America Ferrara, and Amber Tamblyn)
Peter Pan (Jeremy Sumpter)
Frozen (Idina Menzel)

Boys
Princess Bride (Cary Elwes)
Harry Potter (probably the earlier ones) (Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliff, and Rupert Grint)
Goonies (Sean Aston)
Toy Story (Tim Allen and Tom Hanks)
Hook (Robin Williams)
Hugo (Asa Butterfield)
Sandlot (Tom Guiry)

There are of course TONS of other movies out there you could allow your kids to watch. I tried to list awesome ones that weren't too scary, because that might keep the kids awake all night. Do you have any other movie suggestions? Or picture of the cars you decorated?

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?

Let's give a hand to the turkey!

With Thanksgiving coming up at the end of the month, my crafting thoughts turned toward my much younger school days. Many of you probably did a craft like this at some time in elementary school, or girl scouts, or something like that. I decided that I would give it a try with my 19 month old.

Items needed:

Fall colored construction paper
Scissors
Scotch tape (or masking tape would probably work)
Crayons, colored pencils, or markers (if you use white paper like I did)
1 paper bag (I used a small bag, but if you are doing this with multiple kids, then I would use a larger back for the turkey body)

I started by tracing her hands onto a piece of white paper. You could also use colored paper, I chose to let Mia color her own "feathers". Since she's so young, I also did the cutting. Older kids could probably do the cutting themselves, with supervision of course.

Once the hands or "feathers" were colored by both of us (we took turns), we took them all to the refrigerator. Where you decide to place the turkey is up to you (i.e. the wall, refrigerator, dish washer, etc).

I am adding scotch tape to the lesser colored sides of the hands.

And now it's pretty much like "pin the tale on the donkey", only without the blindfold. I handed the ready taped "feathers" to Mia, who then put them on the refrigerator.

I forgot to mention that I cut out the turkey "body" by just making a bowling ball shap on a paper bag that I grabbed on the way out of WINCO, along with my other groceries.

After the "feathers" were all up on the refridgerator, I arranged them around the turkey until it looked like this.

So there you go! How has it worked with your kids? Any tips, comments, or suggestions?