Fall Crafts

We used food coloring and water with cut straw pipettes to make our own apples. "Where do apples come from?" I asked. My favorite answer, "The apple store!"

We talked about acorns this fall. The children see tons of them falling near our park. They are always tempted to take pocketfuls home but I encourage them to leave them there for the squirrels. I cut out tops and bottoms and they matched upper and lower case. 

Then, after hiding some paper

acorns around the playroom, the children glued them into the tree-hide-out for their squirrel to save for the winter.

We talked about pumpkins growing on vines. The kids drew their own crazy vine and glued pumpkins to it. We practiced upper and lower case Pps.

We made these fingerprint turkey prints (thanks for the inspiration, pinterest). And the sort of token thanksgiving gratitude paper turkey.

Turkey Time

- Handprint turkey feathers with craft paint. Paper turkey faces with googlie eyes.-

-Letter tracing and feather coloring with crayons.-

Fall Corn

(listening for the first popping sounds!)

Apples

-paper cut outs from story time at the library-

While our apple week crafts weren't able to correspond with our trip to apple hill, they were still a lot of fun. A simple coloring page is so much more fun with messy paint. It is a weekly must do. Our story time teacher Ms. Chris prepared the apple cutouts and they were a big hit. The children had a great time personalizing their apples. Glueing big and small shapes helps with thier fine motor skill development.

Halloween Crafts

I loved this idea of cutting silhouette haunted houses out and letting the children paste their favorite clip art pieces behind spooky doors and windows.

The girlies loved making these witch socks. I cut shoes from black paper for them to pick (some high heeled, some flat; some regular toed, some elfish) and they chose colors for the stocking and stripes. The glue stick was just slightly smaller than the stripes which made gluing a snap.

These super simple crafts are great for painting and shape recognition. The younger ones love to tell me what shapes they would like but often need a lot of help with those tricky scissors.

It isn't very often that we have juice at daycare... so the kids were extra excited about this craft. It was pretty simple- add about a cup of rice to the inside of the box. Let the kids tear strips of paper and affix using double sided sticky tape. Add a black square with gooogly eyes (under the bandages if possible).

The monster hand garland was my favorite new craft this year. I pre cut my size hands and some face shape ideas in different colors. The children assembled them, then we used a sharpie to make eyebrows (experimenting with moods).

I love these $1 holiday masks at Michael's craft. The children always love them and they work with colored pens or paints. And they almost always are on sale for .40.

Haunted Candy Houses

I love candy as an art medium. It is pretty nasty to eat, I think. Candy corn especially. But I love the colors and the shape and the different textures- especially those sparkly gum drop things (even more yucky than candy corn). Winco has a nice selection in their bulk aisles which is handy- just a small scoop of each for the kids to share.

I haven't found the perfect recipe for the frosting "mortar" yet. This one sets really well but has raw eggs in it. Others I have tried never become firm, so candy slides off.