handprint trees

I have two crafts here as well. There are many ways to do these crafts, and you can do them for any season!

The first one we did was finger paint trees.
I got everything together that we needed- paint, paper- and that is pretty much all! Then I painted the kids hands and we stamped them on the paper. Then with their fingers, they can dip in the red, yellow, orange and brown paint and put their finger prints on the paper for the leaves...

Then today we made fall handprint trees with paper and glue. First I got everything ready. I cut a bunch of leaves out of orange, red, yellow and brown paper. As well as some brown pieces to trace the kids hands on, and cover the toilet paper roll. I cut down paper towel rolls to make the trees a bit bigger! Then I got some crayons and glue.

I traced the kids hands onto a piece of paper (both hands), and then let them colour the square piece that will be the trunk. Once they were done colouring the trunk piece, we put glue on their handprints and they glued the coloured leaves on.

Then we covered the paper towel rolls with the square that they coloured. Cut out the hand prints, and then glued them onto the covered paper towel roll.

I did put a bit of tape on the backs of their handprints, and into the roll to hold them up.

Then we had our handprint trees...

Fun with food

This week we did some crafts that involved food. We made and played with gelatin play-dough, gelatin paint, juice powder paint (if you are going to do this use a very flavourful juice- we did it with the crystal light packages and it didn't work that well. They smelt good, but it wasn't colourful!).

Yesterday we made salt dough. We mixed 2 cups of flour with 1 cup of table salt and 1 cup of cold water. I forgot to take pictures, but we rolled it out and used the letter cookie cutters to do each of the kids first initial. Then the older kids also got to play with it. In the end, they did their hand prints on their pieces. The younger ones had smaller pieces to play with, and theirs ended up half in their mouths- GROSS- and in tiny bits on the floor!


After they did their hand prints, I put those with the letters in the oven. It was on 200 for a LONG time! Like hours! Finally about 5 hours later (I am thinking maybe I could have turned the oven up, but the recipe I had said 200- I think that is for the thinner ornaments (you can use this to make Christmas ornaments too). Anyways--- we eventually took them out (after flipping them too), and decided we would paint them today. You can also just leave them out in the room for a couple of days- flipping regularly too. Or, if you don't use it all, store it in a sealed container for a couple days.

Today, we painted them. I used acrylic paints with the kids for this. And you can also glaze over it if you wanted too.


The kids had so much fun painting something that they made from start to finish.






Now they can give their parents the hand prints, and we are going to add some ribbon to the letters so they can hang them in their rooms (or where ever!).
REMEMBER- if you want to hang what ever you make with the salt dough- you have to put the holes in them when they are still doughy- before drying or baking!

This is their finished product before putting the ribbon in them (they are still drying!