Bubble Wrap Painting

The next time you get a Bubble-Wrapped item in the mail, don't toss that wrapper. Along with being a fun way to encourage fine motor skills by popping those itty-bitty plastic bubbles, your little one can use it for creating a really cool painting.
You'll never look at Bubble Wrap the same way after this fun activity! And your lil one will love getting messy with a bit of paint. Feeling adventurous? Instead of offering your tot a paintbrush, see what happens when your lil one only uses his fingers for this craft!
Here are the easy directions!
What You'll Need:

• Bubble Wrap
• Scissors
• Paint
• Scrap paper
• Paintbrush
• White paper

Directions:

1. Cut a section of the Bubble Wrap about the same size as the sheet of white paper.
2. Select a few colors of paint to use with your tot. Fold the sheet of scrap paper in half to use as a palette for the paint. Squeeze out a small dab of each paint onto the paper and place next to the Bubble Wrap along with a paintbrush. Or let your lil one go crazy and just finger-paint directly onto the Bubble Wrap.
3. Encourage your tot to create an organized design of repeating shapes or enjoy mixing and blending the paints to create areas of color.
4. Once the Bubble Wrap is covered, place the white paper over the paint and press. Lift up the paper to reveal the cool Bubble Wrap print.

Accordion Folded Spring Flower Collage

You will need some sturdy paper, poster board, or light weight cardboard for your base. I cut a cereal box into three strips for our project. Accordion fold your strips, so your finished piece will be able to stand.

Time to gather your stem collage items. I gathered these ahead of time and presented my girls with a “stem buffet.” Your kids might enjoy helping you with this step, too.

Stem Material Ideas:

• plastic straws
• pipe cleaners
• strips of colored & patterned paper
• felt
• craft foam
• yarn
• ribbon
• popsicle sticks, painted green
• green tape
• draw stems with green crayons, markers, paint, etc.

 Once you have all your stem materials gathered, glue, tape, and draw stems on your board. Be prepared – pipe cleaners take a lot of glue to stick! Set this aside to dry while you work on your flowers.

There are many different ways to make your flowers – use what you have on hand! We cut circles and tulip shapes out of watercolor paper. The girls made designs with oil pastels and crayons, followed by watercolor painting.
Other ideas for flowers: colored paper shapes, mini cupcake papers, flower pictures cut from magazines and catalogs, or flower stickers.

 When your flowers are finished and dry, attach them to your stems. We used a combination of glue stick and white glue for this part. Glue dots would also work great, with no drying time.

 That’s it! Now you have some cheery flowers to tide you over till the real ones are blooming. My girls also decided these would make great backdrops for their Playmobil and animal set-ups. Fun!

Cupcake Liner Fish Craft - Super Cute!!!!

http://4crazykings.blogspot.com/2009/07/cupcake-liner-fish.html