January Kiddie Crafts

Here's the monthly (for now, anyway) update on the crafts I've been doing with my son.

We got a slow start to January.  We pulled out some paints early on, but then took a few weeks off, mostly because I still didn't know what sort of crafts I wanted to do.  We focused instead on piecing together elaborate train tracks and making a snow Vulcan (or perhaps he was Yoda.)

 

Here's my son with his January wall:

You'll notice we've got some letters in there.  I've decided to base a lot of our crafts around the alphabet (though not in order.)  Why?  Well, my son had already picked up half-a-dozen letters on his own--his own first initial, M for Mama, D for Dada, B for boy and baby, P for Poppa (my dad), and G for Grammy (hubby's mom)--so I figured we might as well continue to encourage this.

I've been looking around online for clip art that begins with the target letter, and then I print up a page or two of, for example, "C" words.  I'll pull out his letter magnets and puzzle pieces, introduce the letter, have him color the pictures, and then I'll cut them out and he'll paste them on a big piece of paper around the letter.  I'm already having to come up with creative ways to decide where the pictures go, though, because he's getting bored with just gluing them down.  Last time, his front-loader vehicle dropped them and I pasted them in place.

For a few days after introducing a letter, we'll do crafts based on that letter.  Here are the trains we made for "T."  He enjoyed putting them in a line--I had expected them to be all over the paper and at first they were, but then he seemed to realize that trains connect and he wanted to rearrange them--and then adding the wheels.  On the first one, I let

him put the wheels wherever.  Then I realized he seems to recognize his numbers--at least 1, 2, and 3--so I wrote numbers on each car for the second and tried to see if he could put the correct number of wheels on each.  It happened, though I did a lot of coaching.  I'm not sure he would have done it on his own.

For C, we glued whiskers on cats.  The first idea, with string, turned out to be harder (even for me) than I'd anticipated, so I had to help him a lot.  All the more reason to try again, I suppose, so he can refine those motor skills.  For the second cat we did paper whiskers, which was easier for him to handle.  I was amused by the fact that, when I told him we were going to put whiskers on a cat, he said "Poppa!"--my dad has a beard, but this shows he knows what whiskers are.

We also did "C is for cookie."  I had him color a bunch of printed cookies and put them on a printed plate.  He didn't want to glue them down, though, so the finished product only has four cookies on the plate.  Here, he's pretending to eat them.

We did "F" next, partly in prep for the big game.  We're not huge football fans, but we like to have friends over for a party every year.  We used our son's artwork for decorations.  First he laced a football, and then we drew a football field.  He really enjoyed the second because he's always trying to color with the white crayon but it never shows up on white

paper.  He was really excited that it would write on the green paper of the field.  He also surprised me, yet again, when it came to drawing lines with a ruler.  I helped him on some of them, but he managed many by himself, with me just holding the ruler in place.

Lastly (this was actually early Feb) we did one more football craft.  I made a field goal on paper and had him color a bunch of paper footballs.  Then I taped the paper to the table and placed the cut-out footballs in front of him, one by one.  I then had him blow on the footballs to try to make a field goal.  I glued them down where they landed.

Okay, there's the "see how talented my kid is" post for February.  In March, you'll get to see all the Valentine's Stuff we're doing.  Fun, fun!