February Kiddie Crafts

As you might expect, a lot of February's crafts were devoted to Valentine's Day.  Many of them didn't make it up onto the wall, as they served other purposes instead.  Here is my son's February wall (with a few holdovers from January.)

We were working on the letter "F" as the month started.  We finished up some football stuff (found in January's craft post) and then did feet, flowers, and fairies all in one day (it was a frigid, high-of-negative-1 day, so it was a good day to indulge in crafts.)

Then we did fish.  I made a fishing game with some paper fish, paper clips, yarn, a magnet, and one of his drum sticks.  He still doesn't have the manual dexterity to do this properly--he kept grabbing the magnet itself to hook the fish--but he had fun.  I saved this so we can pull it out from time to time.  We also used watered-down glue to paint tissue paper scales on

a fish.  He got bored with this one pretty quickly, so we didn't put too many scales on it.

After that we did "H" (holiday themed--H is for heart) and started our Valentine's Day crafts.  We made a garland out of hearts and string.  He did this much faster than I expected, though after the first heart he only wanted to put the yarn through one hole and not two.  He wanted more hearts after we'd gone through the ones I'd cut the night before,

so I cut a few more.  However, he became completely fascinated with the hole punch so hearts got boring.  (My camera has a function I love called an "Intervalometer" which will take pictures at set intervals.  It's great when doing crafts that I need to be right next to him for or in which I might get messy, because I can set the camera on a

tripod and get shots throughout.  However, my son always looks up at the sound the camera makes while waking up before taking a picture, so nearly every shot has him looking right at the camera.  Ppbth!)

We spent several days making his valentines.  We traced his feet on pink construction paper to make hearts on the front, he painted the insides, and we put his painted handprint on the back.  I also printed up a note saying "Will you be my Feetheart," which we glued inside.

 

We also made a box (like the ones I used to make in elementary school) for holding valentines people gave to him.  We started by having him paint a big sheet of paper to wrap the tissue box in.  After I wrapped it, I gave him construction paper hearts to decorate it with.  He glued most of them inside the box, however.

Our final Valentine's Day activity was to bake heart-shaped cut-out cookies.  I hadn't been sure how long he would last with this.  He only made it through one tray when we made them at Christmas, but he stuck with me to within minutes of the end each day!  We just made the dough on the first day, then on the second we baked the cookies, and on the

third, we decorated.  (Baking cookies with toddlers is not for people who can't stand a mess!)

By the way, the Pebbles hairdo is because he kept seeing me tie my hair back before baking, and he wanted his hair pulled back too.

Our only other "H" craft was "H is for hippo," which kind of tied into Valentine's Day because we made a hippo out of hearts.

Then I introduced the letter "W," hoping to give him a head start on learning that M's become W's when you flip them upside down, and vice versa.  The only "W" craft we got to in Feb was "W is for wheels," where I had him paste as many wheels as he liked on each vehicle.

At the end of the month, hubby took a week of vacation time and we visited the Museum of Nature and Science, the Zoo, and the Children's Museum instead of doing crafts.  It was a nice break from the routine.  More crafts to come next month!






A friend of mine just pointed me to a website to share this sort of ideas about things to do with kiddos.  Check out Tot School if you're interested in seeing more!