Heart in Hand (Homemade Card)

If you follow us on Instagram you might have noticed the quick picture last week of lots of colorful handprint paintings covering our kitchen tabletops. We were busy creating thank you cards for Teacher Appreciation Week.

I love how simple this card idea came out, and it would be perfect for not just teacher appreciation cards, but also Mother's Day, Father's Day, thank you cards, and Valentine's Day. They didn't take very long to put together either, which is especially great if you want to make a whole batch of them.

A "Bad Apple" Craft & Snack

I love when we find great new books at the library! "Bad Apple" by Edward Hemingway is one of our new family favorites.

This sweet tale of friendship tells about an apple "Mac" who wakes up one day with a worm "Will." The two become fast friends, but other apples can't accept the friendship and Mac begins to doubt it. Eventually Mac decides he'd rather be a "bad apple" with his friend than a sad apple without him.

Not only do we love this friendship tale, but it inspired us to both create and snack!

Hand Print Mum Paintings

One of my favorite sights of fall includes beautiful fall mums. I love the variety of colors and I would buy one of each color for the house if I could!

It seemed like a fun idea to try and recreate mums with the kiddos in a craft project: we were inspired to try creating Handprint Mum Paintings. I decided this would be a great project to do with Little Brother.

I do have to admit that sometimes "toddler art" throws me for a little bit of a loop. Although I had one idea for this project in my head of what it would look like, Little Brother took it in his own direction and it looked a little different than I was expecting. But I do love how much he got into painting it, so I decided I still wanted to share it.

Fall Leaves Handprint Tree

It's been a while since we just posted a craft that's just for the fun of doing a craft. So, to get back to our "roots" (pun moderately intended) we're sharing our Fall Leaves Handprint Tree. 

We've been having fun exploring leaves this week as our leaves are just beginning to turn color. My hope is in a few more days we'll be close to really seeing that beautiful New England foliage. We love handprint art, and used the idea of a handprint tree in our Thankful Tree project in some of our Thanksgiving Posts previously. So while waiting for the leaves to turn, we created our own fall foliage tree. 

Hand Painted Reusable Shopping Bags (Mother's Day Gifts)

We are very blessed to have many different mothers we celebrate on Mother's Day. We have several great grandmothers to honor and three grandmothers. Last year for the grandmother's we enjoyed making our Mother's Day Flower Pots. This year we wanted to make another hand painted project and decided to create reusable shopping bags.

A few years ago we had made butterfly prints with our hands and decided to base our bag theme on the same butterflies. We added in some grass, flowers, and a sun to create a more colorful bag. 

Turkey Projects for Little Hands

We're a little behind in posting this week, so we're going to share 3 projects in one update. All of the projects, with varying adult assistance, could by done by toddlers through elementary aged kids. They all use craft supplies you probably already have on hand, so they can even be done last minute Thursday morning just after the real turkey goes in the oven.

Salt Dough Place Setting Turkeys

We actually made these last year the day before Thanksgiving as a way to decorate our table. I made the salt dough using a basic salt dough recipe and then shaped the dough into small birds. Big Brother (who was two at the time) put the feathers into the backs of the turkeys and dotted their eyes with sharpies. We also added beaks and wattles using red and orange pipe cleaners cut into small pieces. We let them air dry over night.

Turkey Paper Plate Hat

This was a fun project we created recently. I was inspired by these great, long feathers I found at Wal-Mart. First we painted the bottom side of a paper plate brown. After the paint had dried we cut out a bird shape with a circle behind it. The bird shape is able to prop upwards and the circle is to be worn like a visor on top of the head. We then taped the feathers onto the back of the bird body and glued on an eye, construction paper beak, and construction paper wattle. 

Handprint & Footprint Turkeys

There are a lot of different ideas on Pinterest these days about how to create a hand print turkey, this is our spin on it. First we painted Big Brother's hand, each time a different color and printed them onto the paper in a semi-circle. We then painted his foot and big toe brown with his little toes orange, and printed it onto the paper upside down. After everything had dried we added googley eyes and a construction paper beak. 

We made a couple of different turkeys, and even had Little Brother make one too! 

We've been having lots of fun creating these different projects. Do you have a favorite turkey project that you like to do with kids? We'd love to have hear your project ideas in the comments. 

And just because I couldn't resist, here's a quick snapshot at what out kitchen floor can look like when we're having fun. 

This post may also have been shared at some of these terrific link parties. 

Five Little Pumpkin Handprints

Although we've already been doing a lot of baking with canned pumpkins this fall our Alphabet Adventure this weekend kicked off some fun pumpkin craft activities this week.

We based our first project around the Five Little Pumpkins rhyme. We really like the Raffi version we download a while back, but you can find many versions online. Here's the version we've been using:

Five Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate. 

The first one said, "Oh my it's getting late!"

The second one said, "There are witches in the air!""

The third one said, "But we don't care!"

The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run!"

The fifth one said, "I'm ready for some fun!"

Ooooh went the wind . . . 

and out went the lights.

And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight. 

After we'd listened to it a few times this week and added in some hand motions I thought it would be fun to do an extension project. We decided to do some handprint painting. 

Rather than paint his whole hand, which wouldn't look very pumpkin like, we just painted his palm orange and one finger green. 

We printed his hand five times and then we mixed the green and orange paint to make brown. Big Brother painted in a gate. 

We let the paint dry for about an hour. When we returned to the project we added in googly eyes and used black Sharpie marker to create noses and mouths. The last two pumpkins even got long "tongues."

At the end Big Brother used our large star punch to cut out purple and yellow stars to add to the sky. 

The best part of this project was how he really liked it and kept repeating the rhyme as he worked. 

This post may also have been shared at some of these terrific link parties.