Cutting shapes for crafts - making it simple

If you work with small children, you probably spend a good amount of time working on crafts with them.  Somehow, all those craft projects seem to need an abundance of cutting!  Sure, the children can do a lot of it, especially if there's a printable pattern they can work from, but what about the other times?  Dark colored paper, and especially black paper, are hard to work with!  What to do?

Here are two tricks that work for me.  I hope they help you and your small ones keep sane and keep crafting!


The first trick is tracing the shapes onto black paper, using a regular pencil.  If you work in good light, the pencil lines show up beautifully - so you can hand those scissors and paper to the children and let them work on their fine motor skills as they do the cutting.  Isn't that a big part of why we do crafts in the first place?

Another trick that works well, and requires even less work from you, is using a printed paper to guide the children's cutting.  I think we've all tried holding a stack of papers and cutting them all at once, and unless you have an incredible grip, the papers all end up turning just a little bit... and the shapes end up skewed.  Here's the solution: staples.

Yes, simply staple the pattern on top of the papers you need to cut out.  The trick is to make sure you staple around the outside of the pattern you want, preferably in several places.  Here I stapled the corners of my white pattern on top of black construction paper, so I could make a black penguin shape for this Penguin rookery craft.  Sure, we could have colored it black, but that wasn't the look I wanted on this project, and practicing scissor skills is so important.

Now it's easy to cut both pieces of paper, and they aren't going anywhere.

Make sure you end close to a stapled area, to keep your papers together until the last possible moment.

Ta-da!

Not only do you have the desired piece cut from construction paper, but there's also a lovely white pattern piece.  I'm seeing another art project here, with positive and negative images.... but that's for another day!

Do you have any teacher tricks or life-hacks you'd like to share?  I'd love to hear them!

Baa Baa Colorful Sheep, The Very Busy Spider, and a pig book.

 This week I posted my first item to my Teachers Pay Teachers Store!  It's a remake of a class book I've been doing with my class for several years, Baa Baa Black Sheep.  It's a FREEBIE, so teachers, please go download it here.  If you find it useful, I would appreciate you rating it! 

Here's the cover... and some samples of the pages the children made.

 Don't you love the crazy, jumping sheep?  Not what I envisioned, but several of the kiddos made their sheep jumping sideways!  They painted the sheep body with their finger tips, then glued on a construction paper head and eyes, and drew on legs.

 Like anything else they have a part of creating, they are eager to read the books we make as a class.  They have been singing variations on Baa Baa Black Sheep a lot this week.  One afternoon we over heard one child singing as she washed her hands, "Baa Baa yellow fish, have you any... eyebrows?  I don't know, I don't know, if you have wool."  Sometimes they crack me up!

Another of the stories we've been reading for our farm theme is Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider. 

We watched a short animated video of the book on youtube.com: (see it here) and I made a flannel board for the children to retell the story and act it out.

 I cut notches into the sides of some small paper plates, and the children threaded brown yarn through the slots to create a web effect.  Construction paper scraps and a little glue, and we had spiders in our webs too.

We also made a pig book this week.  The kiddos cut out circles, rectangles and triangles that I'd traced on pink, tan and brown paper, and then assembled their shape piggies.  I was inspired by this craft, which I found via pinterest.com.  (I've also made a printable version, if you'd like to do this too!)

 I offered several different short sentences for the children to assemble on their piggy page: My pig is _____ (cute, in the mud, pink, brown, tan).  The children had to use their beginning reading skills to find the correct words and construct their sentence.

Check them out, aren't they adorable?  The children were very proud of their piggies, so I recorded each child reading their own piggie page, and made this youtube video  to share with their families. One mommy told me she listened and thought they sounded like angels!

With all these fun farm activities completed, we're ready for our grand finale - a trip to the farm!

Farm centers and other fun

Last week I asked the children what activities they most enjoy doing at school.  Field trips, cooking, reading and sensory play were all favorite activities - as was nap time!  I guess by the time we've done all those other things, we're all pretty worn out, and ready to rest and recharge.

I was surprised that the kiddos didn't seem to have strong feelings about what to learn about next.  Sure, dinosaurs, vehicles, and dancing came up as themes, but the children were just as enthusiastic about everything else I suggested too.  Lucky for me, one of my families has a small farm, and we're planning to visit soon to see the animals - and there's a fantastic and fun theme for us.

I put out lots of farm puzzles for my friends to work on, as well as some farm themed listening centers, and of course, a bunch of fun farm songs on youtube.com for our singing and dancing time in the morning.  We worked on the farm part of abcmouse.com with the ipads, which the children are all very eager to use.  We've made our avatars, learned how to push the x button to close pop up windows, found the home button and the back button.  I'm so glad I added a second ipad for our class to use!

 

I created a sensory bin with farm animal sorting and counting.  The children love digging in the beans, it feels so good to run our fingers through them.  I hid plastic animals in the bin, and made a sheet for the children to match animals to as they found them.

We worked on making farm words with letter tiles and magnetic letters too.  Each of the pages I put out at this center had a farm themed picture and matching word, and space for letter tiles to make the words.  Looking through all the letter tiles was a challenge for some friends, so midweek I changed this center to just three words, with only the letters we needed available.  Much better!

One of my wonderful neighbors cleaned out her craft supplies recently, and donated some scissors that make fancy cuts and even 2 hole punches.  Oh my!  We LOVED them - thank you Ms. Dixie!  We cut paper scraps over and over again this week - working on strengthening hand muscles, cutting skills, and hand eye coordination having fun.  The resulting confetti treasure went home in recycled envelopes, and the children are already asking to do this again.

Outside this week we had a Fisher Price Barnyard Boogie dance mat.  There are four different games on it, from hearing animals sounds to remembering a sequence of animals.  It's a loud game - I wouldn't enjoy it inside - but it was perfect for outside!

So was having a table full of bubbles!  My bubble solution is just one part regular Palmolive dish soap diluted with about seven parts water - and makes fantastic bubbles.

We had a cool science discovery moment in the bubbles when a pair of kiddos discovered that they could hold bubbles in their hands - if their hands were wet.  A lot of bubble blowing, chasing, and catching followed!

We're also playing hopscotch in the backyard this week.  Okay, we don't all play it the same way.  Some of my friends can switch between hopping and jumping as they go, some friends can skip over a number... we eliminated the rock throwing part of the game for safety.  But hey, we're counting, practicing reading numerals, and moving our bodies while we have fun! 

We had to enjoy the lovely balmy weather with a picnic lunch one day.  When I looked for paper plates, I discovered I didn't have any plain ones left - but I did have left over Christmas plates, enough for the kids.  Teachers had to have Halloween plates, and when I looked for a bowl to put our apple slices in, I found a Valentine heart bowl.... so I decided this was a mixed up holidays picnic, and brought out a bunny (Easter) and a squirrel (fall/Thanksgiving) to round it out.  If I had realized ahead of time, we would have added some hats and costumes, and been even crazier!

This week we also enjoyed farm themed toys with our play dough...

 ... played a Scrambled Eggs game (and ate real scrambled eggs for lunch)...

 ... used farm themed paint stamps...

 ...read a farm rhyme and riddle on the pocket chart...

 ...played with farm animal  toys and manipulatives...

 ...and measured farm animals with non-standard units.  I found this activity ready made here.

 It's only fitting that we ended the week with a surprise visit from some Canada Geese swimming in the creek with the ducks.  Duck, duck, goose!

We'll continue our farm fun for two more weeks - I can't wait to show you all the fun learning activities we have in store!

X Marks the spot

Ahoy Mateys! We're learning about the letter x this week, so it's time for some serious pirating - because X marks the spot.  It is so difficult to find things that start with x and that are relevant to the children... at least, it was, until we included pirate things.  We dressed up, got pirate temporary tattoos, made Xs out of all kinds of piratey things, and scowled, arrrrrr!

 And every self respecting pirate (an oxymoron?) needs to search for buried treasure, so we dug in the sensory box for gold dubloons, 'jewels', keys and shiny bits and pieces.  Dubloons were definitely the favorite!

 My own boys, mostly grown now, loved this pirate ship toy when they were little.  Now the kiddos enjoy it, and had all kinds of pirate pretends this week.

 I got out an abc fishing game, because pirates have to eat fish.  (We had tuna for lunch this day too.)

 I had all my scurvy dogs walk the plank, right into the ocean with fish, sharks, and even salt water crocodiles.  One of the kiddos added the puppy... poor puppy!

 Here are some of the pirate books we read this week.  Our favorite of all is Tough Boris, by Mem Fox.  When my boys were little, my husband would read it to them forwards, and then backwards.  Not to spoil the story, but one page, read backwards, says "died parrot his when but."  The kids think that is the funniest thing ever!  I also really love Roger the Jolly Pirate, by Brett Helquist, because... well, you'll have to read it to find out why.

 We did a cute pirate craft, to work on our scissor skills.  Some of the children had trouble cutting out the face, because I traced it on some old file folders, and the paper was too heavy for them to cut.  Next time, I'll use plain old manila paper.   I found the idea on applesandabcs.blogspot.com.

If you're looking for even more pirate activities, I have made a variety of fun pirate themed resources available on my TeachersPayTeachers store, including this fun class book:

My kiddos really enjoy writing, reading, and re-reading class books.  They have such ownership of the books we make together, and want to see and hear their work over and over again.  This particular class book repeats the sight words "the" and "where".

There are a few other things that start with X, of course.  We talk about x-rays and skeletons a lot this week (vocabulary: skull, spine, ribs, vertebrate, invertebrate).  Yes, I know, those are awfully big words for little kids.  Here's the thing, if you introduce big concepts in a way that relates to something the kiddos care about, sometimes they remember!  When I showed the children a skeleton book this week, and said that the frog was a vertebrate, because it has a back bone and a skeleton, one of the children commented that the octopus does not have those, and is an invertebrate.  (He's five years old.)

I have a collection of old x-rays that I've accumulated over the years, and post them around the room.  The kiddos aren't scared, just fascinated, because that's how I present them.  This year we even got a dog x-ray to check out!

Here are our Xx crafts: x-ray man, and a xylophone inspired by playandlearnwithdana.  Pretty simple, but I did pull a little measurement in by having the children seriate the bars for their xylophones, from longest to shortest.  As usual, the kiddos did a really good job of cutting out their letters!

Of course, we made our hand print crafts!  The kiddos chose either an x-ray fish, or a hand x-ray to make.  Notice the number of "bones" they put on the hand x-rays: 3 bones in each finger, 2 in each thumb, plus a longer bone in the palm for each digit. Once again, they may not remember it at all, but if we expose them to ideas, then it's possible they may.

We also played xylophones and other musical instruments while we were outside this week.  I like to have the instruments outside, where its okay to be loud and exuberant.

We finished our week off with a picnic outside in the wonderful sunshine, and outside story time. 

I DO love spring!