Feather Painting

 The ostrich feather is one of the children's favorite items in the classroom at the moment. They love feeling the very soft, small feathers around the bottom and then the stiffer, longer feathers above. 

 It's not a real ostrich feather of course. I found it at Michael's craft store last week. It looked like an ostrich feather to me so I brought it into the classroom as part of our African animals theme.  Since everyone was interested in the feathers, we decided to paint with feathers today. We used the small colored feathers from our art supplies. 

We squirted the paint right onto the paper and used the feathers to move it around and mix it up. 

 We added more paint and it turned into a color mixing project. 

 

 Using feathers to paint was a fun alternative to paint brushes. 

Monkey Play

Here is a fun monkey craft that we made with the two-year-olds today. It was a little difficult for them to do and I ended up having to help everyone quite a bit. It would probably be more appropriate for three- or four-year-olds but the children really wanted to make monkeys today and this was the only thing I could think of with the supplies we had on hand. They turned out very nice in the end and they are lots of fun to play with. 

 For each monkey, I cut out two large brown ovals, one small white oval, and a brown monkey head. I also gathered two pipe cleaners and two googly eyes for each monkey. 

 First, we put lots of glue on one of the brown ovals and laid the pipe cleaners across it. 

Next, we put the second brown oval on top of the first so that the pipe cleaners were between them.

Finally, we glued on the head, eyes, and belly.  We had made monkeys!  (Though some of the kids insisted they had made spiders.)

 When the glue was dry, we put the monkeys on the big tree branch in our classroom! 

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Crocodiles

 

This craft is a fun way for children to work on their fine motor skills. 

Before beginning the activity, I cut out a crocodile shape for each of the children. 

Then I folded them and drew guidelines for cutting. 

The children in our class love to cut with scissors so they were eager to begin. Cutting on the guidelines required a good amount of hand-eye coordination. 

Some of the children just wanted to cut and went a little overboard, which was fine. I had a few extra crocodiles on hand in case they wanted to try again. 

 We glued on the eyes...

and drew faces. 

I love that they were all different!

 

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Elephants

One of our favorite books this week is Little Elephant's Trunk by Hazel Lincoln. This book tells about all the ways an elephant can use its trunk. I found an easy elephant craft at busybeekidscrafts.com that we made after reading the story again today. 

For each elephant, I gathered these supplies: 

Two grey paper ovals

Two ears cut form grey paper

Two goggly eyes

One pipe cleaner

A small piece of string (for the tail)

Two clothespins

One glue stick

The children spread glue on one oval and pressed the pipe cleaner and the bit of string onto it. 

Next, they glued the second oval on top of the first one so that the pipe cleaner and string were between them. 

Then they added the ears, eyes, and clothespin legs.

These were not only fun to make, but they were also fun to play with!

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Stripes and Symmetry

After looking at pictures of zebras with their black and white stripes, we made our own zebra stripes. We used black paint to make the stripes on one half of a piece of white paper.

Then we folded the paper in half...

and rubbed it a bit. 

When we opened it, there was a very pretty symmetrical set of stripes. 

The children were too young to understand the word symmetrical but they did understand that both sides of the paper were the same. This is the first step in understanding symmetry. 

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African Safari Part 2

After flying to Africa in our pretend plane, we grabbed our binoculars and set out on a safari adventure. 

We made the binoculars by cutting a paper towel roll in half and stapling the halves together like in the picture. We also attached a string so that we could wear them around our necks. 

Earlier in the day, I hid our plastic animals around the school. When it was time for the safari, we walked around and "spied" the animals with our binoculars. 

What an exciting safari!

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African Safari

This week we have a been getting ready for an African safari trip. We have been reading lots of books about Africa and about the animals we are hoping to see there. We found Africa on our classroom map.

 After talking about how far it is from us, we discussed the best way to get there. Some of the children thought we should drive or walk (or even use our capes to fly!) but we decided that it would be easiest to go in an airplane. I told the children that before we went, we would need passports. I gave each child a passport and let them glue their own picture in it. We used chairs to set up a pretend airplane in the classroom, then we boarded the plane and were on our way!

To make the passports, I printed out a passport template that I found on line, cut out the pages, and stapled them together. 

When we landed our pretend airplane in Africa, we stamped our passports with a star and the letter A for Africa. 

Everyone is very excited to go on another trip to Africa soon!

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