Springtime Crafts
The next time you make scrambled eggs, save the shells! Rinse them out and leave them to dry, and pick up a bag of large pom-poms. They can be yellow if you want to make baby chicks or white if you want to make bunnies. Your child can pick out craft eyes, pipe cleaners, or construction paper. To make baby chicks, cut an orange diamond from construction paper, fold it over and glue to a yellow pom-pom. Add craft eyes above the beak, or perhaps smaller pom-poms or yellow feathers for wings. These chicks are then glued inside egg shells for an adorable Easter decoration! For bunnies, you can use pipe cleaners for ears, smaller pom-poms for front feet, and you can make a nose and whiskers out of construction paper. The bunnies can sit in egg shells too, and you can display your child’s work in an egg carton or a decorative basket.
Another great craft that your kids will love to do any time of the year is to make flowers or butterflies out of coffee filters. This is a wonderful project because no two flowers are exactly alike, and your kids will have so much fun experimenting with colors. It’s very simple: all you need are coffee filters, washable markers, and pipe cleaners. Flatten the coffee filters over newspapers or some other protective surface covering, and have your kids color all over the filter with the markers. They can try using two or three of their favorite colors to make a pattern, or they can use every color of the rainbow. Then, have them fold the filter in half twice, so that if they reopen it they will have four equal sections. Get a bowl of water and dip only the folded tip into the bowl; the water will travel up the filter, blending the colors together. Reopen the filter and allow it to dry on a newspaper or old towel. Once it’s dry, you can fold it like an accordion and secure with a pipe cleaner in the middle and make a butterfly by twisting the ends of the pipe cleaner into antennas. Or, you can attach a green pipe cleaner to the center where the creases met when you folded it, and crumple it upwards from there to make a flower. You can do much more with these colorful coffee filters, just encourage your kids to get creative and see what they come up with!
