Preschool / Bible Craft – Shining Our Light

Yesterday I wrote about how we are trying to integrate our faith more and more into our every day life as a family.  Occasionally we do little crafts or activities (if I can think of any) to go along with this.   

This weekend, the Sunday scripture reading from the Gospel of Matthew is about how Christians should be salt and light in the world.  (Matthew 5:13-16)

We talked about this a little and then did a fun candle craft.  We’ve done this once before and M loved it.  He’s  been wanting to make another one, and this was the perfect opportunity (especially considering that I just used up a jar of chicken bouillon, the perfect size for a little candle. ;) )

We started off with some tissue paper scraps, our jar, white glue thinned with water, a foam paintbrush, and a small picture of Jesus with His mama, cut from a Christmas card:

I explained to M that this is called decoupaging.  He just loves those big words. :)

Paint on a thin layer of glue, press on tissue paper pieces, then carefully paint another thin layer of glue on top.  Keep doing this until your jar looks “just right” to you:

It took some extra glue to get the picture to stick on.  I would suggest using a cutting from a magazine instead of a card, or using generous amounts of double stick tape to put the picture on, then covering it with the thinned glue:

 

When it’s dry, pop in a tea light candle and watch your little light shine. :)

the back

the front

We’ve also been singing This Little Light of Mine, using a battery-operated tealight to “hide under a bushel” (his cupped hand) and “blow” out. :)  M really, really loves this!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Preschool Art – Epiphany Stars and Corn Syrup Painting

Today is the 12th day of Christmas – are your little drummers drumming?  If they aren’t, I bet they will if you tell them they can. ;)  I’m sure mine will, although that’s only one drummer, not twelve.  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be ok with it if I had twelve drummers!

Tomorrow is Epiphany, and we’ll be moving the wise men all the way to the stable, where they finally get to see the baby they’ve been looking for.  They will bring gifts, and I plan to have a little something (a very little $5.00 something) for them to give to M also.

We decided to make some stars to help celebrate, and I turned it into a full-fledged art project by introducing a technique we’ve never tried before – painting with corn syrup.  This was fun and I wished we’d tried it sooner.  It is not as messy as it sounds!

Here’s what you’ll need:Corn syrup, food coloring, small paint brushes, glitter, craft sticks, and stars cut from cardboard or cardstock.  And, because I just wouldn’t be me if I included all the supplies in the photo, we also used parchment paper, double-stick tape, scissors, and an ice cube tray.

First, pour a puddle of corn syrup onto one of the stars: 

Then use a craft stick to spread it out towards the points.  You want to cover the entire star:

Next, squeeze on a couple of drops of food coloring: 

And use the pointy end of a paintbrush to swirl the colors (you could use a toothpick or skewer for this too, obviously):

We loved watching the colors swirl around – so pretty!

Keep swirling out towards the points, until you have it just the way you want it.  We should have left it at that, because it was beautiful.  However, M was sure a little glitter would be great, and a little glitter probably would have been fine.  I think I liked it better before the glitter, but apparently I forgot to get a photo of that.  Here’s with glitter:

You can’t tell in the photo, but the corn syrup makes it very, very shiny – perfect for a star!  It almost leaves it looking like painted glass or ceramic.

Leave them to dry overnight.  Depending on your humidity level, drying could take a couple of days.  Our air is very dry these days, and it only took one night for our stars to dry.  They look just as shiny after they are dry, but are no longer sticky.

Next, we decided to try painting our cardboard stars with colored corn syrup and paint brushes instead of a craft stick.

I poured a little corn syrup into four wells of an ice cube tray, added some food coloring, and a tiny amount of glitter: 

We each painted one star (after watching, I just had to try this for myself – it was a lot of fun!):

Painting with the paint brushes left a much thinner layer of corn syrup, which meant less mess and a shorter drying time.  However, we weren’t able to achieve the swirling effect from earlier.  The swirling was mesmerizing and beautiful to watch.  When we do this again, we will paint plain corn syrup onto our paper, then drip on food coloring and swirl.  Hopefully that will mean a thinner layer of corn syrup, while still having the swirled look.

Our finished (painted) stars:

We have company coming over for dinner tonight, and one last evening enjoying the light of our Christmas tree.  We may watch The Little Drummer Boy, read Little Star, and sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.  We’ll read the story of the Three Kings from M’s little Bible tomorrow and I have a little mosaic crown project set up for him (pictures of that later).

I’m linking this up to Kids Get Crafty!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Creation

We’ve been reading Bible stories every morning since a little before New Year’s Day. As you can imagine, we are way past the creation of the world by now. However, it’s always good to review and M really enjoyed *creation* activities.
God made all the animals and we sorted them. :) I used a green piece of paper for land animals, a blue piece with waves drawn on it for water animals, and a blue piece with clouds drawn on for animals in the sky. We took M’s Fisher Price Zoo animals and sorted them all onto the squares of paper. After they were all sorted we talked about how it was Adam’s job to name all the animals. We thought that was probably a pretty fun job. ;)
M was also interested in the fact that ostriches have wings but can’t fly. He liked that they are fast runners though! We also talked about the hump that camels’ have and how they store water in them. This led to a discussion of the desert and jungle for the land animals. M decided I should’ve made a desert paper and a jungle paper instead of just one paper for all the land animals. That way we could’ve sorted them a little better. What can I say? He’s right; I need to start running my ideas by him while I’m still in the planning stages, hee hee. This idea was from here.
Then we made a fun sticker collage with foam stickers. First I traced M’s hand on green paper, we cut the hands out and glued them to blue paper to make grass. We added a little pond at the bottom. We added cotton balls for clouds in the sky. M put the sun in the sky and drew a little face on it all by himself. :) He thought it looked a little silly, but I think it looks great. ;) Then we got busy with the other stickers. We made flowers and added animals in the grass, fish in the pond, even a couple of birds in the sky! There’s even Adam and Eve, and if you look closely you’ll even see an apple tree with a cat in it (sorry, no snake!). :) M was so proud of his creation and he showed this to Daddy as soon as he came home. He said, “It’s the world that God made!!” So sweet!
And we read this lovely little book:
Our Nest, by Reeve Lindbergh. I am in love with this sweet book. It’s a perfect bedtime story, making everyone feel safe and secure, as it talks about all the “nests” we have – our homes, our towns, our world, our universe… all of creation is our “nest”, a place to be cared for and loved. The book mentions creation, but does not mention God. However, I do feel that God’s loving hand is implied in the wording. It’s a beautifully illustrated book and a wonderful way to talk about God’s creation with a child!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Jonah and the Whale

We finally got around to doing another Bible story with actual activities to go with it.  We’ve been reading the stories and talking about them, but I’ve just been completely out of creative ideas to go with any of them.
And, just an FYI, with Advent beginning soon I’ll be preparing for a daily (quick) Bible story with M up to Christmas.  After that we’ll try to get back in the swing of things with a weekly story… my current plan is to start with creation and go from there.  This is what we’ll be doing in Advent too, but after Christmas (or possibly New Year’s) we’ll take more time to do some crafty things on a weekly basis for each story.  Gosh, I hope that makes sense.  My mommy-brain needs some serious sleep. :)
So, last week we talked about Jonah.  Good old Jonah, who is a lot like M in many ways… mainly in the saying “No” way and running the other direction when asked to do something. ;) 
We read two books about whales throughout the week, and the first time we read them I casually mentioned Jonah and his *adventure*.  M was fascinated.  He hadn’t really learned about whales yet, and loved hearing how big some of them can be and that they don’t chew up their food, they just swallow it whole.  Gulp!  For whatever reason, he found this fact astounding.  And Jonah getting spit out?!  Well, you can imagine how cool he thought that was. :) 
The first book was Whales by Gail Gibbons – an excellent book for learning facts about these creatures.
The second book was Baby Beluga, by Raffi.  You have probably heard this song… the book is basically the song with illustrations.  This one was also well-liked. 
Then we read the story of Jonah from our favorite toddler Bible:
And I just (today) found this flannel board set:If you are interested, click on the picture and it will take you to the site.  The pictures are about halfway down the page.  I’m going to make this for M so he can “do” the story on his flannel board.   Of course I searched high and low for something to make at the time we were actually talking about this story and couldn’t find anything… this would have been (and will be) perfect!
Our craft was so much fun for M.  He LOVED it.  I can’t stress that enough.  I thought it was so simple that I would be lucky to get his cooperation for the whole thing, but he really, really loved it! (I like it when that happens!) 
First, he did some color mixing – periwinkle blue and a tiny amount of yellow to make a sea-green (pretend it’s sea-green, ok?) background.  He painted this onto a piece of white cardstock with a square piece of sponge:
I found a coloring page here, printed it on cardstock and cut the whale out.  M colored Jonah with a crayon.  Then he mixed white and purple paint and painted the whale and an oval piece of cardstock that I had cut out.
We let everything dry overnight.  The next day he glued the whale to the sea background, and we attached the oval to the center of the whale with a paper fastener.  This is the whale’s flipper.  I know most whales don’t have flippers right there but this one does. Matthew asks everyone who enters our house, “Do you wanna see Jonah in the big whale?!?” and he flips up the flipper and there sits Jonah, on his knees praying, just waiting to be spit out. :) 
Jonah did the right thing in the end and did what God asked him to do, but I’m not entirely sure that lesson made it’s way into M’s brain exactly the way I hoped it would.  However, I would say this story definitely made an impression on him, and he really does like it – a lot.  And hopefully, eventually he’ll understand the moral of the story too. :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Daniel in the Lion’s Den

We were in a hurry this past Friday – trying to get out of town for the big Labor Day weekend (hope you all had a wonderful weekend!), so we only had a short amount of time to spend on our Bible story.
We read Daniel in the Lion’s Den in both of our Children’s Bibles (see them here and here), one in the morning and the other at nap time.
We learned this song with motions (from Hubbard’s Cupboard, click the picture to go to the site):
And we made a paper plate lion. I drew inspiration for this idea from both DLTK and Making Learning Fun.
You will need a paper plate, paint, paintbrush,glue, a triangle cut from construction paper or foam, googley eyes, and 6 strips of black yarn.
First, paint a paper plate orange. We are running low on paint, so we mixed red and yellow together. You could do different color combinations too – maybe yellow for the face and orange or brown for the outer edge of the plate (lion’s mane), but we made it simple and did orange all over.
Glue on googley eyes, and a triangle nose (we used brown construction paper).
Next, glue on whiskers. For the whiskers I put the glue lines on the plate so M could see where to stick the yarn pieces.
For a little scissor practice, I drew black lines for M to cut on the back of the plate, around the mane at about 2 inch intervals.


Ta da – our finished lion:
We also read a library book that sort of tied in to this story. It is titled How Loud is a Lion? by Clare Beaton.

This is a fun book that goes through characteristics of several animals, always asking at the end of each page, “But how loud is a lion?”. Finally, at the end you see the lion and he ROARS (very loudly at our home, but only as loudly as you wish at yours :) ). We discussed how lions are loud and have sharp teeth and claws that could hurt people, and how wonderful it was that God sent an angel to keep Daniel safe – the lions didn’t even touch him!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Craft Time – Rainbows Galore - #2

Because the Gluey-Jello rainbow turned out like it did, we did another rainbow craft.
I gave M a piece of white cardstock and this rainbow painter we found at a discount store ages ago and have never used:

He didn’t really paint in a rainbow shape, but I didn’t necessarily intend for him to. I just wanted the whole paper covered with rainbow colors.

I also had him put his hands together like this (to make a dove) and drew around them on a light beige piece of cardstock:

(Oh, how I love those chubby little hands!)

Then we mixed white glue and very fine silver glitter together on a saucer:

He painted the birdie:

I wish you could see how sparkly it turned out. I have had great results mixing glitter with paint (or even just plain white glue) to achieve a sparkly effect. The key, though, is to use the finest glitter you can find. It’s way less messy than letting them sprinkle the glitter on.

Once the rainbow paper was dry, I drew a rainbow shape on the back and cut it out:
Glue the dove onto the top and you’ve got a pretty little reminder of the story about Noah’s Ark.
Nope, I didn’t make him hold it front of his face, that’s just what he did.
Here’s a close up of the sparkly dove:
It turned out very pretty – the pictures don’t do it justice.
Have a beautiful, sparkly day! :)