Craft Time – Turkeys with Crumpled Tissue Paper Feathers

Thanksgiving can’t go by without at least one turkey craft, can it?  I know many of you are up to your ears in turkey crafts; if you can’t possibly stand one more, don’t read this post! :)
This was very simple and fun.  I used this activity mainly to introduce M to the “scrunch up tissue paper and dip it in glue” technique that I think is so neat, but that he’s never really been interested in.   This time he enjoyed it, but didn’t like the fact that once in a while glue would get on his fingers. (When did he become Mr. Neat and Clean?)
Supplies: brown paper, marker, scissors, glue, saucer or lid (to put the glue on for dipping), googley eyes (or buttons if you have no googley eyes, although you might regret it – see below), orange triangle, red waddle, and tissue paper cut into 2” x 2” squares.  The measurement does not have to be exact.
Draw a turkey head (think key hole shape) on half of the brown paper, and on the other half draw an arc that covers most of the area.
Cut out the turkey pieces, or have your child cut them out.        
Put a puddle of glue on the saucer or lid.  Scrunch up pieces of tissue paper, dip them in the glue, then stick them to the semi-circle.


Try to completely cover it with the wadded tissue paper pieces.
Glue eyes, beak, and waddle onto the turkey head. 
If you want, use a square of styrofoam or a ribbon spool, or something similar to make your turkey a bit more 3-d.  Place glue on whatever you are using for a spacer, and glue it on top of the tissue paper.Place more glue on top and glue on the turkey head and neck.  It is fine to simply glue the turkey head right onto the tissue paper area if you don’t have anything to use as a spacer.

Hm. Hopefully yours will not also look like a
crazy, hypnotized turkey. :)

You can tape a cardboard tube (t.p. or paper towel, cut to size) to the back of your turkey to make him stand up in the center of your Thanksgiving table!  I think we’ll face ours to the wall, hee hee. ;)
Have a beautiful day! :)
 

Dropping Colored Water – a Fine Motor Activity

This week I had as many shelf activities out for M as I usually have, but one of them was such a huge hit he did it for 2 hours the first day, and went back to it each and every day, while completely passing by every other activity.  I finally had to take it off the shelf so he would choose something else!

It was simple to put together and not at all time-consuming.  I simply printed magnet pages from Making Learning Fun (which are supposed to be used with circle magnets) for the letter F, one of our letters for the week.  I placed the pages in plastic page protectors and put them on a tray along with a few paper towels and a small dropper with red water in it.

 

The idea was for M to squeeze one drop, and only one drop onto each circle, then place a paper towel over the top and watch the color soak through. 

Well.  Never did I imagine that this would be The Best Activity in the World,  but apparently it is.  He did both F pages a few times, then begged for more.  I had some number play dough mats printed out and in page protectors already, so I grabbed those and he did them several times too. And, he got in a little unexpected math work by counting the circles on each page as he dropped water onto them.  Gotta love an activity that multi-tasks! ;)

 

It was M’s idea to trace the numbers with the colored drops.  It was so neat to see the number form as the water soaked through the paper towel.

Our dropper was just an old food coloring dropper.  You can pry the tip out, fill the container with water, drop in a tiny bit of food coloring and put the tip back in.  It worked perfectly!   I must have refilled this thing 20 times during the course of the week and it kept working great.  I didn’t want to use a regular eye dropper with an open bottle of colored water because  I wanted to eliminate any chance of spilling the water (food coloring stains!).  This turned out to be the perfect solution. 

Have a beautiful day! :)