Lion or Lamb

So the old saying goes.....
IF MARCH COMES IN LIKE A LION IT GOES OUT LIKE A LAMB

Well I sure hope this stands true, the kids and I are tired of winter already.  We have hardly been able to go outside, between the ugly weather and all the colds we seem to be passing around.

March 1st surely came in like a lion here is Saskatchewan, with a temperature of -39 Celsius with the windchill.  So none the less we stayed inside again and did some crafts for this fun little saying.  Now lets hope it starts to change over the the lamb real soon, so we can go outside for a while during the day.

We made LAMBS and LIONS.


What you need:
cotton balls
scrap paper (pink, black, orange, brown, yellow)
Black marker
paper plates
glue
scissors
brown or black pipe cleaners
googly eyes










What you do:
LION

1. Cut the yellow, brown, and orange paper in the small strips about 2" to 3" in length
2. glue strips of colour paper around the outside edge of one of the paper plates
3. add folded pipe cleaners to the sides of the face for whiskers
4. add eyes and a black triangle to the middle for a nose
5. We then added a mouth with a black marker and a few dots for details for the whiskers

LAMB

1. glue cotton balls around the outside edge of a paper plate
2. add googly eyes and a pink triangle to the center of the plate for a nose
3. we then drew on a mouth with a black marker
4. if you have extra paper laying around you can make a bow and glue it on to the top of the lambs head too, if you would like.

A fun easy project to do with children.  And each day they can look outside and change the face of the animal to how the weather is.  So if its cold and ugly out, its a lion day and if its nice and warm its a lamb day.

Chicken Week Days 2 and 3

Sorry I didn't get yesterday craft posted, I ran out of time before my day came to an end!  So I will make both yesterdays and today's in one post. 

So we have done a few more crafts along with reading some chicken/duck stories and coloring another picture.

For the next stage in the chickens life we colored:

Chickens in a nest can be found at www.coloring.ws

As for crafts we made chicks that hatch and form chicken pictures.

Chicks that Hatch

What you need:

Plastic Eggs (you can usually find these around Easter time in stores, they open up and you can fill them with candy or little gifts)
Large yellow pom poms (two for each child)
googly eyes
orange foam or construction paper
white glue

What to do:

1. Place a decent amount of white glue in the bottom portion of the egg
2. Stick a yellow pom pom into it
3. Then glue the second pom pom on top of the first one
4. Glue your eyes and beak on to the top pom pom 

Once they are dry you can then show the children how the egg hatches!!  My little ones had fun showing me how they can hatch their eggs all by themselves.

Foam Chickens

What you need:
Yellow foam
Red Foam
Orange Foam
Googly Eyes
Glue
Scissors
pencil

What you do:

1. Draw the shape of a large egg for the body of yellow foam
2. Draw the shape of two wings on yellow foam
3. Draw feet and beaks on the orange foam
4. Draw the head piece of a chicken on the red foam
5. Let the children cut the shapes out (if they aren't old enough to cut you might have to do this part too!)
6. Glue pieces together to make the chicken 
7. Add eyes 

Reading:

I had the older children look through the book shelf to see if they could pick out the chicken books.
Here's what they came back with.... (I know they are not about chickens but they were pretty darn close, so we read them anyways). 

Book 1:
The Ugly Duckling
From the Series "Baby Bear's Read Along"

Book 2:
Duck Duck Moose
Written by Dave Horowitz

I tried to explain to the children the difference between ducks and chickens, now I am not to sure if the younger one know the difference yet or not......  But I am still happy they found "bird" books by themselves.


Take a look at additional pictures at: Ducky's Photos

Chicken Week Day 1

So with the older kids back into school this week, the younger ones and I at Ducky's have started our new themed weeks.  As mentioned in a previous post, I was finding the Lettered weeks to be a little hard for some of the children, they are mostly between 2 and 3 years of age. I decided to start with farm animals and see how it will go from there.

Today we did the following:

While I was getting out craft project ready I had the children colour 2 pictures.
1: just an egg ( Egg found at Family Crafts on About.com)

2: a picture of a chick that has just hatched (chick in egg can be found on DTLK's chick colouring pages)

These pages will be kept and at the end of the week with will make a little booklet of the stages of growth for a chicken.
Once our coloring was finished we started into today's craft.  We made chickens out of baby food jars.  Who thought, hey???  And I must say we will be using this method a few times over the next couple of weeks while we work on our farm animals.

What you need:

• Baby Food Jars
• Craft foam in orange (or you can use scrap construction paper)
• Tacky Glue or glue gun (I would recommend that you use one of these, we used white glue and it wasn't the easiest!)
• pompoms in the color yellow
• yellow feathers
• wiggle eyes
• scissors

Directions:

Clean baby food jar. Remove label. Fill with pompoms to make the body of the chicken. Put the lid on and turn it upside down. Glue on wiggle eyes. Cut  beak and feet out of foam and glue in place. Glue 4 to 6 yellow feathers to the back side of your jar sticking up to make its tail.

We also listen to the story Chicken Little today.  As sad as it is, I have what seems like a million and one books in my house and I do not have Chicken Little!  So I found one on the computer and we watched it.  The kids really enjoyed watching it, as for the fact that they know the computer is off limits here, so when they do get to use it a bit, its sure a treat for them.

Author: Christianne C. Jones

Feel free to check out more pictures at Ducky's Photos of today's craft !