The Easter Bunny Came Early!

What a joy it is to what the children have so much fun with crafts, decorating, and "hunting".  Here at Ducky's we had our Easter party this past Thursday and lets say I was sure tired by the end of the day, although the children were not because they were all on a sugar high from cupcakes!

It has been pretty quiet around the day care for the last few weeks with mom's or dad's being off of work for a while and with me hurting my back and having to cancel child care for a week to recuperate.  But along came Wednesday and I finally had an extra little one for us to do some Easter crafts with.

Wednesday we made Bunny hats, Easter Lily's made out of our hand prints. We also had some baking fun by make chicken nests with eggs and the famous "Peeps".  The girls had a blast with this project and just as much fun eating them afterwards.

Thursday was a busier day with having my regulars come in for our party.  We started off with making chicks out of tennis balls, followed by decorating paper eggs for our mom's and dad's.  While the children were having fun decorating their eggs I snuk off to the living room to hide some plastic goodie filled eggs.  I then told the children that I had seen the Easter Bunny outside and he told me he had snuk into the house early because he heard we were having our party today.  Wow, you should have seen the children's faces when I told them this.  It was priceless and I wish I had the camera out at that time.  So I continued on with what the Easter bunny told me....... he laid eggs around the living room and they were to collect them all in the baskets he left, once all were found, they had to sit in a circle and listen to me.  So that's what the children did and the noise begun!!  Every egg that was found I would here a "WOW" or "I have another one", "Look, look, it green, blue, orange..." .  We found them all and sat in a circle, they all got to pick the color they wanted and then we continued on by practicing our colors and sorting.  Them we counted everyones eggs to make sure they all had the same amount.  Now was the fun part.... they got to open the egg and see what the Easter bunny left them.  The girls got barrettes, chocolate eggs, stickers,  light up little ducks for the bath tub.  And the boys got a hot wheels car, stickers, candy eggs and a light up little frog for the bath tub.

By the time our egg hunt was over it was 5 minutes to 12 and lunch wasn't started...... So I asked the children what the Easter Bunny's favourite food was and once they figured it out they then learned that that was part of our lunch too.  They though it was funny that the Easter likes carrots and so do they!  That's all they talked about for the rest of lunch time.  We ended lunch off with some homemade chick cupcakes that I made early in the morning before the children even arrived. And then it was nap time, or I thought!  Only one child ended up falling asleep, the rest were on a sugar high from the cupcakes (let's just say I have learned to give them cupcakes after nap time from now on!).  We finished our day off with playing rabbits and coloring a few Easter pictures.  At home time each child got a little Easter from me and they got to take them home to find out what was in them.  Because I will admit it, I was just to tired to keep everyone's things separate from one another and didn't want to keep taking the candy away from the kids, because they weren't allowed to eat it before supper.  So that was left up to mom and dad to deal with!!! Sorry mom's and dad's but "Ducky" was exhausted!

Remember to take take a "hop" over to Ducky's Photos to see more of our fun filled day's

The luck of an Irish

Well we had our little party for the big green day and what a blast we had doing all sorts of fun little things through out the day.

We made our own Happy St. Patrick's Day pictures on green paper, with stickers and drawings.

Shamrock Hats

What you need:

• green paper
• scissors
• stickers
• stapler
• pipe cleaners

How to make these fancy hats:

• Cut 2 shamrocks for each child out of green paper
• Cut a strips of green paper long enough to wrap around your child's head (you might have to tape two pieces together to make it big enough)
• Let the children decorate the head band strips
• Once decorated, wrap the paper around the child's head to make sure its the right size and then staple together.
• Staple a pipe cleaner to the back of each shamrock
• Staple the other end of the pipe cleaner the the head band paper
• Once finished you might want to place a piece of tape over the staples so that they don't get caught in the children's hair, or make sure when you staple that the loops of the staple are to the outside of the head.

Each child received a green beaded neck lace today also to wear with their new hats.

While I was making lunch I found some St. Patrick's Day shows on YouTube for the children to watch (as I don't have any of my own!)

 








For lunch we had some fun also......
I cut their sandwiches in to shamrock shapes
We had cucumbers (cause they are green!)
Our juice was the "pot of gold" as is was a citrus punch
Dessert was vanilla pudding that I died green with food coloring (the kids thought this was just amazing!)









During Lunch time we listened to some Irish and St. Patrick's Day music. 








 

Our afternoon snack they children got to have fun decorating sugar cookies with green icing and shamrock sprinkles.




While the children had their nap/quiet time, I painted small clay pots so they were black.  Once dried I placed gold chocolate coins in them.  And they can take their pot of gold home for a treat for later (we all know, I have given the kids enough sugar with the cookies and icing, there is no way they get chocolate here too.  Mom and Dad can deal with that sugar high!)

Check out additional pictures at Ducky's Photos

Leading up to St. Patrick's Day

We Start off our St Patrick's Day crafts at the end of last week.  I was short on kids so I didn't want to move into the next farm animal yet so.... what better to do then more fun crafts!

Here are some of the crafts that lead us up to the big Irish Day.


We colored numerous St. Patty Day pictures:

Page can be found at Parenting Leehansen.com

Page can be found at Craft Elf

Page can be found at dulemba.blogspot.com
 



Tie-died Coffee Filter Shamrocks

This craft came from Kaboose website, I just changed a few things to make it easier for the younger ones.

What you need:

• coffee filters
• green markers
• Q-tips
• Small dish of water
• scissors

How to make your tie-die Shamrocks:

1. Have the children color all over the coffee filter with the green makers. (Don't worry about designs or anything fancy, just let them scribble for once!)
2. After they have colored the filters dip your Q-tip in the water
3. Then on to the colored filters
4. Now watch the magic happen...... the water makes the coloring run and forms fancy designs of its own
5. Set filters to the side to dry
6. Once dry cut the filters into the shape of shamrocks and hang up for decorations!

Treasure Boxes

I found some cute little wooden boxes at the Dollar store and thought that they would make great little treasure chests for the children.

What you need:

• Small boxes (doesn't have to be wooden ones they could be cardboard too)
• Green paint
• Paint Brushes
• Gems (we used little jewels, that I found at the Dollar Store)
• Glue

Instead of gems/jewels you could use:

• buttons
• beads
• stickers
• little rocks

How we made our treasure chests:

1. Paint the boxes green
2. Let dry
3. Glue the little gems on to the box
4. Let dry
5. Now your little ones have their very own special box to keep whatever they like to in it

A Treasure Hunt

While the children were painting there Treasure Boxes, I headed to the living room for a bit and started hiding some St Patrick's Day goodies.  Also at the Dollar Store, I found some green coins and shinny shamrocks... I picked them up just because I knew the children would love them.  So I thought for a while on what we could do with these fun little items.  That's when I came up with the idea for the treasure hunt to go along with our sparkly boxes.  With having younger children, I decided not to hide our treasure in any place all to hard for them to find.  They were all located in plain sight for them to find, yet they still had to look for them.  Once they found them they were able to put their treasures in their own boxes to keep and take home.

Remember to check out Ducky's Photos for more amazing pictures of the children having fun.

A rainbow and snack

Our St. Patrick's Day craft started today with a snack and craft in one.

We made rainbows out of Fruit Loops and Cheerios. First I had the children sort the Fruit Loops by color and of course they were eating just as many as they were putting in the dishes!  This was great because we were able to do a number of activities and learning experiences at once. 

• Snack
• Learning colors (for those that don't know their colors yet)
• Sorting/math skills

While the children finished sorting the colored Fruit Loops, I was making the outline of the rainbow.  I wasn't able to find one that I liked from the Internet so I decided to do it myself.  I imagine if I took some more time I would have found one, but instead I just drew two clouds at the bottom of each paper and connected them with one big loop for the starting of the rainbow.



What you need:

• Heavy paper (card stock) in the colour you choose
• Glue
• Fruit Loops
• Cheerios
• Template of a rainbow

Directions:

1. Have the children place glue along the top row of the rainbow and place the red fruit loops long it
2. Continue the first step until you reach the final color (each row will get smaller and smaller)
3. Place glue inside the cloud and use the cheerios for this

Colors of the Rainbow in order:

1. Red
2. Orange
3. Yellow
4. Green
5. Blue
6. Indigo
7. Violet (Purple)

Of course we skipped the indigo cause Fruit Loops don't come in that color!!!!

Other ideas: 

Instead of fruit loops you could use

• beads
• buttons
• tissue paper
• colored pasta
• colored rice

Instead of the cheerios you could use

• cotton balls
• white tissue paper
• rice
• pasta
• white buttons
• white beads

Remember to check out Ducky's Photos for more pictures of today's craft

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 !

Salt Dough Creations

On Tuesday the children and I made salt dough cut outs.  What fun that was!  I made the dough and cut it into equal pieces for the children, rolled them out and tossed all our play dough cutters into the middle of the table and let them go to town.  Once they had cut out what they wanted to, and lets say I rolled that dough out at least 50 times, between all the children, we placed our pieces on cookie sheets and baked them.  Half my children left just after lunch (with no school the girls dance was moved to the middle of the afternoon, instead of after school like usual) so I decided that we would wait until today to paint our master pieces.

Now today was the special day to paint these little trinkets.  Out comes the large garbage bags to cover my table, the 14 jars of paint and all the paint brushes I could find around the house.  To town the kids went with painting.  What kid doesn't like to paint????  Once we were done painting our cut outs on to what else.... FINGER PAINTING of course.  What a blast, what a mess!  But the joy they had doing all of it and the joy I had cleaning off 6 kids and all the paint brushes. 

Here's the recipe I used for our salt dough:
Ingredients: (I tripled the recipe and found it was more then enough for 6 kids)

• 1 cup of fine salt
• 1 cup of flour
• 1/2 cup of water (may add more)

Instructions:

• In a large bowl, combine the salt and the flour
• Make a well in the salt/flour mixture and add the water
• Knead until smooth and shape into a ball
• When not in use, wrap in plastic or store in an airtight container 
• Bake at 350 F for 10 minutes or until hard

HINT: To get a softer dough you can add more flour. Adding more salt will lend a more granulous affect. To add color to your dough, use different types of flour or add food coloring or paint.
Knead to get an even color.

Additional pictures are displayed on: Ducky's Photos

Lava Lamps

While real lava lamps rely on special ingredients and secrets, we made our own at home ones today.  The kids had a blast learning about the science (those that understood what I was talking about!) of how water and oil don't mix.  The younger ones were just amazed at how cool these lava lamps looked when they got to shack them up.

What you will need:

• glass container (you choose the size, I used medium salsa jars.  That way they aren't to big or to small, but you could use sealer jars, canning jars, baby food jars......)
• oil of any type (I used baby oil, cause I had left overs from one of our Christmas projects, to which I found at the Dollar Store.... I would recommend using olive oil or any expensive oil, not that it would change the out come, its just that you might as well save the money and use something a little cheaper)
• Food coloring
• glitter, sequences, small beads..... (we just used sequences)
• Hot glue gun (or better yet, clear silicon if you have some around home)

Here's how we made these "AWESOME" things ~and most of you have the items floating around your own home.

1. Fill the jar about a third full of your oil
2. Sprinkle your glitter (or what ever you want to use that is sparkly and eye catching) on top of the oil
3. Add water to nearly the top of the jar (I went about 2/3 of the way up, for this step)
4. Add a few drops of food coloring to make your desire color of water
5. Finish filling the jar with water, don't go right to the top but pretty close
6. Add your hot glue or silicone to the inner lip of the lip and screw on to the jar 
7. Run another bead of glue around the edge of the lid to make sure it is sealed well (after I did this I wrapped a pipe cleaner around the glue just to kinda hide it
8. Flip jar over, back and forth, shake it up!!! Fun some fun watching what happens.

After our lamps were made I let the kids decorate the lids to hide the writing from the original use of the jar and we put each child's name on their jar with foam stickers too.  

Check out Ducky's Photo's for additional pictures of our craft/science project.

Sun Catchers

Home made sun catchers were a big hit for us today.  As there is no school this week for children in our area I have the task of keeping older one busy.  I am not use to this as most of the children in my care have always been a little younger.  Sure I have a 6 year old of my own, but still when you have two boys that age and two 8 year old girls, I was scared to death for this week.  I enjoy children, but have never had to entertain that many older ones.  So back to the wonderful world of the Internet I went and found some fun activities for them to do.

Today we made sun catchers as mentioned above, the kids wanted to go outside this morning, but lets face it..... when it is -29 Celsius out there, I knew it wouldn't last long.  It would just be to cold for them.  Even with the sun shinning away and making it look so nice out.  So instead we started talking about how the sun plays little "tricks" on us.  Just because it is bright and shiny out there doesn't mean its warm (at least not in the winter, in the middle of Saskatchewan).  Once I got the kids on the topic of the sun shinning in my dinning room through the windows, that's when I got the idea to make the sun catchers.

I have the pleasure of owning a small laminating machine (of course it was bought from Walmart!), so this was one craft that I could use it for, not just to laminate already done pictures and crafts, like have have always done with it before.

Here's what we did:

First those that were old enough, I had them cut out shapes of their choice from construction paper.  The younger ones, I did it.

We then cut the inside of their shapes out so we only had an out line of it and the centers were totally open. 
I then had them rip tissue paper into small pieces, again the colour of their choice.  

We then placed the outline of our shapes on the laminating paper and the tissue paper on the inside of the shape.

Once they were finished we put them into the laminating machine so the two plastic sheets would melt together.  Lets just say most of the children thought this was the greatest thing, watching the sheets come out the bottom of the machine, looking totally brighter and even different then they did when we first put them in.
It was great fun and kept them busy for a while, after all was done we punched holes in them and tied some ribbon around it to make a string to hang them in front of the window.


Now if you don't have a laminating machine or don't want to buy one cause you don't think you will use it enough, you could always use contact paper.  You can find it at any art or office supply store, some stores even carry it in different colors!  This paper is like tape almost, just in a sheet of 8"X11" usually, you peel the backing off of it to expose the sticky surface.  Place you outline and tissue paper on it then take another sheet and place on top of all that.  This way is shinny on both sides and nothing falls out or off.

Snow Day

Snow Day, not the kind that the children miss school because of ugly weather and are stuck inside making all parents crazy.  Today was an outside day!! YEAH, seems how its been so darn cold out or windy out that I don't like to take the kids outside often and with my little one having a small circulation problem, he gets cold really fast and it takes him along time to warm up again, we haven't made our way outside a whole lot this winter.  But today was sooooo nice, I couldn't pass on it.  I layed the little one down for a nap, turned on the baby monitor and then the rest of us headed outside to play in that white fluffy stuff (well actually it hard right now, from being packed from the wind we have had the last week!).  


I was trying to think of something fun for the kids to do outside and then it came to me, we will snow paint!  Yeppers it was something new for all of them and they though it was amazing to change the color of snow.  With a little searching around my home I was able to find 3 empty spray bottles.  I rinsed them out, filled them with water and added some food coloring. And there ya go, snow paint!

 

We also dug snow "seats" as the kids were calling them, and yes I did have to sit in them too (for you knowledge, I do not have ski pants!!).  We went tobogganing and just ran around the yard, climbed as many hills as we could find and crawled in the snow.  No I did not crawl in the snow, sitting in their seats was more then enough for me.  Once we got inside after about a good 2 hours outside, I made them some hot chocolate and they watched a little bit of TV while I got some lunch going for them.  After playing so hard outside I thought maybe they would sleep today at quiet time, but with no luck only 1 out of 4 slept.  So we decided to start coloring pictures instead.  All in all, I sure hope we continue to have this nice weather so we can keep playing outside!