Yesterday I had the sewing machine out, and my son was drawing. I asked him if he wanted to draw on some of my fabric and we decided to make a stuffy. To nobody's surprise he eventually made a truck and he loves it (secretly, to us, it does look quite a bit like a creature, but that tail is a ramp and those legs are wheels). In a perfect world, we would have had fabric markers around, but our home is quite far from perfect and we used a pencil & felt pen instead. This is how we made it.
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South Pointe Academy
Recently we did another “Windy” school visit to South Pointe Academy in Tsawwassen. After reading Snowy & Chinook, two kindergarden classes wrote and illustrated their own Windy-inspired story about a trip to the Animal History Museum. Here are some of the amazing animals they made for their story. Can you see which is the elephant, bunny, fish, penguin, leopard and dinosaur?
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easter origami baskets
I don't like buying a lot of plastic Easter materials which only live in the house a few days. Here is an upcycled basket which is fun to make — made with newspaper, strips of coloured paper and washi tape. Oh, we did break down and buy some commercial stickers ^_^
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coffee filter sky
We visited the planetarium this weekend and this was a fantastic after-activity: make a universe with the paper from a coffee filter + felt pens. Wetting the paper with water gives a great watercolour effect. After we'd completed the solar system, we moved onto rainbows and clouds. It's a great idea, thanks to DTLK Kids for the idea, which you can see here.
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snake puppets
Update: we made these printable paper snake puppets — it's a good template. Here is our snake exploring the wall of a garage... Mr. printable has some great templates for snake finger puppets, both coloured and not coloured (so you can design your own pattern).
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doll apron pattern
Snowy & Chinook sometimes make clothes for themselves, and since they do a lot of cooking, simple aprons are something they make a lot. These also make great mechanics aprons.
They're easy to make, and you can leave out the pockets if you like. Small children who would like to work with this pattern can use fabric or felt and glue and omit the sewing. This is one of those projects where stitching by hand is quite a bit quicker than machine.
The sizing is for a mid-size stuffy. Here is a PDF link for you to print.
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