I'm happy to have an opportunity to "blend" my two favorite subjects — children's crafts and quilling — in one post. Today I'm giving some tips for kids' quilling, based on my personal experience.
But before you read on, you may want to check out the basic quilling instructions.
Doing quilling helps in developing fine motor skills, creativity, patience, and diligence. But most importantly, it's just another way to have fun with your kids! So, here are my observations and recommendations.
Isn't this an excellent way to learn! Kids have fun making letters and numbers and then... eating them.
The Soma cube is a 3D puzzle that consists of 7 pieces of different shapes. These pieces must be assembled into a 3x3x3 cube. There are 240 distinct ways to solve the puzzle. I made a home-made Soma cube puzzle out of small, about 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 cm (9/16 x 9/16 x 9/16 inches) colored wooden cubes, like those you can buy at arts and crafts shops. I didn't have to buy them, since we have been using such cubes for a long time — the kids like playing with them. Only 27 cubes in total are needed. I just glued them together with a wood glue, and here we go: now my children can enjoy this amazing puzzle, they solve it or build various 3D shapes out of its pieces: castles, animals, etc.
Some interesting resources about the Soma cube: Soma cube in Wikipedia, Soma cubes, and a lot of stuff on the Soma cube.
Recently my son got interested in astronomy :) Even though he's only almost four, he enjoys watching documentary movies on astronomy, knows the names of all the planets, what a solar eclipse is and much more... That's why we came up with the idea of making a toy telescope. Here's how you can do this:
Recently, I stumbled upon this great DIY game for teaching letters and reading. For our game I used images from an old magazine instead of photos of family members.
Besides an old magazine you will need some cardboard and bottle cups to make this game. Cut a rectangular cardboard card, glue a picture onto it and draw circles with the diameter of the bottle caps next to the picture (you can just trace the caps). Inside the circles write the name of the item shown in the picture. The same letters are also written on the bottle caps — now have your child pick the right caps and make up the word. I cut the cards out of cereals boxes. Letters that correspond to vowels are written on white caps, and those corresponding to consonants — on blue ones. For children who are already familiar with letters and starting to read, the circles on the cards can be left blank, and the word written underneath the image.
Without doubt the oak is one of the most fascinating and interesting trees. Among other activities we like watching an oak that grows nearby, at different stages of its life cycle. It has different parts and looks different when seasons change. There also different creatures living in it.
If you don't know about the Art Projects for Kids blog, go and visit it now. It's a must! Just look at these cat heads my daughter draw following the instruction in the Laurel Burch Cat Heads post.
Cutting out symmetrical silhouettes looks to me like a magic. You fold a piece of paper, cut something that looks like nothing, open it and...
We had lots of fun making this t-shirt! I found this on the "Ten kids and a Dog" blog, and they reference "Steve Spangler Science", both the blog and the site are really wonderful.
This time I'd like to share the guidelines I use to make practice pages. This one if for learning Hebrew alphabet, but the main rules apply to anything of this kind. You can buy printed ones, but home-made are more fun, because kids can participate in making them.
We made this pizza using some beige paper, paint and fresh vegetables. The idea of vegetable stamps has been taken from the "Nature Printing
One look is worth a thousand words. After numerous attempts to explain to my child what is a water well and how it works, the idea to make its working model popped into my head. I must say this is an original craft I'm very proud of :)