Kids Co-op - Valentine craft

 
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Its time for Kids Co-op, please link up your favourite kids posts and check out what others have been up to this week, plenty to inspire you. This week I'm linking the following:

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(Goblin is 39 months)

Goblin and I made some Valentine hearts for Nanny and Granny. These are super easy to make and look great. 

I cut two hearts out of cardboard. Around the edge I cut little Vs. Then I sprayed them gold. 

I cut some Christmas parcel ribbon into foot long lengths and taped one to the back of a heart. Goblin then wound the ribbon around the heart until it ran out and I taped the end down. The idea was to do this a few times but unfortunately Goblin decided it was more fun to see how much ribbon he could stuff into his mouth. So once I'd retrieved it and wiped the dribble off I finished them.

And now to the linky

I'm sharing this with

Valentine lantern bag

(Goblin is 28 months)

This week I decided to take up challenges on two separate blogs and combine them in one activity.

Tinkerlab have a challenge to make something creative with a paper bag, and Living Montessori Now have a  Valentine blog hop. Now I have to confess that I will probably be disqualified from the Tinkerlab challenge because one of the rules is that the craft activity should be child directed. While I did leave Goblin to have a lot of fun and freedom while making this creation it was definitely mummy directed.  I had an idea of what I wanted to end up with and I suspect if I had let the activity be completely child directed we would have had a paper bag full of cars.

I got a gift voucher for Monsoon from my old work team when I left last month. I spent it on a lovely dress for work. As a result I also acquired some pretty pink and red tissue paper and a Monsoon paper bag. Ideal for a valentine activity. 

Goblin is quite into cutting with his new craft scissors (suppose to be my new craft scissors!) so I cut the tissue paper into strips and let him attempt to cut the strips into squares. He enjoyed the activity but wasn't very good at cutting - he closes the scissors but then pulls them and rips the paper rather than opening them to cut it. If the scissors were sharper that technique would work but rather than give him sharper scissors I think I'll just keep working on getting him to close and then open the scissors. 

For what I was planning it didn't matter that most of the tissue paper was ripped rather than cut. I laid some sticky back plastic on the floor and got Goblin to stick the tissue paper to the plastic. 

He really enjoyed this. Especially when I showed him that he could do it by dropping it from a height and letting it rain down onto the plastic. 

 Its just as well we had a lot of tissue paper squares because quite a lot did not end up on the plastic!

 But he had fun putting the tissue paper into a play silk, and later into his lorry. 

 In the mean time I cut a heart shaped hole in the Monsoon paper bag and stuck the sticky back plastic to the inside of the hole. No glue required, you just use the sticky edges of the sticky back plastic. 

This is what it looked like.

Pretty cool I thought. But that wasn't the end of our little project. Next I suspended a light from the handle (I used a reading light because it was lighter, but a torch would be fine.)

The finished lantern can be hung by the bag handles from the front door on Valentines day. Or you could make a load of smaller ones with tee-lights inside them and line the garden path.

Here is what it looks like with the torch hung inside the bag.

I'm linking this to the two blogs mentioned above and

Valentine salt dough hearts

(Goblin is 27 months)

I'm usually a bit 'bah humbug' about Valentine's day because its so overly commercial. I love my friends and family 365 days of the year and try and tell them regularly, so a special day seems a bit daft to me.   However having a toddler makes you review your interpretation of things and this year instead of cynically dismissing it as an opportunity for Hallmark to make a killing, I have viewed it as an opportunity for Goblin to do some craft activities and share something special with his friends. So today we set about making little heart keepsakes for him to give to his friends and family.
We used our usual salt dough mix

1 cup salt

1 cup flour

1/2 cup water

When I say cup, thats not the american measurement, that just means what ever cup you are using, its the same ratios. We used a tumbler from the cupboard which held about half a pint. All the mixture goes in the bowl together at the same time and you mix it together with your hands adding a bit more water if needed.

 Instead of adding more water we added some ready mix pink and red paint. This is what it looked like when we'd mixed it all together. 

 Goblin rolled it out. His hands are not covered in paint from the dough - he decided to do a bit of impromptue finger painting while I was getting the dough to the right consistency. Goblin cut the hearts with his heart shaped cutter (I had to help get the cutter right the way through the dough). Then he used the spatula to lift them into a tray - this was his favourite bit.

We made a hole in each heart with a kebab skewer so that we could thread a ribbon through later to hang them up. Goblin also made some extra holes in some of the hearts - for effect. And we used his zigzag roller on one of the hearts which gave it a really cool texture. We put the hearts in the oven at 120 degrees C (250 F or gas mark 1/2) for three hours.

 I was impressed that when they'd dried out the colour was pretty much intact. Goblin added glue and glitter (I helped with the glue because left to his own devices Goblin would have drowned them in glue). I had intended to just give Goblin red glitter to use but he decided he wanted to also add blue and purple. He specifically asked for the blue glitter so who was I to stand in the way of his art.

Once the glue had dried (ish) I wrote on them and tied the strings on. We will give them out on Valentine's day. Until then they can hang on Goblin's 'seasons tree' which is strung above his art table.

I'm linking this to