Valentine's Day Crafts for kids

Pom Pom Valentine Monsters

Supplies:

• yarn
• mouthwash paper cup
• cardboard
• scissors
• googly eyes (regular ones or the ones with eyelashes)
• foam stickers or dollar tree jewel stickers
• chenille stems
• glue gun or tacky glue

Instructions: 

• Wrap your yarn around the cardboard piece (long-ways) about 150 to 200 times.  
• After you have wrapped it the desired amount of times, one one side of the cardboard tie a know around the center of the yarn.  
• Flip the cardboard over and cut through the center of the yarn.  
• Take your mouthwash cup and flip it upside down and hot glue your pom pop to the dop where you tied the knot.  
• Make another pom pom by wrapping the yard (short-ways) around the cardboard about 20 to 30 times and repeat the process for tying the knot and cutting yarn.  (this is your hair for the pom pom)
•  Hot glue the hair on the top of the cup.

Now the fun begins 

• Add your googly eyes.
• Make some pipe cleaner antennas and hot glue them to the top of the head under some yarn hair and form them the way you want them to look with your fingers.
• Add your stickers to the top of the antennas.

My little monster enjoyed taking a break from her classwork to make a cute little monster to sit on her desk for Valentines Day.  

Finger Painting Art

What you'll need:

• paint
• paper
• paint brush

Kids love to get messy!  Here they just need to either use their paintbrush to make their tree, or dip their finger in the paint and smear it to make a tree.  Now just dip the fingers into the paint and make a leaves to form a heart.  Super cute! 

Heart Fireworks

What you’ll need:

• construction paper, cardstock, or canvas
• paints
• paintbrush, foam brush
• pencil

Instructions:

• Fold a piece of paper in half and draw half a heart.  Cut it out while folded and it open up to a full heart.  You'll need different size hearts.
• Place the hearts in different sections of your paper or canvas and trace the hearts.
• Paint the hearts with a foam brush.
• Now you will start painting around the heart in layers.  Choose your 1st color and paint around the heart.  You'll need to make it look like streaks.  So just keep swishing the brush from the traced outline of the heart then go outward with your paint brush.  
• Repeat the process with different colors and keep going until you reach the end of the paper/canvas.

Pointillism

 Valentines Craft

This technique is known as a "pointillism."  
Definition:  a technique of neo-impressionist painting using tiny dots of various pure colors, which become blended in the viewer's eye. It was developed by Georges Seurat with the aim of producing a greater degree of luminosity and brilliance of color.

This style of art uses dots of colors to make a picture.  When you look at the dots side by side, it connects the colors so you can figure out what the picture is, even though the colors don't actually touch each other or blend together on paper.  

For the older kids, you can use this activity as a way to introduce the child to a specific style of art.  Here are a list of artists that used this style of technique.  https://www.ranker.com/list/famous-pointillism-artists/reference  

Here is also a great link to help your children understand the art style and some art work.  https://www.widewalls.ch/pointillism-dotted-art/

There is a lot more to this art activity than just swapping out your paint brushes for cotton swabs!

What you’ll need:

• Cotton swabs
• Paint, either on an palate or plate, or in individual cups
• Paper

Instructions:

Dab the cotton head into your paint and then onto your paper.  You can dab your paint into creative patterns or shapes on your own, use coloring book sheets (focus on coloring books for younger children with large, simple designs), or print out any number of free cotton swab painting templates by searching for “q-tip painting.” To show their creative style, just let them make up their own.  

3-D Hand Art

Super cool 3-D hand project.  This is a great one for teens.  It is sure to surprise!  It's an optical illusion and once completed if you stare at it from a distance it can play tricks on your mind.  

You will Need:

1. white paper
2. crayons, markers, chalk, or coloring pencils
3. sharpie

Directions:

1. First, they will trace their hand and arm.
2. Next, they will take a ruler and lightly draw horizontal lines about 1/2 inch straight across from the left side of the paper to the hand/arm drawn.  Repeat from the other side of the hand you drew and go to the end of the right side of the paper.  It's best to work your way from the bottom up.
3. Then you will start connecting the two lines drawn from one end to the other from inside the traced hand/arm.  You will need to curve these lines to create the 3-D look.
4. The next to last step, you will color the stripes with different colors to complete your masterpiece.
5. Finally you will take a sharpie or dark color marker and re-trace where all the pencil lines are 
6. to create your 3-D image.  And you are done!                      

 

Egypt Unit Study

Some kids learning styles are hands-on.  My daughter does better when she can see and touch it not just read words on the paper.  So I get a little creative when we do our school  We had a good time studying Egypt.  I used the Story of the World history curriculum.  It's geared towards younger Elementary, but I put unit studies with mine and made it a little more challenging.  We did lapbooks and projects with almost every lesson.  Our favorite was the mummified chicken.  Yes, I said MUMMIFIED CHICKEN (see other post for that project).  It was not as stinky as you would think or hard.  It is very time consuming because it takes 7 weeks to complete the process, but it is worth it.

Lapbooking:



 
Projects:

Ancient History Writing & Cartouche



Ancient Egyptian circlet/crown/diadem
We forgot to paint the cobra  :  ( OOOPS)  It still turned out pretty cute though.



Egyptian collar
You can make this out of poster board, cardboard or whatever you want.  I used the dollar tree foam sheets and just let her create her own design.  We punched holes in the corners to run string/yard through it so she could tie it around her neck.  



Egyptian hieroglyphics cave writing (stone tablet) 
Here we just used the salt dough recipe and added gritty sand like what you would have in a sandbox to make it have the texture and the color of the caves back then.  You can find the recipe here:  http://www.firstpalette.com/Craft_themes/People/hieroglyphic_stone/hieroglyphic_stone.html 


Egyptian amulet
This one was made out of a toilet paper roll, dollar tree modeling clay, rhinestones, and gold spray paint.  Our original plan was to make a whole outfit, but we never did get to doing the actual costume.



Egyptian Wig
Clearly this is a more than a one day job and I'm pretty sure we aren't doing ours like the picture, but we had a lot of laughs and my full of life girl enjoyed modeling it and acting silly.  To make this you cut several strips of black construction paper and wrap them around a pencil or dowel so they will curl up.  After you have curled them all use a piece of cardboard or poster board to wrap around your child's head and make a headband. Then you will glue, tape, or staple the strips to the head piece. 



Pharaoh sculpture
Although we joked this looked more like George Washington, she did a great job on it and spent some time on it.  She used a toothpick to carve out the details.  We just got the brown air dry, sculpting clay from our local Hobby Lobby.  If you google discount coupons for them online you can screen shot the coupon with the code on it and get it 40% off for a big box of clay.



We also did a project with toothpicks and marshmallows and she built it into a pyramid.  

Some of the art art projects were done to finish off the study.  Here is one that she cut up shapes to make a desert and the other one had several steps to complete the project.  (sorry about the red eyes in the picture)  The 2nd art we did was with newspaper and construction paper layered into an image.

 

When we were done with our Ancient Egypt study we took a field trip to a museum to visit the Egyptian exhibits and lucked up that they had a real mummy there.



After our trip to the museum we wanted to try Egyptian food.  This is as close as we could get in our area.  We tried mijadarah and tabbouleh.

Freezer paper stencils

So who doesn't love new clothes when we are going somewhere exciting?  For me it's cruising and Walt Disney World.  I don't like to wear the same clothes when I go to those places because I know there will be hundreds of pictures taken.  Unless you have one of those expensive DIY cut machines it's just not affordable to buy tons of new shirts for your family.  I always try to talk my husband into doing matching shirts when going to Disney and he just doesn't take the bite.  So I started making my own shirts to support my habit of not wanting to wear the same thing each time we go.

How do you keep it under $5?  You shop clearance racks when they are closing out Summer and Winter Seasons.  If you don't have enough time to plan for that then you can get t-shirts in the craft department from Walmart for less than $4.  I use the $0.50-$1 paints from Walmart as well.  Get creative too.  I use glow in the dark paints, glitter, etc.  Your biggest expense will be the freezer paper which usually runs around $8 for a big box.  But it lasts a long time because you don't need much when you do it.  Only the size of the image you will be cutting out, so no need to waste it.

Its really easy but time consuming so you will want to work on it a month or so before you leave for your vacation.

You will need the following supplies:

1. Freezer Paper
2. Paints (fabric paint works best, but I have used the $0.80 ones from Walmart and they last a while)
3. Shirt, Pants, Jacket, Cloth tennis shoes, Backpack, etc. that you want to paint
4. An image you want to paint
5. Scissors
6. Paintbrushes or foam brushes
7. Hairdryer
8. X-Acto Knife 
9. Frame matting
10. Marker
11. Tape 
12. Cardboard
13. Iron or heat press

                                                                                                                                     Instructions:

1. Print out the image you want off the internet (silhouettes work best)  
2. Tape the image on a window, place freezer paper on the shiny side down on top of the image.
3. Trace the image.  Be sure to color all of it in because you will need those wide lines to cut.
4. Use an x-acto knife and cut out all the black off the paper you traced
5. Iron the image (Shiny side down) onto your shirt like shown in the image below.
6. Place cardboard inside the shirt so the paint won't leak through.
7. Paint the image then use a hairdryer to dry the paint.
8. Peel the freezer paper off and ENJOY!

 
This next set of images were a little more time consuming because I used several paints to get the effect I wanted.  It turned out pretty awesome.  

Tinkerbell was done a different way.  See instructions above, but instead of throwing out the black pieces you cut out keep those and throw away the big piece of freezer paper.  (I always use both so I can get a two for one on painting shirts for my family).  You will have to iron down a few pieces at a time so they won't slide while you are trying to iron them down.  Then you take the paint brush and paint over the pieces and brush out.  I like to use matting frames now because in this one below because Tinkerbell had an odd shape and it wasn't even on both sides of her body it didn't form a perfect circle.  When using the matting it is best to use masking tape to tape it down so the paint won't leak under it.  

One other technique to try is after you iron on the freezer paper, instead of painting it I used clorox in a spray bottle and created this look.  You will need to place cardboard inside the shirt to make sure the clorox doesn't bleed through to the back side.  

We used this one for a Carnival Cruise Breakfast.  It was so much fun.  

Test it out on different things and textures too.  I tried them on a pair of cloth tennis shoes.  Happy Painting!