Halloween Simple Cut and Paste Paper Crafts

Hello there! I'm thrilled to announce our new series called "Holiday Cut & Paste Paper Crafts" in our shop! This is a simple and easy-to-prepare craft that only requires basic crafting materials. It's perfect for teachers, homeschoolers, and working parents who want to do crafty things with their kids with less prep and mess!

This bundle includes 8 holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, 4th of July, and Back to School.

Today, I'm featuring the Halloween set that I'm sure you and your kids will love! This set includes 8 templates that make a great project for preschool and kindergarten kids. It's a simple cut-and-paste paper craft that's fun and easy for young children.

Arctic Diorama

Last week, the boys and I made an arctic diorama.  I asked the boys to help me assemble a small diorama that we can place on the table for exploration and subject of discussion in the course of our polar region studies.

Christmas Themed Tray Activities for Preschoolers

Happy first day of December!!!  I’ve been away for awhile, busy with life and other extra curricular things… because you know, “it’s that time of the year”.  Anyway, despite of  all the happenings, I was able to assemble these simple Christmas-themed activities for my 4 years old.  My aim here is to simply introduce the meaning of Christmas, the symbols, learning Christmas songs and a little bit of  arts and crafts.  Hope you like these activities!

How the Stem Works by Dyeing Flowers

I am so happy to share that we finally get to dye our flowers successfully! Meaning, ALL of the colors were visible unlike before wherein only a few of the colors took effect (red and yellow).    I’ve been wondering on how we can successfully color our flowers, with 100% coverage and we finally did it this time!  By the way, we worked on this activity because I was demonstrating to Vito the function of the stem in a plant. 

Sparkly Planets for your Solar System

We’ve done this before (in 2013) and we made another one again! Creating our planets for our solar system using aluminium foil. Have done this before?  I mentioned the source of this activity in my previous post, read it here.

The Elements of Art: Learning about Lines

It is timely that I get to share how we nurture the artistic side of the kids using Montessori principles.  In this month’s 12 Months More of Montessori Learning, I’m sharing Vito’s current obsession:  drawing!  If you’ve been following me on Instagram, I shared how Vito enjoys making faces of us (Dad, Mom and Mavi).  He just uses lines and dots, a little bit of shading to convey the emotions and faces of his family.  So Mavi suggested if we could teach him how to make different kinds of lines, just like we did before.

Playdough Monster Faces

I managed to create a pitch black playdough and the boys had so much fun making “scary” monster faces with it! 

Cork Stamping Art: Trees in Autumn

Vito is 34 months old.

My youngest is not really the artistic type. But even though he’s not into painting crafty things, I make sure that these art materials are always available just in case they feel like doing some artistic pursuits. So imagine my delight when he decided to join me with this autumn trees painting activity.

Shapes Resist Painting

Vito is 29 months old.

Here’s another interesting way you can get your kids to learn about shapes. I was telling Vito we’ll do magic, and look for shapes in the black paper.  He was fascinated of what he will discover after covering the cardstock with paint!

Learning through Arts & Crafts

We love making crafts at home! Aside from bringing out the artistic side of the kids, it’s also a great opportunity to practise fine motor skills.  So this week, I’m featuring five amazing arts and crafts activities from our beloved bloggers!
 

Bird Theme: Owl Babies Craft

For the Bird Theme, we are reading Owl Babies and The Story About Ping books.  Vito enjoys reading them with me but he loves Owl Babies more. So in line with it, we made some cotton owls at home to extend our learning about owls and the textures of birds.

Bird Theme: Spaghetti Bird’s Nest

The boys are still giddy of doing this themed-activities weekly, and yes even Mavi loves it as he gets to join us from time to time.

We're seeing A LOT of nests in the neighborhood because the trees are still bare, so this has got me thinking of making a bird's nest at home.  I told the boys all about it, and they were so excited! There are so many versions of this if you searched in the web: the yarn, shredded newspaper… but I wanted to try the spaghetti as I have some that are about to expire.  (this idea was inspired by Let’s Tot School)

Painting the Moon

Vito is 28 months old.

We have an amazing full moon during Holy Week so I encouraged the boys to the paint the moon.  I can’t believe that it turned out so beautiful and realistic!  The craters are naturally formed and the color combination of paints were fantastic.  The best part about this is that it’s so simple to make!

The Rainbow Clouds Craft

I saw this beautiful rainbow craft a few weeks ago in Pinterest and I totally forgot the main site, so please if you own this craft leave a message and I’ll include the credits. 

I’ve been introducing Vito to the spring season using our Spring Season Picture Cards, books and outdoor activities.  Today, I’m sharing the rainbow clouds the boys made last week.  The weather was terrible at that time  and we couldn’t explore our yard so I made use of their free time doing crafts at home.  So I tried to scan through Pinterest in search of simple crafts that BOTH of my kids could work on, and this is one of them!

Crafts projects allow children to exercise their fine motor skills, improve manual dexterity and understanding of visual-spatial relationships.  They provide opportunities to use their imagination as well.  Just be vigilant when using small items and sharp objects like scissors.

Spring Arts & Crafts and {Learn & Play Link Up}

There’s so many wonderful posts I’d like to feature this week in our Link & Play Link Up!  I love seeing all these beautiful artworks and crafts which are so colorful and spirited! Here are my picks!

Chinese Lantern Project for Kids

We had a lot of fun today making our Chinese lantern in celebrating Chinese New Year.  Mavi and I did this years ago, and I think he would love to do this again, and of course for Vito to experience.

Best Arts & Crafts for Kids and {Learn & Play Link Up}

Years ago, Mavi would do a lot of artist study.  One of my favorites is our Van Gogh project, The Sunflower.  It was one of those rare moment wherein both Mavi and I were in depth with our subject and were absorbed by the beauty of painting.  But it was just more than artwork. We studied the life of Van Gogh, and how his life reflected in his work.  (click the image below for more details)

Now thinking about it, I picked the best art projects and crafts in our link up this week.  Here are the featured post:

Playing with Colors and {Learn & Play Link Up #3}

Don’t you just love spring? The colors of the flowers brighten up my day.  The beauty of the cherry blossoms never ceases to give me a smile.  Reason why, in this week’s link up, I will talk about the things colors and the things that you can do with it, to see a mood.

Check out some of these fun activities from our previous link up that features the use of colors!

Featured posts for Playing with Colors this week:

Flower Water Tube Stamping by Montessori on Mars.  Wonderful activity for creating beautiful materials through color mixing using stamps!

Montessori-Inspired Color Activities for Toddlers from Living Montessori Now. A great way to introduce young children to colors.

Learning About Seasons from Planting Peas.  You will see how they use color variations to set the seasons.  Amazing!

Under the Sea Preschool Activities from Natural Beach Living.  I love the use of blue water beads to setup an ocean senosrial tub! The use of colors can definitely simulate a habitat!

Art Appreciation Activities from Every Start is Different. A compilation of art activities for kids!

This week on The Pinay Homeschooler, we create warm and cool colours! Mavi mentioned something like “It’s making summer and winter Mom.”

We are doing a lot of artworks at home.  Just the other day, we were looking at the masterpieces of famous artists like Monet and Van Gogh.  We talked about the techniques the artists used and how they set the mood of their paintings.  In particular, we talked about the colours they used during the daytime and night time.  In effect, we ended up talking about warm and cool colours which eventually brought us to this activity.

So Mavi and I practiced mixing paints to create our own warm and cool colours.  He was even more excited that we get to name our own colours!

Warm colours are colours of fire and sun, yellow and colour tones of red and orange.  Can you see the  names of his colours?  Yellow Golden Sun of Heavens and Lobster Bloody Red!

Cool colours are those of water, violet and colour tones of blue and green.  Love how he created his names:  Gods Light and Coral Sea Blue.

This is a simple activity that you can do with your kids anytime of the day! Less preparation but with much to learn.  Now with this knowledge, we can create paintings with proper mood settings! 

By the way, about the coloured tempera paints we are using. The brand is Gouache Liquide Tempera Paints. I am very particular with the paints we use at home because Mavi has asthma.  This brand has negligible smell and I love how strong and vivid the colours are.

So start making you colours now and have fun naming them!

Pin this for later! 

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.

If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

• Montessori Education
• Homeschool
• Sensory Play
• Tot and Preschool Trays
• Fine and Gross Motor Activities
• Kids in the Kitchen
• Healthy Recipes for Kids
• Arts and Crafts
• Natural Living
• Free Educational Printables
• Family-Oriented Activities
• Healthy Living

Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest

Vanessa from Mama’s Happy Hive~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jennifer from Study at Home Mama~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Marie from Child Led Life~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jae from Pinay Homeschooler~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Heather from Golden Reflections Blog~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Renae from Every Star is Different~FB~Pinterest

GUIDELINES FOR LINKING
Please link up 1-3 posts
Follow each of the hosts on social media
When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.
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Ancient Egypt Study: How to Make a Papyrus

Oh this one is an exciting activity for Mavi!  He could not believe that he actually made paper!  Presenting to you how we made Papyrus out of our parchment paper.  This is in line with our Ancient Egypt Study (The Study of Ancient Egypt).

Materials needed:

• Glue mixture. (mix 1 cup of flour with 2 cups of water)
• strips of parchment paper.  You can use anything you like here, but I decided to use parchment paper to make it more realistic
• Aluminium foil
• kitchen towel
• rolling pin

This was our setup. I covered the area where we’re going to work so it won’t stick in the wooden table.

Colorwheel Flowers

I came across this project at Deep Sparkle and decided to try this with Mavi.  I love how simple the project is and it uses basic colour combinations.  Since the project involves the colorwheel, Mavi and I revisited our basic art lessons about colours a few years ago. We talked about the primary and the secondary colours and how the are organised in a wheel type figure so we can easily remember the colour combinations.

                      

Read about colour theory I and colour theory II.

Mavi worked on the red, orange, green and yellow combinations, while I painted a blue-violet flower combination.  And here’s how they looked like after we added  black and white paint details.

The flowers turned out really good and the colours were vibrant! You can see these hanging in Mavi’s room as of the moment.

For the details of the projects, click this link from Deep Sparkle.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!
Share It Saturday
The Natural Homeschool