Halloween Coloring and Activity Books

The girls LOVE the Halloween coloring/activity books that I made for them last week!
(the zipper pouch is covering their names)

I printed the coloring pages from Activity Village and DLTK. I LOVE Activity Village!


E(2) has really loved coloring in her book!


Here are a few of the pages...





These books have caused so much excitement since they came in the "mail" that I'm already planning a Christmas version.

Our Crafty Halloween Centerpiece

I set up this crafty Halloween centerpiece for the girls last week, and they went straight to work as soon as they saw it! They received the Halloween puppets craft foam pumpkins in their October Fun Box.

Decorating the craft foam pumpkins and then gluing them to construction paper has been their favorite activity so far. I love setting up seasonal/holiday craft areas like this. Such fun!

Bubble Prints

The girls LOVED making bubble art prints as an art activity during "B" week. Thanks for everyone who emailed with suggestions on how to do this!

I poured about 2 tsp of Dawn into a bowl and added a little water. The girls each chose one color of food coloring and squeezed the color into their bowls. I gave each of them a straw with a slit cut in it...it's VERY important to cut a small slit in the straw, so that they don't accidentally suck up the soapy solution! They stirred the mixture with the straw and then blew to make a bowl full of bubbles.




Once the bubbles were over the rim of the bowl, we placed a piece of white cardstock on top of them to make a bubble print. O experimented with holding the paper on top of her bowl while blowing the bubbles, and this worked well.


Here is their finished artwork.



This one is embellished with a few stickers :)

Rainbow Rice for Our Rice Pit

The girls and I dyed our rice in rainbow colors for our rice pit on Saturday! This was so easy to do that I don't know why I didn't do it years ago (seriously, this has been on my to-do list for at least 3 years!).

First, I put 3 cups of white rice in each ziploc bag.

Then, the girls took turns choosing a color of food coloring and then squeezing the coloring into the bag of rice. We added 4 tsp of rubbing alcohol, sealed the bag, and they squished and squeezed and shook the bags until the rice was completely covered in color!

Here are our bags of beautiful rice!



I poured the rice from each bag out onto packing paper to dry. We let it dry for about 5 hours before pouring it into the rice pit.

Here it is right after I poured it into the rice pit...it looks so pretty!


It didn't take long for my little monkeys to mix it together completely! They LOVE the rainbow rice!

Painting with Balloons

Since last week and this week are "B" weeks, we are doing lots of activities that start with the letter "B." Last week, the girls had lots of fun painting with balloons!

I blew up several balloons (and saw stars...they were NOT easy to blow up) for each girl, and put paint in several flat containers. (I usually cut the tops off of take-out containers to use as paint trays, and they worked perfectly for this activity).

O(5) really enjoyed seeing the prints that she could make with her balloon. While E(5) preferred to paint with a mostly deflated balloon.




E discovered the joy of having blue hands!

Luckily, the paint was washable!


Here's one of their creations.


Our next "B" art activity was "painting" with bubbles...I put watercolor paint in 3 small bottles of bubbles. Then I blew bubbles while the girls ran around with pieces of white cardstock to catch the bubbles. The theory was that when the bubbles popped, they would make a pretty and colorful print...wrong. The girls had fun catching the bubbles for about a minute, and the bubbles didn't leave behind any prints...just a couple of barely visible drops. Oh, well. They loved the idea of it, and it was a valuable lesson that things don't always turn out how we plan and that's ok.