Crafting Time

Ever since Rilyn was born I've been excited to do arts and crafts with her.  I have visions of the most amazing shelf filled with globs and globs of crafting materials for my kids to use at their disposal and walls covered in their creations.

Let's just say I've been crafting with other kids since...well forever...from my mom's daycare kids, to all the kids I was a nanny for, and of course my students. So, it just seems natural that I would start crafting with my daughter the minute she was born.  Don't think I haven't looked up crafts to complete with newborns.

But, one thing I've learned is that if a kid isn't ready you will just fight them the entire time and I know my daughter well enough to know up until now she was definitely not ready.  She doesn't like structured activities, just recently stopped putting everything in her mouth, and she has the shortest attention span on the planet.  And trust me I've seen some short attention spans!

The last month, I've noticed a huge decrease in the amount of stuff she immediately sticks in her mouth, she has been using more materials appropriately like crayons and stickers, and has started sitting for structured activities for about 5 minutes so I thought I would give some crafting a shot.

I found a fairly simple project on pinterest where they decorated a butterfly on contact paper with ribbons.  I really liked the idea of using the contact paper because this eliminates a step of gluing.  Another good thing to remember while creating with kids is that they should be able to do a majority of the project themselves.  If not, you end up hanging your own artwork on the fridge.  That might seem like common sense but trust me I've seen plenty of adults doing the project while the kids sit and watch because it was too hard.

So, we decided to do a sun and I added an extra step with adding the rays, which did take glue but only for a small portion of the project.

I prepared all the materials ahead of time so we were ready to go when she was ready.

Step 1: I put a small dot of glue on the sun and Rilyn placed the rays on each dot.  She actually did very well with this and it was the perfect amount because she was getting bored by the last two rays.

Step 2: I put the sun on the contact paper and let Rilyn place ribbons all over.

Step 3: Rilyn told me she was all done(even though there was more ribbons left), and we admired our finished project.

I think this project lasted about 15 minutes, but I didn't time it so I'm not sure.  She put nothing in her mouth and we had no meltdowns so it was a success for us.

I'm excited for the contact paper projects because it is so much easier than using glue with kids her age!

I can't wait to craft some more!!