activities – Page 2

Craft Spotlight: Color Reveal Birds

Get ready for an amazing feature post on our beautiful Color Reveal Birds! I have so many photos to share with you from this wonderful day. See our campers’ artwork and some step-by-step assembly of the birds.

The Color Reveal Birds feature a kit of 24 sheets. Each sheet has two parts: The main bird body, and its wings.

The best part is that at first, the Color Reveal Birds don’t look like much. Once you add markers, however, watch for emerging patterns!

Combine colors together! Color the bird’s head blue and its body red, then switch for another color–such as blue–for its wings!

Make sure you use thick markers that can cover a lot of surface area. The best effect is achieved when the entire bird is colored in.

We got many different kinds of designs!

When you are finished coloring, pop out the bird from the backing. The pieces are already scored to make it easy for you to remove them from the sheet.

Fold the bird’s body in half down along the middle.

There are two slots in the top of the bird’s body. These slots allow you to easily slip the bird’s wings onto the top.

In addition, there are two notches in the back that help secure the bird’s wings at the back. This will also help fan out the bird’s wings.

The top of the bird’s body features a hole punch that can be used to thread string through.

Knot the ends of the thread together.

Ready to hang!

Our art campers had so much fun with finding places to put the birds. But the best of all was getting to attach the birds to the spokes of cute kid-sized umbrellas.

A flock of birds are approaching!

Here’s another great shot of our campers with the bird umbrella!

They just loved posing with it!

Hang the birds from a classroom mobile or use to decorate a window!

Great job, campers!

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Posted on June 16, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

Craft Spotlight: Retro Pop Paper

Add beautiful effects to your cut and paste projects! R15303 Retro Pop Paper provides you with a variety of bright colors and eye-catching designs. For this project, our Art Campers decorated painted wave paper with fish cutouts using the Retro Pop Paper. See more below!

First, we supplied our campers with a few fish templates that they could apply to the paper, trace out and cut. We showed them how to fold the paper, and then place the templates, folded, onto the fold line of the Retro Pop Paper.

Once the campers had traced the shape onto the paper, they cut it out.

With the paper unfolded, a fish shape appeared! We tried a variety of different fish shapes. You can see the shapes in the top right.

The backdrop was a sheet of brown craft paper that we had in rolls in our art room. We spread out the sheets and cut them at about 3-4 foot widths, then painted them with blue wavy lines.

Our campers applied a bit of glue to the backs of the fish shapes and pasted them into various positions on the craft paper.

The campers had a lot of space to work with!

All done! Check out all those gorgeous fish designs!

Here’s what another group did. Great work, campers!

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Posted on June 9, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

Mosaic Play!

Our R15639 Spectrum Mosaics were featured in a project at a local daycare! Here’s a few photos of the projects these crafters put together!

R15639 Spectrum Mosaics come in a variety of different colors and are double-sided, so kids will get surprised at the color they see on the opposite side.

These mosaics were used to decorate the bug cutouts with a bit of glue. The colors are bright enough that kids can separate them or sort them into groups.

R15639

The aim of this project was to paste the mosaics on the bugs in order to decorate them, but you can take it a step further by focusing on covering parts of the cutout with a certain color. This gives it a uniform mosaic look.

The Spectrum Mosaics package comes with beautiful practice artwork on which children can paste the mosaics. This will help them build puzzle-solving skills while exercising fine motor skills!

Thanks to Janice for sending us these photos!

Posted on June 6, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

Craft Spotlight: Yoga Cards

Get outside and STRETCH! R62011 Yoga Cards feature printed images of recognizable things, such as a hot air balloon or a tree and an accompanying yoga position. Our Art Campers exercised with a ton of different poses. Check out more below!

Full instructions for Yoga Cards can be found here. Access breathing tips, detailed descriptions about each pose and more! There are 3 challenge levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Difficult. Each are color coded by a border surrounding each card: Green – Easy, Yellow – Intermediate, and Red – Challenging.

The back of each card shows detailed illustrations on how each pose is performed. For instance, the picture above shows our campers performing the “Wooden Bridge” pose.

This pose requires that you straighten your arms outwards from your body and spread your feet apart. Carefully inhale as you lean on one knee and hold for several seconds. Exhale as you straighten your knee out. Repeat for the opposite leg.

A bit too easy? Okay! Let’s try something new!

Now let’s try the “Swaying Sunflower” pose. This one requires you to raise one arm up and over your head to the other side, inhaling as you do so. Stretch your body in the direction that your hand is pointing. Exhale as you lower your arm. Repeat for the other arm.

Yoga Cards not only visually stimulate your students, but help them connect an action to a recognizable object. This helps generate image association and engages various muscles in the body.

You can add your own twist to each action by introducing song or rhythm, like a dance session! Otherwise, get students to focus on their breathing and learning new vocabulary words such as inhale (to breathe in) or exhale (to breathe out).

This one’s pretty challenging! See if you can do it right now. If not, why not get a set of Yoga Cards and start with the Easy Difficulty to loosen up those muscles!

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Posted on June 2, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

Craft Spotlight: Brilliant Beads

Following our series of posts about our beading wonders, including the Fancy Stringing Rings last week, today I’m going to showcase a bit about our Brilliant Beads!

R2170 Brilliant Beads come in a bright assortment of colors and shapes. Besides basic small round beads, there are some that resemble flowers while others look like geometric shapes. You can talk about each of the shapes to your students as they sift through them.

You can also sort by color. Pick out similar colors and observe the different shapes that make up that color group. Get students to describe the beads with practice vocabulary.

At the Art Camp last year, our campers designed their own super-long necklaces and brilliant bracelets. To prevent groups of beads sticking together, we got the campers to use pipe cleaner as the thread for all the beads.

Here’s another shot of some lovely jewelry!

Use Brilliant Beads in a variety of projects, not just for jewelry! Check out the video below that shows you how to make your very own bead-paintbrush. This “paintbrush” will add a provide your students with a new technique for painting!

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Posted on May 26, 2014June 16, 2020 by Raman

Caution! Twins at Play Introduces our Colorful Educational Light Cube!

For several years, the Caution! Twins at Play blog has garnered huge following for their experimental light table play. With the release of our newest Educational Light Cube, Kristen and her twins couldn’t wait to try it out for themselves! See what their preview post featured at the link here!!

This post was made on the Caution! Twins at Play blog which can be reached here. This blog is a huge educational resource for newcomers to light table play as well as a source of ideas for light table play veterans.

The benefits of light table play are varied and vast:

• Develop fine motor skills.

• Explore sensory play.

• Integrate special needs learning.

• Count, sort, describe, experiment, combine and mix materials together to create gorgeous light effects.

• Engage children with learning disabilities.

• Versatile usage.

• …and so much more!

Kristen shares more of her experiences with the Light Cube here and will be updating her blog with more upcoming Light Cube activities.

Here’s a quote from the blog post:

Not only is it compact and portable but has a surprising amount of surface to play on. What’s great about the light cube is that you can play on the sides of it too! You can drape play silks over the side, or whatever else you can come up with.

The possibilities are endless for learning and play. The fact that you can move it around or take it with you somewhere makes it a really great item for any teacher, homeschooler, or any parent!

We can’t wait to see what’s in store!! We will even be featuring Caution! Twins at Play as a future guest poster so stay tuned for more light-play filled posts!

The new Educational Light Cube will be a feature of our special upcoming series on Light Table play. Check back in September for a new blog post day every Thursday on Light Table Play!

Thanks to Kristen from Caution! Twins at Play for her wonderful post!

Original photography and text © Caution! Twins at Play

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Posted on May 22, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

Craft Spotlight: Fancy Stringing Rings

Make your jewelry fancy with Fancy Stringing Rings! Beautiful, bright colors and recognizable designs make these beads a joy to work with. String, sort, play and mix colors together on a light table!

Beading is a prime fine motor skill activity that’s always a favorite for arts and crafts sessions! The best part about our Stringing Rings is that they are large enough to fit through any size string–even pipe cleaners.

There are a range of different activities you can do with the Fancy Stringing Rings. Stay tuned for this week’s original craft post featuring our Stringing Rings!

In the meantime, enjoy the video below showing how to make simple bracelets using Fancy Stringing Rings and tape! That’s all you need.

Simply lay your beads onto a strip of tape and seal up! It’s that easy!

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Posted on May 21, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

The Differentiated Kindergarten blog uses our Manuscript Letter Beads!

Students will love being able to see their numbers and letters up close! These sturdy, colorful beads can be strung on thread or sorted into trays just like the photo above. Use the beads to teach number and letter recognition using visual and tactile approaches. Like blogger Marsha states, the beads aren’t simply beads, because “the bead IS the letter”!

Blogger Marsha published her post on July 12, 2013. The post is entitled, “Beads Glorious Beads!!!” Check out the full blog post here!

As the post shows, the Manuscript Letter beads come in two formats: Lowercase and Uppercase.

To order our products, visit our website here or click on the following links to locate our products:

• Manuscript Letters (Uppercase)

• Manuscript Letters (Lowercase)

• Number Beads

The Manuscript Letters can be used for a variety of projects or in educational lesson plans. Great for introducing letter and number recognition, the Manuscript Letters and Math Beads come in a variety of bright and fun colors that students will love to work with.

String up the letters to make bracelets or necklaces! Tie a knot in between each new threaded letter to keep them from bunching up, or use pony beads to separate the letters when spelling multiple words.

Use the letters for Bingo games! Play a variation of Bingo called Lingo (Letter + Bingo)! Draw a 4 x 4 square grid and write a random selection of letters on it. Distribute the graph cards among students and provide a handful of letters for the students to use. When a random letter is called out, students must search through their letter supply to find the correct letter. The first person to call out Bingo must have a row of 4 letters with corresponding letter beads!

One of Marsha’s activities involved separating a handful of letter beads into consonants and vowels or lowercase from uppercase. To really increase students’ letter comprehension, you can ask them to make words from the jumbled uppercase or lowercase letters!

Marsha even designed a lovely little cubby area to store all the letters inside. You can customize the storage area to hold letters as well as numbers or to differentiate between upper and lowercase letters.

Thanks to Marsha for this insightful post!

This post was not sponsored for a review. At LittleFingersBigArt, our mission is to present to our readers and viewers the newest and most creative craft ideas that fans of Roylco have made on their own. Our goal is to allow you and other educators and parents to reuse our products in fun ways so that children always get the best educational experience from them!

We’d love to see more ideas like this one! If you’ve got a brilliant craft idea or have made a version of one of our crafts that you would like to share with us, send an email to us with photos, descriptions or a link to your work. We will create a feature post and link back to you with full credit. Contact us through the contact form for more details. We’d love to hear from you!

Posted on April 25, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman

Craft Spotlight: Fingerpaint Flower

Big, bold and bright, Fingerpaint Flowers are the perfect art activity to paint out in the spring air! The best part about fingerpainting outside is that it adds another dimension of sensory development: not only are students using fingerpaints to stimulate finger movement, but the warmth of the sunlight will warm up the paint and the fingerpainting paper!

You don’t have to get the students to paint the entire flower. It can serve as a group activity! For younger students, paint sections of the flower petals. Some students may get a bit overwhelmed by the size of the fingerpainting canvas. Focus each student on painting one small space at a time, like one petal out of the whole flower. This will help students to narrow down their fingerpainting.

R75422

The R75422 Big! Huge! Fingerpaint Flowers can be painted then used as classroom decorations. Make a giant fingerpaint flower garden!

Once the paint on the Fingerpaint Flower is dry, paste other materials such as yarn, scrap paper, sequins, glitter glue and more to decorate! Add fun designs or patterns to the flower petals with markers or crayons.

To view more ideas in the instructional guide, click here!

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Posted on April 15, 2014February 12, 2020 by Raman