she's crafty

So lately, I've been a bizarre combination of Mr. Rogers and Martha Stewart. I feel like we're spending all of our free time doing crafts or baking. Take an early "nesting phase" and combine it with cool weather and grey skies, and BOOM! That explains it.

Yesterday, we baked cranberry orange bread. It has been one of my faves since I was little, and my mom always made it at Christmas time. But since I'm the mom now, I get to decide when we bake it, and since I was craving a bit of tangy goodness, voila... a bread was born. I don't have any pics since it's hard to monitor a busy toddler, measure ingredients, and play Annie Liebovitz all at the same time. But Emerson was the best listener that she's ever been while baking. She stayed interested the whole time, and was pretty good about keeping her fingers out of the bowl. She did manage to stick her hand into the box of baking power for a taste before I could stop her, but I think she learned a valuable lesson there ;)

Now, onto the crafts. Today, we made a mosaic stoplight. When we're out and about, I've showed her the stoplights and talked about what the different colors mean. She even pushed her doll stroller around and periodically waits "her turn" for a green light. So she gets the concept. I thought it would be fun to reinforce it with a concrete example. Plus, she worked her fine motor skills picking up all the little bits of paper to glue on, as well as maneuvering the glue stick. First we sorted the little bits of paper into piles based on color. (There's that sorting again...I love it!)

Then we glued on the mosaic papers to the colored circles. Lastly, we glued the "lights" onto the black paper.

You may remember our leaf sorting activity from last week. Well, yesterday we used some of those leaves for a turkey craft. We practiced shapes as we put the beak, eyes, legs, and feet on our circle head and oval body. {I didn't know what to say about the gobbler-thingy, other than it's a squiggle.} Last week, we had our friend Greta over to play. The girls busied themselves with a texture collage project. We talked about smooth, hard, soft, squishy, and crinkly as they added objects to their collages. It was amazing how quiet they got as they concentrated on gluing the items down.

Here's a few others that we've done recently:

We made an acorn using dried oats and Grape Nuts cereal. Then we looked for squirrels outside and talked about how they find nuts.

I love this cute Frankenstein that we made the week of Halloween. He's still on our kitchen table. We just can't bear to part with him.

Here's a peek at our "gallery." She's so proud of all of her projects!

I can't take credit for the vast majority of these. There's a link to a blog called "No Time for Flashcards" on the left side of this blog. She's the brain behind most of what we do (although the turkey was my brainchild, thank you very much :) If you have young ones in your care, check it out!

Make it a crafty week~