Tag: butterfly

Butterfly Hand Puppet

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Butterfly Puppets (3)

We’ve been having fun with puppets lately, and here’s a neat one that kids can wear right on their hands!

I had a few fabric swatches in different prints, so cut out circles for a blue butterfly and a rather whimsical pineapple one. Insert this circle of fabric into a clothespin. Ideally I would have used a peg clothespin, but a spring-type clothespin worked in a pinch (with a little hot glue for security).

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I then wrapped a pipe cleaner around the tip of each clothespin as the antennae.

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Now to get it onto the kids’ hands! Using some old exfoliating gloves from the drugstore, I hot glued one “butterfly” onto each glove.

Veronika loved fluttering hers around!

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Travis’s very quickly became a flying dragon involved in make-believe games rather than a butterfly, but that worked just as well! Either way, these puppets were simple but fun to make.

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Butterfly Art

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Butterfly Art (7)

You and your toddler can make one of these beautiful paper towel butterflies, or a whole bunch of them to hang on walls or windows. Younger toddlers will probably need to use a paintbrush, but consider using an eye dropper with older toddlers; it’s a great tool to hone fine motor skills.

To start, I set a piece of paper towel down on a craft tray, along with watercolor paints and a cup of water.

Then I showed Veronika how to dip the brush in the water, into the watercolor, and finally onto the paper towel to decorate her butterfly. “Dot dot dot!”

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I also wanted Veronika to practice with the eye dropper variation, but didn’t want to use liquid watercolors because they can stain. Instead, I mixed some of the watercolor paint with a little water in a cup so Veronika could practice dipping and squeezing that way.

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It was the first time she mastered the art of squeezing to release water from the dropper. She loved watching the color come out!

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Then she proved that she still loves to be impish, and upended the cup of water all over the paper towel. That made for one very wet butterfly!

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Luckily I knew it would dry eventually.

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As the finishing touch, fold the paper towel in half, then gather up in the center and wrap a pipe cleaner around the middle; bend the extra pipe cleaner on top into antennae. Our butterfly looked so pretty fluttering about the kitchen!

 

Rainforest Crate!

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Coinciding with the hot, humid summer weather, our latest offering from Koala Crate was all about the rainforest.

The first project, a Butterfly Puppet, as actually quite a bit like a butterfly craft we put together recently from Ranger Rick magazine, illustrating how caterpillars morph into butterflies. The one in this crate simplified things greatly, providing us with a felt butterfly puppet body that we needed only to decorate.
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Travis really took charge on this one with his own vision of how the caterpillar and butterfly should look. We didn’t end up with a version that matched the sample, therefore, but I loved his final caterpillar creation.

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You can talk with your child about symmetry as you decorate the butterfly portion, but rather than insist on a symmetrical orientation to our stickers, I let Travis design it the way he wanted.
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Folding the wings in and out of the puppet’s body for the transformation was a delight every time.

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Flutter flutter!

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Next up as the Musical Rainstick. Cap one end of the provided cardboard tube with a provided plastic cap. Next fold up the indents in the provided cardboard insert; this will help the beads fall at a slower “rainy” rate. Here we are very seriously adding the wooden beads:

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Time to shake shake shake! This was so fun that it was a little while before we decorated the rainstick with the rainforest stickers.

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The rainstick gets used again in the final project, a Balancing Tree Game. Punch out the cardboard branches, and fold the ends up.

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Use a Velcro dot to adhere these branches to one end of the rainstick. You can also add a few more of the rainforest stickers.

Now the challenge was to fill the rainforest tree with pom-pom leaves using the provided tweezers. This was great fine motor skill practice.

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A note of caution: The game is hard, even for grown-ups, so be prepared to ease some preschooler frustration.

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As a nice touch, the pom-poms store handily in a provided pouch when you’re done with play.

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As a final craft, we put together a suggested Venus flytrap. Parents, cut little triangles all along the edges of a paper plate. Use markers to color the inside of the plate red and the outside green.

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We didn’t even finish coloring before Travis eagerly made his flytrap chomp on some pom-pom flies!

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Oh no, can a Venus flytrap eat a whole caterpillar?

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I loved seeing Travis’s imagination at work with this one.