Spring, Spring, Spring!

What are some signs of spring? Spring makes me think of birds returning, weather getting warmer, gentle rain, the grass turning green, and plants beginning to bloom. Frogs are a'hopping by the pond and turtles are lazing in the sun. Decisions, decisions!! Luckily I have my spring activities and art boards on Pinterest to help me narrow my choices.

Little H LOVES the color yellow so this bird nest caught my eye rather quickly at Mrs. T's First Grade Class. Remember ... when an adult does all the cutting, a project done by an older child can easily be adapted for a younger one. But to make it look really different from the chick we did in March, I think I'll change the bird color to red. Luckily that bag of feathers I bought for the chick project included orange and red feathers as well!

Can't take the teacher out of me ... I'm beginning to think of possible games when I visit the dollar store! I grabbed these small Easter eggs, but don't plan to use them till mid-April. We'll pretend they are bird eggs ... Little H is VERY good at pretending! I put two nests on the workmat so I could vary our counting activities. This way I can call out a number or show her a number card to fill each nest. Then we can compare the eggs to work on some math vocabulary: more and less. At two and a half, she really doesn't have a good grasp on that concept yet. If she shows interest, we could also do some simple addition problems.

Then while looking at some of her other class projects I found a simple rainy weather craft. Coloring this umbrella will be a snap with her Do-a-Dot paints. Think she'll glue it on a pale blue background and maybe add some raindrops with dark blue tempera. Can't wait to see how it turns out!

Hmmm, I think we need to have more painting this spring and in a project that allows more expression for Little H.  Teaching 2 & 3 Year Olds had a Cherry Blossom Craft that I thought looked like fun ... just hope Little H thinks it's fun too! Sometimes she just wants to glue and it's sure a lot less mess for me to clean up so I'm happy to oblige!

Goodness knows, I always have plenty of wine corks around so we can use those for the pink blossoms. Not sure how the feather will work for the stem, but I still have plenty so we'll give it that old college try! If she finds it frustrating I can always have her use the end of her paintbrush to paint the branch.

My friends know that I'm not really an outdoorsy kind of gal, but Little H does love all kinds of  animals. Since I've already come up with a "bird" craft I think we'll do an animal from the pond. (Yes ... the Pinterest junkie has a board for that too!) I saw a turtle at Preschool Activities that gave me an idea. I don't want to repeat all those dots I have planned for the umbrella. Instead, I thought I'd cut out squares of tissue and have her place them on the turtle shell. Then we'll spray water on the tissue and let it dry.  The tissue paper will bleed a pattern on the shell and when the tissue is dry, we'll remove it. Repetition problem solved! There Was a Little Turtle is a cute rhyme we could do and Five Little Speckled Frogs would be a great pond song to learn. Uh oh ... might have to have some frog stick puppets too!

 FTM posted this gift idea as a frugal Mother's Day gift and I quite agree! I just happened to find a 5x7 shadow box in my closet that would make a perfect frame. Then I kept looking and found some bright green polka-dot ribbon to make the bow. I'll just need to cut some tissue paper squares and this will be ready to go!

I never used cupcake liners to make flowers before so I decided to look at Hobby Lobby and see if they had any spring designs. Sure enough ... jackpot! I found striped lines in spring colors.  A little more searching and I found some jeweled flower stickers in matching colors that would look great in the middle. Thank you Crafty Crow for the great idea!