Sea Life Window

These lovely little windows are quick and easy (once you have gotten the hang of stopping the contact from bunching).

1. Cut out the pieces you want to use on your picture (cellophane and tissue paper are the best as you can see the light coming through)



2. Cut out the centre of some card so that you create a frame



3. Cut a piece of clear contact and stick it onto the frame leaving it sticky side up so that the other papers can be stuck to it. **This is where you would normally build the picture front to back (fish first, then sea weed and finish with water) so that you have the picture completely within the frame but for a 4 year old it's hard to work backwards so we did it the other way. This is why you will see some of the picture overlapping the frame:)



4. Now create your masterpiece. We put the blue cellophane horizontally for the water and the green cellophane vertically to create some sea weed. A few pieces of bubble wrap created some bubbles coming out of the mouths of the fish. Solid paper for the fish themselves with metallic paper indented with lines for mouth, fins and tail.



5. Now add a layer of contact to the top of your picture, hold it up to the light (natural or otherwise) and voila...... a work of art!

Large Newspaper Stuffed Fish

These are really easy to make and so effective. I was really proud of Marli for what she achieved here. She really enjoyed it and this was evident by her continuing it until it was finished. Just the standard kinder grade paint was used.

You can do so much to decorate these. We started with crayons .... although oil pastels would be better. I did the outline of the fish and cut out 2 the same (these were done on butchers paper). I then flipped over one and we did some decorations with the crayons. We then painted them and added some glitter glue and some plain glitter. A couple of large cut out eyes and here they are drying. Once they have dried we will assemble them.

Here is the finished product. I think I would go round all the edges with masking tape (on the inside) before putting it together if I were to use butcher paper again. The paper is quite flimsy and thus prone to tearing when stuffing it. I only did the top edge to give it stability and strength to hang it. All edges would be much better. Anyway I also ended up using paper towel (can you believe we didn't have a newspaper in the house!) which is particularly good for the smaller area's such as the mouth as it's much softer.

Load up the stapler because you need lots of staples to put it together properly. You certainly don't want paper peeking through in between the gaps. Good enough to hang up her brothers sea themed room!

Hand printing sea life

This can be easily created by using your child's hand prints. A sideways print creates a fish, up and down and it's an octopus. Add some eyes, suckers and mouths and you are done. We prepainted the background with blue wavy lines and added some green wavy lines (done with fingers) for seaweed. We also added a black paper frame so that we can make it a work of art to be hung in her gallery!

Under water theme

This was another theme I organised for playgroup. There was a variety of craft's from fish to octopus's, boats to starfish etc. I will endeavour to collect a few of them and add more photo's of these items close up but they looked fantastic.

The wheels on the bus

Playgroup last year I organised a mural. We thought that the "Wheels on the Bus" theme would be great with lots of interesting things to look at on their journey. The kids made a variety of craft's that were included on the mural. Photo's of the children were included on the bus.