I'm excited to introduce you to my Guest Blogger this week! Her name is Cori from Peace, Baby! Batiks!
She has a fantastic blog where she features really lovely handmade items and YUMMY recipes!! She's sharing with us this fantastic supplement to any mom's arsenal of summer boredom busters!! Here's a little more about her:
She has a fantastic blog where she features really lovely handmade items and YUMMY recipes!! She's sharing with us this fantastic supplement to any mom's arsenal of summer boredom busters!! Here's a little more about her:
I’m a stay-at-home mom with a three-year-old son, and when he’s awake, I play in the sandbox, drive Cars characters, and pretend I am a Mars rover. While he sleeps, I play with wax and brightly colored dyes to make batik clothing for babies and toddlers and sell them through my Etsy shop, Peace, Baby! Batiks. I love finding fun new designs for my shirts and dresses. I enjoy batik because of the vibrant colors and the web-like strands of color that run through each design as the wax cracks. I also like to scrapbook, cook, read, and watch movies with my husband.
Now that the weather’s nicer, we’re taking our weekly playgroup outside. It’s hard to get the boys’ attention away from the sandbox and bikes and stomp rockets for very long, so by necessity, our planned activities have gotten shorter.
The inspiration for this activity came from Eric Carle’s The Very Busy Spider and a board game based on the book. I was also inspired by Sarah’s thumbprint critter post from a while back. The kids need to do some color matching to create their web before stamping on a little spider with their thumb. (The boys in our group range from just turned three to just turned four.) Too cute!
Here’s what you need:
I created the worksheets and then copied them on my printer. Use four or five colors, and repeat each one three or four times around a circle. Any more than that seemed like it would be overwhelming and take too long. I didn’t want them to lose interest.
Read the book The Very Busy Spider. The spider and her web are raised on the pages, and the boys loved feeling the web as it grew throughout the book. There are animal noises in the book, so you could also quiz them on what each says.
Next, explain that they’re going to help the spider build her web by matching colors. They need to draw lines matching colored dots. They can draw across the circle, along the sides … as long as they’re matching colors, anything goes!
Stamp a spider on each child’s finished web using his thumb.
Draw legs and a face on the spider or let each kid do it himself.
Have fun!
