Sunday, May 29, 2011

Homeschool-preschool projects

The project? Pipe-cleaner-poofy-ball-alien-monsters. I was thinking about what the girls actually "learned" with this. I mean.. to be called home-"school" they have to have learned something right? My girls are 5 and 3 (and one month, but she was sleeping) and they learned some new motor skills for one thing, to wait their turn as I was using the hot glue when they told me where they wanted something glued, and they used their imaginations! (oh, and of course you can talk about colors and shapes and count things. We also listened to and sang with a Psalty cd while working together.)
Lily took hers with her this afternoon so I didn't get a picture of it, but the big weird one is the one I did while helping the girls (to show them some ideas on how they could use their imaginations! .. not that *I* was having fun with it.) ;] Renna's (my 3 year old) made the little one in the back on the right.
here's a top/back view of them just to give some perspective and ideas of random ways to attach things to your "alien"
This is what I used. I got the pipecleaners with all different poof balls AND google eyes all in one package at Michels for only $5.. thought that was pretty good for how much there was. I did try to use Elmer's glue, but I've always HATED using that! As a kid it totally annoyed me that I had to wait forever for the glue to dry and when it did it didn't even look good and it was always messy and ruined the fuzzyness of fuzzy things. So, I opted to be the gluer and the girls took turns asking me to glue things to their monster. Saved us a lot of frustration and mess for everyone.
And these are the shapes we used. I showed the girls how to hold the pipecleaner with the pencil (together in their left hand) while wrapping the pipe cleaner around the object with their right hand (since they are both right-handed.) Lily (my 5 year old) was able to do them very neatly and was able to do a spiral as well. Renna made a good attempt at the shapes and we used those too! The pink in the picture is a spring that I flattened out (the spiral and flat-spring are great for "feet" or a base of sorts for the big poofs.)

2 comments:

RickCapezza said...

Looks like a lot of fun!

Lynne' said...

The girls liked the sound effects I made up for how they should "talk" to each other. ;]