Butterfly puppet tutorial

So many great ideas can be found on the internet and pinterest!  I got this one from THIS blog My 6 year old loves doing art so much that this was a great choice for her to practice reading her site words (it's like coloring with numbers.)

Another idea from Pinterest was making letters with drawn circles so that the child can cover the circles with glass rocks.  Our letter of the week is "Bb" so my four year old worked on her project.

 Scrapbooking and blogging are really invaluable to us mothers.  Too often we get bogged down with all the stuff that we have to do.  Like my last post about not feeling like I could enjoy the little moments.  Today I was overwhelmed with the mess at the table after we did these projects (mainly because I didn't have time to do anything about it because I had to go grocery shopping and then put all the groceries away while I was making dinner and it was under a time crunch because of the event tonight *blah blah* you get the picture.)

Well, sometimes enjoying things fully come in our memories.  So, here I am looking at the pictures and realizing that my feeling of "WHAT am I doing?  Where is my grocery list?  What was I supposed to get?  How am I going to keep it all in budget?  Oh no, I forgot to do language arts with Lily!  Why do we have so many toys on the floor?  ACK, I forgot to put chocolate on my grocery list!  Where are the babies shoes?  Bother, I walked out the door without remembering the sling or to change the toddlers diaper first.  Should I try to buy something else for the cats fleas or wait?"  ...and on it goes.. yeah, too much in my head to really enjoy these sweet moments with my kids, but they had fun.  I was even able to make the fussy toddler a bit happier today than in past days, so I call it all a success!  Even though I have to do a little school with Lily on Saturday -- it's all good and I'm determined to keep this up because we are getting better at it!

Both girls absolutely LOVED watched some videos of a butterflies life cycle and a butterfly emerging from it's chrysalis today.  We've also been playing the song "Bullfrogs and Butterflies" this week since last week was all about Frogs and this week was butterflies.

"My Father's World" curriculum does a 'badge' in the shape of the subject each week with the 'words to remember' on it.  This week it was "God can make me new" but rather than using a badge this week I decided to pull out some craft stuff to make butterfly puppets and it was so cute that I took some pics to make a tutorial!  So, first fold the felt in half.

Cut a butterfly wing shape on the folded felt so that it will become symmetrical.  I didn't use a pattern.  Just wing it!

Ta da!  Not brilliant, but it works.

Snip four holes on either side of the fold line.

Slip some pipecleaner through the hole and loop it around the wooden spoon handle.

Cross it over and back into the other holes so it sort of looks like this.

Twist around the handle again so it's something like this.

Curl the ends.  You can now wave it around and the wings will "flap" up and down sort of like a butterfly... only heavier. 

Curl up the ends so it looks like the antenna of the butterfly, and decorate however you wish.

The older one wanted to cut up felt to decorate hers and the middle one wanted to use these bangle things.

I squirted some tacky glue on a paper plate and gave them Q-tips to dip in it to make it a bit easier for them.

I wrote the words to remember and a Bible verse on the spoon part.

Almost done.

They kept adding more and more!

It even has a cute red poof-ball for a face.

All done!  Except later she added 6 legs and a proboscis (the "tongue")

 So, to recap.  You will need --
  --Felt
 -- decorations to glue onto it (this could be other felt or sparkles or puff paint or buttons or paper.. glue or staple the decorations on.)
 -- wooden spoons
 -- Pipe cleaners