Collage elephant

My first idea was pasta or rice but the pasta too big and rice too….. Anyway hunting around I found these holographic shapes. Which led to talking about shapes and colours. She had a bit of fun but she was being a bit miserable being sick so only wanted to do so much.

Here are the finished results.
My favourite elephant book is ” the elephant and the bad baby”.

E is for elephant and Emily

Emily has a cough so we didn’t go to playgroup today and since it is raining out came the paints.

Very intense concentration on her painting face. We started with water colours and then moved to paint brushes with the paint in the handle. The idea came from the blog No time for flash cards. An E with a long trunk and an ear. The only downside to using the paints is waiting for it to dry so I can cut out the E and glue on the jungle background Emily is painting. Oh well on to the elephant collage while it dries.

We’re going to the zoo…

Well we’re not really but today I found myself unexpectedly at home when I was supposed to work and without a car and I had nothing planned for today and couldn’t get inspiration so I decided we needed more animals for our zoo.

I stuck on baby genius goes to the san diego zoo while I got ready (shower, computer browing time etc) and we decided what animals we wanted. Alexander got a hippo and a monkey, Emily wanted a giraffe and elephant. I went to DLTK to get more Toilet Paper Roll animal templates.

I also found this link to some Fingerprint Giraffes. I tweaked it a little. I decided the giraffe’s head looked like a foot so I found some yellow card, traced around Alexander’s foot and Emily’s foot and cut them out. I folded the remaining half of the A4 sheet in half and cut it down for the long neck.

We headed outside to enjoy the sunshine.

They then painted the templates which had mixed results – making it nearly impossible for me to find the lines to cut out which is why the hippo face and legs are in white as I reprinted it. I did debate getting them to use crayons and making them do life like colours and then I thought colour doesn’t hurt, they can make the animals any colour they want.

Alexander liked making dots on the giraffe’s body parts but Emily just wanted to paint, whether with brushes or with her fingers. But that’s ok.

Kids painting

Only got Alexander dotting his giraffe

While we waited for the paint to dry the kids rode their bikes. Well actually Alexander rode Emily’s bike with training wheels and Emily was on her three wheeler…

So while the paint dried they rode, then while they rode mum quickly cut stuff out and then the glue came out and the eyes came out and Emily tipped the eyes everywhere!

So no photos of putting things together but here are the finished products.

Here are three finished animals, the monkey was hiding somewhere. The lid of our shoebox is the open air enclosure at the zoo. The giraffe’s legs are on wonky but she is only 2 and I didn’t micromanage like I often do.

Lunch was sort of themed. I striped the bread into vegemite stripes, scooped out some avocado and called it grass and chopped up a boiled egg and called it lion heads. Gave my daughter a toothpick to pick up her avocado and she ate away! Alexander scraped the avocado skin clean.

There you go, holidays next week and we’re going away, hopefully that will inspire the children and me for the theme for the following week.