Family Crafts – Making Spring Scenes

I am of the mind that it is time to will the cold away.

While at least mildly unrealistic as February dawns on us, I’m all too willing to perpetuate my delusions of warm sunshine, crocus and tulips pushing their heads up through the still-frozen front garden – in the form of construction paper and cut outs.

It’s not that I hate Winter.

The wonderful, easy-going snows that have dominated this Winter are totally fun. The tiny person and I hit Millennium Park yesterday for a few hours of sledding and snow family making that left us way more happy with each other than the previous stretch of sick days.

I just feel a little sluggish, even frozen, myself right now. So, brightening up our house with some flowery scenes that also double as phonics, spelling and ID lessons helps me move beyond the urge to sleep all day.:)

In the middle of one of those afternoons recently when the lot of us were suffering from a bit of cabin fever, we busted out the construction paper, laid out the newsprint all over the dining room, and started creating Spring.

It ended up a fun project that we now have strung along the banister, inspiring us to see things a bit brighter, keeping the tiny person excited about finding clouds, colours, flowers and the sun, and getting me thinking that we have moved into a new stage creatively.

What you need:

- Different coloured construction paper
- News print in sheets or rolls (PJs on Cliffe and The Echo sell it)
- White glue
- Scissors
- Crayons or a pencil for tracing and writing IDs on cutouts

How to do it:

1. If you can freehand cut or draw, go for it and cut out flowers in different colours, clouds, a sunshine with rays, rain drops and any other Spring-like thing you’d like to add to your scenes. If you are like me, tracing is more my strong suit. Here are a few templates to try:
Flowers from DLTK
Umbrella from DLTK
Other Spring templates

We printed the templates, cut them out, traced them onto the construction paper (cutting multiple sheets at a time). A bit of work. But fun. If you have a toddler or a young preschooler, you may want to try some Spring colouring pages to entertain them while you are cutting.

2. Find a place that can withstand a little bit of glue (I.E., kitchen floor) and spread out a few sheets of news print.

3. Grab the glue and get pasting your cutouts into cool Spring scenes.

4. We then played a game where I sounded out the words for each Spring thing for the tiny person and she told me what letter goes with each sound. We eventually got everything labeled and now she runs around pointing it all out to us (all of the time). With older kiddos, you could turn this into a lesson about the water cycle or the life cycle of flowers.

The whole thing took us about an hour from beginning to end and, with a snack and some songs mixed in, was a really fun, whine-free afternoon. (Unlike this morning…:() I totally admit that these are not crafting beauties – particularly the rain scene where the meadow looks more like a forest fire. But, hey, good times were had:)

Think Spring!

Tags: Art, children, crafts, cut, family, glue, Kids, Our Big Earth Media Co., Paper, Spring

Category: ARTS & LITERACY, Crafts