SRP 2012: Wacky Wednesday (Part 3) | Nocturnal Animals/Things that Go Bump in the Night!

The subtitle of this post shall be: Miss Angela Cuts Out Ten Thousand Triangles.

Did I cut out ten thousand triangles? Technically, no. Did it feel like I cut out ten thousand triangles? Ohhhhhhh yes.

For the final week of our Wacky Wednesday program, we decided to combine two of the themes we hadn't been able to use yet: Nocturnal Animals and Things That Go Bump in the Night. (And yes, I am once again going out of order, because I have lots of pictures for this week!)

Now, back to the triangles! Miss Jan and I had seen these adorable construction paper owls and immediately decided we wanted to use them as one of our crafts. Now, considering our very high turnout each week, and seeing the number of triangles that ended up being used for each of these owls, I made it my mission to cut out All The Triangles. All of them. Honestly, we have some kind of terrifying automatic paper cutting machine upstairs in our office, but I didn't think cutting out over a thousand triangles would take THAT long, so I just opted to do it myself. (No, Miss Angela. Miss Angela, no. You are WRONG.)

Haha, interminable triangle-cutting aside, these owls turned out GREAT. (And, of course, we had SO many triangles left over. Oh well. I would rather have too many than not enough!) The kids really went to town with them, resulting in a slew of what I like to call 'Picasso' owls.

 I loved seeing all the different takes on the owls! I think we have the most fun when we focus on projects that are more about the process than the final product, and this definitely felt like one of those.

So, the owls were a 110% thumbs up!

Next, we were inspired by these lovely fireflies, though we decided to put our own spin on them.

This is Miss Jan's sample. It's hard to tell in the picture, but we added a little bit of glitter to the wings, and it really jazzed up the craft!

This was probably my VERY favorite firefly; it's not every day you see one that has a nose!

Another one, with lovely, sparkling wings!

Our final Nocturnal Animal craft was a raccoon mask, (inspiration here).

I only have a picture of the template for this one, but there wasn't too much variation across the board. We cut the paper plates ahead of time, and traced the black sunglasses shape. We also went ahead and punched holes for the eyes, instead of using googly eyes, so that the kids would be able to see through them. Definitely the quickest craft of the day, but fun!

And finally, we finished up with blow paint monsters! I saw this post linked on Pinterest awhile ago, and it remains one of my very favorite things.

This one is Miss Jan's template - isn't he cute? Haha, I think he looks like a sea creature, a bit. 

The blue paint was a bit too thick when we first mixed it, which is probably clear from the picture. I like my paint watered down enough so that you can get some really awesome spidery branches. For this project, we just used your basic tempera paints mixed with water. Then we had our amazing volunteers go around and dribble a bit of each color on the kids' papers. In retrospect, we could have given them more paint, probably, and we ended up doing second rounds for people who didn't get enough the first time, but we were pretty focused on trying to keep the mess minimal.

Ahhhh, a terrifying monster! In the interest of keeping the program fast-paced (since we had numerous squirrely toddlers to contend with) we just gave the kids googly eyes to stick on, but I did love the idea of the kids being able to cut accessories from paper to give their monsters that little something extra.

And a final bunch of this week's crafts!

 I had a GREAT time with this week's projects. Since it was our final week, we'd had plenty of practice setting up, which really enabled things to run smoothly. I'd say this was maybe the smoothest program of the summer, despite it clocking in at four crafts!

I'll be posting about our superhero program next, so keep an eye out for that!

SRP 2012: Wacky Wednesday (Part 2) | The Night Sky!

And here we are with Wacky Wednesday Part 2: The Night Sky! This is another week with fewer pictures than I would like, but this time I actually have a good reason for it. That is, a reason that does not involve me simply forgetting the camera!

Somehow, Miss Jan and I completely failed to realize that since July 4th fell on a Wednesday this year, the library would be closed on the actual holiday. This led to some last-minute scrambling, as we decided to bump our "night sky" theme up a week, since we preferred to have it the week before the 4th, as opposed to the week after. We had a few activities and crafts in mind, but not all that much set in stone, since we thought we'd have an entire extra week of planning. And since nothing was too terribly set in stone, we (of course) managed to change our minds on almost every single craft approximately two days before we had to have them ready! Because we are awesome.

While clicking around, hoping for inspiration to strike, I stumbled across this amaaaazing depiction of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night:

Picture from Suzy's Artsy Craftsy Sitcom

Super beautiful and fantastic, right? Unfortunately, also waaay beyond the scope of our program. But while I was looking at this, I couldn't help but think about other ways we could do a 'Starry Night' of our own. And then I remembered salt painting!

Hah, not quite as impressive as the quilling, mayhaps, but well-suited to the age group we had, and lots of fun besides! We used black paper and watered down acrylic paint, which resulted in some really awesome, vibrant colors, and also meant we didn't have to worry about getting liquid watercolors! (We tried food coloring, but it was way too light.)

We decided against eye droppers, too, and just gave the kids those thin paintbrushes that come with every set of kids' paints ever. Those worked perfectly! They let the kids transfer enough of the thinned paint to color their pictures, but didn't completely soak the paper.

Our second activity was creating a "mural" of the night sky. We rolled out a huge sheet of black paper along three tables, then set out some chalk and let the kids have at! This wasn't a terribly time-consuming project, but I think it turned out really cool.

The chalk showed up well against the black paper, and you could also smear it for a neat effect. Once the entire paper was full, we hung it up in the hallway, behind our book tables!

My favorite part was probably the many suns that turned up in this version of the night sky!


And finally, we have our last craft, which is also the reason I have so few pictures of this week.

 
We made rocket ships! We got the instructions from Family Fun, and they turned out AMAZINGLY. Once you get the hang of launching them, they really fly! We even set up a launching site for the kids, to see who could send their ships flying the farthest.

Now, you might be wondering why this craft so severely impacted our picture taking. WELL. See that little circle where the kid has drawn in a face? We decided it would be cute and oh-so-personalized to take pictures of all of our kids, then cut them out so they could put themselves in the peep hole of their rocket ship. Unfortunately, we not only overestimated how long it would take to snap all the pictures, then upload them to our not-always-fast computers, but we didn't count on everyone being finished with their crafts so quickly! This was our shortest program of the summer; half an hour after we started, I had people wandering down to the children's room to ask if the pictures were ready to go yet, which they most decidedly were not. I eventually got MOST of the pictures handed out, after some serious scrambling, but it basically kept me tied to the desk until the very end, meaning I didn't get any pictures of the program. Still, the rocket ship cup was a big hit; I would absolutely do it again, probably just not with the individualized pictures this time.

SRP 2012: Wacky Wednesday (Part 1) | Nighty-Night!

The end of July seems to be creeping up on me in the worst way possible. What happened to June, anyway? Long story short, it's been go-go-go around here all summer long, and I am sadly behind on my blogging! I haven't made any new flannelboards, either, so participating in Flannel Friday anytime soon is a no-go, but I did want to make a post for some of the crafts we've been doing.

My coworker, Miss Jan, and I, have been in charge of a Wacky Wednesday program for ages 3 - 7 this summer. We were initially hoping to do some science experiments, but with an average crowd size of 80+, we couldn't quite figure out a way to manage it. We focused on arts and crafts instead, with an occasional activity thrown in to keep things exciting!

 We started Week One off with some fun, simple camping crafts, but I'm having a tough time tracking down pictures of those, so I think I'll leave that post for later. Instead, I'll skip on ahead to Week Two!

Our theme for this week was Bedtime, and we planned (most) of our crafts accordingly! We'd initially talked about having a teddy bear sleepover sometime this week, but somehow in the scramble to get everything else ready, the sleepover was forgotten. Oh well - maybe next time!

Our first craft this week is tied with superhero week for my absolute favorite of the summer! We made... drumroll please...

Handmade teddy bear pillows! Such a fun bear craft!

Teddy Bear Pillows!

I am still entirely delighted with how well these turned out! They. Were. Adorable. Miss Jan and I had been tossing the idea around, but were having difficulty figuring out how to put it into action. The examples we'd found online all involved sewing, which would have been way too difficult to manage with 50-some five-year-olds. (For example: these bears here!) Finally, we cut two simple (matching) bear shapes out of the world's softest and fuzziest fleece (using this template as a guide), then hot glued them together along the edges. We left just the top edge unglued, so the kids were able to stuff the bears with fiber fill, poking it into the arms and legs with pencils. During our craft day, we had a hot glue station, manned by our AMAZING volunteers. (They completely rocked - we couldn't have done our program without them!) Once the bear was filled and glued shut, the kids got to take them back to their tables and decorate them, with a little help from the lucky adult who had brought them! SO much fun, and a great way to use up scraps of leftover fabric!

That's a picture of some of our patrons' AWESOME creations. If you're wondering what that vaguely tie-dyed, soggy mess underneath them is... well. Let me tell you about our adventures in bubble painting.

For those of you not in the know, bubble painting is supposed to produce an end result like the following:

 Picture from Meet the Dubiens

What a cool idea, we thought! Bubble painting! Awesome! And it is awesome - if you do it right!

Suffice it to say, our bubble station could have run a wee bit more smoothly. We used foil pie tins to hold the solution, which made it almost impossible to get a print. Most of the kids ended up with a very faint circle, if anything, and the rest managed to dip their entire paper into the solution, thus ending up with a soggy mess. (See above.) We had slightly better luck with smaller containers, but even then, the prints weren't nearly vibrant enough. (We used food coloring instead of paint to color our solution, which I think might have been part of the problem.)


Along with the bubble painting, we also made our own bubble wands with pipe cleaners, wire, and beads, then filled a big tub with bubble solution so the kids could blow bubbles. Thankfully, that was much more successful!


Bedtime week also featured a "counting sheep" craft. We printed this template on cardstock, then used it as our base. The kids drew a hat for the sheep, cut the entire picture out, then glued cotton balls to the sheep's body. (To cut down on waste, we had them tear each cotton ball into smaller pieces. Worked like a charm!)

 This was our initial inspiration, from Adventures of a Blonde Librarian!

We could have left it here, but we felt like it was too simple for our craft program, so we decided to give the sheep a "fence" to jump over. We cut sheets of cardstock in half, then had the kids draw a fence on them. Miss Jan, armed with a hammer and nails, punched holes in a bunch of craft sticks pre-program. The holes provided just enough give for us to stick a small brad through them. We taped the sheep to one end of the craft stick, then laid the piece of paper on top of the stick and punched the brad through both layers. Once the brad was through, we spread the tines and taped those down to the craft stick. The brad provided a pivot point, giving us a sheep that "leaped" over a fence!

(I seem to have misplaced my sample - clearly I was very well-organized this summer! - so please observe the following picture, of the sheep having completed its leap!)

And there you have it! Week Bedtime was, I believe, a success! The kids had fun, we had fun, and barring the bubble painting, I think all of our projects turned out really well! (And the kids still enjoyed the bubble painting, so I'm going to go ahead and count that as a win, too. I would absolutely try it again, just with more careful planning this time around.)