Those Girls Do Like to be Crafty

Hopefully writing this won't be as traumatic as the experience. This afternoon we did a craft. This was a major production for me. I dislike any craft that requires manual cutting, massive quantities of glue, and multiple materials.  I am a perfectionist, crafts conflict with my nature. However, since I am homeschooling two girls that are 5 and 6 years old, I feel I am obligated to do it. It feeds one aspect of my needing to be the 'perfect' homeschool Mom since I struggle so much with the discipline needed to homeschool. I really would love to be one of those parents who embraces unschooling. I kinda did that the first year and in the end didn't feel I covered what I needed. After my first unschooled year my girls couldn't tell you the day of the week, months of the year or count past 20.
This year it was going to be different. I am using Math U See, Hooked on Phonics, and My Father's World. My Father's World has not worked as well as I had hoped. I have radically modified it to where we are only using the Bible Reader and Workbooks. The key is that Math U See is working fabulously and my girls read better than most of their peers. Anywho I digress.

My girls like crafts. If I did a craft every afternoon with them I would their hero. Now don't get me wrong, we do something art related everyday because they love it. Mostly we use markers, crayons, colored pencils or pens to draw. We will paint at least once a week too.  I go through a ream of white copy paper each month. I use tons of recyled pictures to print out my coupons.

Yesterday I whipped out my Cricut (I don't scrapbook) for the first time since we moved and created some Shamrocks and spring pictures. Just involves paper, scissors and glue. The simplest craft activities I can handle. However, the Cricut yesterday led to asking when we would do other crafts like we did in Vegas like with the babysitter. Oh how I miss our babysitter who would do crafts with the girls. Desperately would love to find one, but alas I am finding we can't recreate the past.

Our Cricut Creations.

Last night we found two crafts online that I thought would be somewhat reasonable to handle. A zebra picture from Busy Bees Kid Crafts and a lion with a mouth to feed from Learners in Bloom. What would I do without creative people on the internet?

Shoe print from a mary jane style Croc.

The paper I used for the shoe print & the body of the paper bag.

We started by painting the paper plates yellow. Set those aside to dry while we glued a body for the lion, picked out eyes and traced a shoe for the zebra head. I thought I was being clever and saving time by using zebra print paper (scrapbook pad). All that the zebra needed was some cutting and glue. Well unfortunately my girls are developing my perfectionism. I think we went through 10 ears, 5 manes, and 4 noses. My oldest got so frustrated that it wasn't coming together the way she wanted it to look that she quit. It didn't help that I was doing work for my youngest. I told her if she was patient I would help her too, but she decided it was her craft and that she didn't need help. She is stubborn like I am. We struggle with each others temperments. So she quit doing the zebra and joined us again when we went back to the lion.

With the lion my girls decided that it needed the mark on its forehead like Simba got from Rafiki, the baboon in the Lion King. I was fine with that until I figured out that in working with finishing the rest of the lion I kept getting orange paint on me. Why did I keep running into issues with the orange paint. Well I didn't think through the whole open mouth on the paper plate and paper lunch bag thing. They drew the mouths on, but I had to cut them out. There is no easy way of having a 5 or 6 year old put a hole in the middle of a paper plate and paper bag to have it look the way they want it. So I brought out the big guns, a box cutter. I didn't want to put holes in anything other than the plate and bag. I got a piece of cardboard to put underneath. I thought I was a genius. Little did I know that the box cutter must be dull and once you paint a paper plate it isn't so easy. So since the kids had painted on the orange before I did the holes, it was a mess. Anywho, in the end the kids adore the lions. They are running around the house looking for 'food' to feed the lions. This is when those Little People come in handy. Kids are having a blast playing King of the Jungle and occasionally breaking into scenes from the different Lion King movies.

Paper plate lion and shoe print zebra.

Other than my achy back from standing over the table for over an hour, I survived. Well the orange paint along with little pieces of paper all over the table and floor don't thrill me. Overall though it was a good afternoon doing a craft. Will I want to do it again? Not anytime soon.

My oldest daughter and I were out having Mommy and Me time today. As his special time with our other daughter my husband decided to do a craft with our youngest. She wanted a zebra who eats like her lion. I was so incredibly impressed. Take a look at the finished product. What a great Dad!

Zebra who can 'eat'