Keeping Kids Busy: Cheerios Jewelry

I spent the weekend with my cousins this week. Beading is one of their favorite activity and seriously, who wouldn't love to make Cheerios bracelets and rings?

I thought this would be the most perfect way to spend the noon especially for Jana (the one in the 101 Dalmatians' PJ's) who has a problem with using her right hand since birth as the nurse delivering her pulled it too hard.
Passing the thread and holding the "beads" requires using both hands, so making a pretty bracelet encouraged her to use her right hand more. :) I call it success!
I'll leave you with a big collage showing how we spent our afternoon:

It's such a great activity to exercise those little muscles and have a tasty snack at the same time. We ate our bracelets just as soon as we're done showing them off! lol

See y'all soon,                                  

Crafting & Cookie Decorating with The Kids

The other day the family kiddos slept over at my place. We're a big family with a grand total of 12 grand kids starting at 7 months and ending with me (16 going on 17)!

So, the kids are used to have little "workshops" every now and then when they visit me, so they expected more coloring or science experiments, but I had other plans! :D

Nanny baked us some sugar cookies and I prepared royal icing, spatulas and a whole lot of sprinkles for the kids to decorate them.

And boy did they love it! You should have seen the smiles on their faces (which I couldn't photograph because I was busy convincing 10 toddlers not to eat the icing! )

Yes, it was messy. Yes, sprinkles showed up in the weirdest places ( hair, noses, under the couch) but it was quite a hit! and it gave me a good chance to talk to them about mixing colors. (double score!)

Here are some of our finished cookies:

 Can you guess which are mine? :D

 Little Mr.A colored his cookie in Egypt's flag colors. How sweet. :) He even made 2 yellow dots for the eagle!

The next day, we had our cookies with some milk for breakfast and the kids were ready for some paper crafts.

We talked about fairies and wonder lands, and Jana (5 yr old) decided that we should make a train to take us all to Pixie Hollow! So we did.

We cut bits of cardboard and colored them and made our very own train, then each one drew themselves and I cut out the itty bitty characters and we all hopped into the train!

They had such a fun time assembling various pieces of cardboard to make different type of trains, until we settled to this one:

Little Mr.A drew himself too, and wanted to be the train driver, but the girls wouldn't let any boy get inside "The Girls" train! lol

After all, who needs a driver when the train is operated with fairy dust?

After we're done with the train, I helped them to make these tiny pom pom critters. I think this one is their favorite so far! We ended up with a whole generation of brightly colored, wide eyed monsters and, God bless, fairies.

So all in all, these were 2 craft-full days the kiddos will never forget. And I was left with a huge mess to clean up, but we had fun so.. yeah!

It's so much fun to work with a large group of kids. I'm not saying it's not frustrating, but you can say I just got used to it, and the giggles make cleanup much more fun!

Have a great day,                                   

Pin It