Craft Day with the Homeschoolers

We get together with our homeschool group a few times a year for a crafting day.  Each family is asked to bring a crafting project that we can share with everyone.  

It's not always easy coming up with crafts that are simple enough to do with large groups of children who span a large range of ages.  We're also asked to pick activities that don't require much in the way of drying time-- so no glue or paint!  

We had so much fun for the next few hours crafting and visiting with our friends. 

We made bird feeders-- 2 different kinds

• For bird feeder no. 1:  we spread honey all over a toilet paper roll and then rolled it in bird seed.  We strung some shoelaces through the toilet paper roll so they could hang it from their trees when they got home. 

• For bird feeder no. 2: we strung cheerios onto some pipe cleaners.  It was fun to be able to shape the pipe cleaners into different shapes for the birds.  I think a bunch of them strung on one tree would be really cute!

 

      
One family brought their rainbow loom and some rainbow loom bands for bracelet making.  Their daughter was great at demonstrating and teaching the kids how to make bracelets!

Another family brought pipe cleaners, clothes pins, coffee filters and markers for making paper butterflies.  

• The kids would draw on the coffee filters with markers, spritz it with enough water to make the marker colors blend and bleed and then once dry we'd crumple them up slightly to make wings and clip them in the middle to make little butterflies.  The pipe cleaners made the perfect antennae.

One mom brought a stack of paper, some markers, and some rulers and taught the kids how to make 3-D drawings using lines and bumps. 

One family brought an iron and some Perler Beads.  

The kids had so much fun creating all sorts of shapes and patterns with the tiny beads and watching them magically "glue" together with the use of the hot iron (which the mom did for them all).

We had a family that brought lots of foam stickers and some papers for the kids to make sticker collages. 

Our final family brought paper with heart stencils, star stencils or drawings of flowers on them with little strips of colored tissue paper and watered down glue for the kids to make stained glass pictures.
 

Often simple projects work best but we're always amazed at how well the kids adapt and pick up on the craft projects.  Older kids help the smaller kids and it's great to see them all having fun together.