Tissue Flowers

Step 1: Start with 10 sheets of tissue paper in the color of your choice and according fold it across the pile. The folds should be about 1 1/2 to 2 inches wide.

Step 2: Fold it in half and secure the middle with craft wire or pipe cleaners. In order to get the craft wire tight, I use my fingers to squish the middle in order to pull the wire tight.

Step 3: Fan out the paper on both sides of the wire.

Step 4: Carefully separate the tissue paper one by one on alternating sides of the wire/pipe cleaner. Continue separating the tissue paper, and when you get to the end you'll need to rearrange the tissue paper until it looks even.

Butterflies

These paper towel butterflies are easy enough for preschoolers to do, but creative enough that school age kids will enjoy making them too, because there’s no cutting, gluing or painting involved!

What You Need to Make Paper Towel Butterflies:
• Wooden clothes pin
• Paper towel
• Markers or Dot Markers
• 4” Chenille Stem (a.k.a. pipe cleaner)

How to Make Paper Towel Butterflies:
1. Colour the base of the clothes pin with markers and add a butterfly face to the top of the clothes pin. Be creative! Butterflies are colorful!
2. Use regular markers or dot markers to decorate the paper towel. This becomes the butterfly's wings, so again be creative!
3. Twist the center of the colourful paper towel and slide the twisted part into the slit of the clothes pin.
4. Spread out the edges of the colourful paper towel so it looks like butterfly wings.
5. Twist the chenille stem around the top of the clothes pin and push the ends upwards to create the butterfly's antennae.

Hand Picked With Love

I just love making home made cards with the boys and have to say any card that involves a child's hand print is special. This year for mother's day we have made the boys Nans' these cute flower cards. I love that they are simple to make and have such a personal touch!

Paint your hand ready to print your flower petals.

Draw a circle on your page (this is where the photo will go) and press painted hand prints all around the circle as flower petals.

These cards have been made with such love and I know that the boys Nans' are just going to love them!

Jelly Bean Fun

I had great fun doing this activity with Master 4 as it gave him the opportunity to be able to estimate, count and create a graph using individual jelly beans. This is a favourite of mine that I have used many times when teaching. Children love "real" maths and what more can be real than getting to eat a few jelly beans at the end of your activity! The activity itself has many numeracy opportunities: counting, colour recognition, estimating, graphing, mathematical language development (more/less)

To complete the activity you just need a packet of Jelly Beans and a graphing sheet. Place all the Jelly Beans in the middle of a piece of paper and get your child to sort them into colours.

Introduce the term "estimate or guess" to your child. Get him/her to estimate how many there are of each colour before actually counting them.

Using the Jelly Bean graphing Template talk to you child about what a graph is and why we use them. Then colour the bottom row showing what coloured Jelly Beans you will be graphing. Then get your child to place the jelly beans on the graph one colour at a time. Explain that you can count the total number of each colour individually or you can read the number along the side (if they are at this stage).

Once your child has counted the number of each coloured jelly bean total get them to write the total. This is a great opportunity for those children who are ready to start writing numbers.