Ginger Casa

Dallas, TX blogger - parenting, cooking, gardening, DIY-ing, crafting, and life with three boys!

Monster Letters – Halloween Craft for Preschoolers!

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monster-letters-fun-halloween-craft-for-preschoolers

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I love Halloween because there are just so many options for fun things to do and of COURSE, it's in the best month on the entire calendar — October!  I have never been one for scary zombies, vampires, and witches, but I love the fun, cute things about Halloween.  

My 2 year-old is really, really terrified of anything remotely scary, so he was unsure when I told him we would be making a "monster letter."  When he saw that it was HIS letter and we would be gluing pom poms in cute colors with googly eyes, he was all for it.

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Easy Grandparent’s Day Gift For The Gardening Lover

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Easy Grandparent's Day Gift For The Gardening Lover

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Grandparent's Day is September 11th this year, which means that it is coming up quickly!  The boys' school doesn't celebrate Grandparent's Day until October, and really, we should be celebrating it all of the time because grandparents are awesome!!

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Fingerprint Bluebonnet Craft for Kids

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Fingerprint Bluebonnet Craft for Kids

fingerprint bluebonnets

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It is always an exciting day when we spot the first bluebonnets in Texas.  We have a few around our house and at our church, but just gazing at the amazing bluebonnets over the ranches and plains is just breathtaking.  I'm a sucker for babies in bluebonnets.  Our usual bluebonnet spot was not so lush this year, but there were a few, so I plopped my sweet toddler down in them and took a few pictures!  (The other two boys were sick…thank you, Spring.)

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Mummy Letters – Halloween Craft For Kids {Cute, Not Scary!}

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Mummy Letters – Halloween Craft for Kids has been brought to you by BurlapFabric.com.  All opinions are mine.  Contains affiliate links

Since it is already September, I guess it is time to start thinking about Halloween.  It’s not my favorite holiday, but it’s in my favorite season and the day before the Captain’s birthday, so I have learned to love it.  It really is a lot of fun to see the boys dress up in their favorite costume and get candy and little toys.  They love it, so I guess I must, too.  I sound like a hater, but I just don’t like adults trying to scare kids who don’t like to be scared.  Halloween doesn’t have to be full of scary things to be fun!  Maybe I’m just bitter because I was a very sensitive child who scared easily and I have bad memories of Halloween.  ha!

The boys love to make decorations for different holidays, and I like to keep it fun and cute for Halloween.  I came up with the idea to cover cardboard letters with cheesecloth and attach the always adorable googly eyes .  D had the idea to attach a nose on his mummy, so he added a pom pom and it’s pretty cute, I must say.

The Captain volunteered to show exactly how we made it in this time lapse video:View Post

Make This Fun Burlap Flag Craft With Your Kids for The Fourth of July!

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This burlap flag craft has been brought to you by Burlap Fabric.  All opinions are mine.

Burlap Flag CraftThe boys and I really making crafts together, especially during the summer.  We love flags, but realize the complexity once we're already covered in paint, figuring out how to equally space all 50 stars.  It is what it is, and this craft was super fun for all of us to make.  As I've said before, crafts for kids do NOT have to be perfect at all.  I like to just sit back and let the boys do what they want to do, and then we can work together on the more difficult parts.  That's what we did with this American Flag craft.  

Materials:

 

2" Inch Burlap Ribbon Wholesale - 100 Yards

Instructions:

  1. Cut 13 strips of 1" burlap, 15" long
  2. Lay out 7 of the burlap strips on newspaper or mat.
  3. Use small foam roller to paint 7 strips red.  (This was fun for the boys!)American Flag Craft
  4. Wash out the foam roller and then paint the 6 strips white.whiteburlap
  5. Let strips dry and wash out foam roller again.
  6. Cut square of regular burlap, 7" x 7".
  7. Use foam roller and blue paint to cover the burlap square.
  8. Let blue square dry.
  9. When blue square is dry, use angled paintbrush to paint white stars (or circles, lines, blobs, etc) on the blue square.
  10. Next, create a frame with the sticky craft sticks.  It should be in the shape of a flag (of course,) and tall enough for the strips to line up.  This size depends on what kind of look you are going for.  We chose the layered look.
  11. Parents, use the hot glue gun to carefully glue each strip, layered on top of each other – remember, red goes on top!
  12. Next, glue the blue square with white "stars" on top in the top left corner. 
  13. Let dry and add a small piece of burlap to hang your work of art!

This craft was a bit difficult for my 6 year-old to complete on his own, but he and I, along with my 4 year-old, worked together over a couple of days and made a flag they were proud of.  We had a great time and got to learn more about the flag, too!  You really can't be educational crafts and remember, they do not have to be perfect!

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

 

Easy Dot Art Shamrock Craft For Kids – St. Patrick's Day

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Easy Dot Art Shamrock Craft for Kids

Crafts are something that we all can agree on in this house.  The boys are excellent about coming up with their own crafts, but sometimes they need a little guidance to get started.  They love these Do A Dot Art! markers that Grammy gave to them and so I drew a shamrock (doesn't have to be perfect!) and let them dot around it.  The box says to only dot the markers, not drag them, so that adds another level of patience and skill to their crafting.  They seriously use these for everything.  We have made letters, their names, different drawings, and now these shamrock craft paintings.  They turned out really cute!

Materials needed:

Easy Dot Art Shamrock Craft

Directions:

1.  Draw or print an outline of a shamrock.

2.  Have child dot the marker all around the outline, then fill in the inside with green.

3.  Create a rainbow pattern with remaining colors (red, orange, yellow, blue, purple) and create a rainbow "behind" the shamrock.  We made two lines of dots for each color, then repeated the colors until there was no more white space showing.  

4.  Let dry (it doesn't take long) and display for St. Patrick's Day!

Shamrock craft
Easy Dot Art Shamrock Craft for Kids

To extend your child's learning, here are some fun St. Patrick's Day books for kids!

DIY Drinking Glass for Kids using Repurposed Glass Jars

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We have been using glass cups, bowls, and plates for a few years now to limit our use of plastics in the home.  I try to get our dishes from thrift stores or clearance but things DO break with kids using them, so you really can never have enough!  Recently, my mother gave me quite a few of these cute little jars that she had saved for us, because they are the perfect size for little hands.  (They are great for portion control for juice and keeping spills small, too.)  I had seen a great idea to decorate coffee mugs with oil based paint markers and thought it would be fun for the boys to personalize their repurposed glass jars.  We dedicated about an hour to decorate our clean glasses and let them dry for about 24 hours.  I think they turned out super cute!  They've made it through one dishwashing without chipping, but really should be hand washed to avoid chipping.

DIY Drinking Glasses for Kids Using Repurposed Glass Jars

Supplies needed:

  • clean glass jars
  • oil based paint markers
  • clothes that can get messy (because as much as you tell a three year old "don't get it on your clothes…it's not going to work 😉
  • imagination!

​DIY Drinking Glass for Kids using Repurposed Glass Jars

DIY Drinking Glass for Kids using Repurposed Glass Jars

Directions:

  1. Follow directions on markers to get them ready for drawing.
  2. Draw, write, create with the markers on your glass jars.  I wouldn't recommend drawing inside of the glasses because I'm thinking that would leech chemicals into your beverages..which is the whole point of using glass jars anyway.  🙂
  3. Let jars dry for about 24 hours.
  4. Place decorated jars into a cold oven.
  5. Turn on oven to 350º.
  6. Leave the glasses in the oven for about 30 minutes.  Warning: you will smell the paint "cooking," so definitely open up a few windows or do like we did and head outdoors during this time.
  7. After 30 minutes, turn off the oven but feel free to leave the glasses inside to cool….then they're ready!

​

​This was so much fun for the boys and they just went to town, asking for more jars to decorate.  It all cost about $12, which was the price of the markers…the jars were F-R-E-E!  So now, all of my glass jars that I use for food storage are pretty and decorated! 

We also made a fun Father's Day gift for Daddy to drink his favorite juice:

DIY father's day Drinking Glass using Repurposed Glass Jars

(The jars I used were from this product, in case you wondered.)

 

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