If you have young children and you are studying frogs, this is a simple and fun frog craft to make. I found it in a Family Fun Magazine. Instead of using green craft foam, I just used green construction paper. The magazine used to have a template online, but they deleted it. So, looking at the design above, you could draw that shape on a piece of green construction paper. Have your kids cut it out.
We bent back the head, glued on some google eyes, and cut an “X” where the mouth goes. Then we shoved the party blower through an “X” in the middle of the body and through the mouth. It took about ten minutes. (I have no idea why they say it takes an hour.)
Of course, the frog craft party blowers don’t last very long, but they sure were fun while they lasted. The kids kept blowing the party favors in each other’s faces, and they had a great time! (If you buy a lot of party blowers, you can change them out when they’re covered in spit!)
If you want more ideas for fun Early Childhood art projects, click here.
Organizing your homeschool does not have to be difficult. In this video clip, I show you how to organize educational bins for unit studies in homeschooling:
As you can see if you look upwards, a lot of storage space can be found above your head. Look at the enormous amount of stuff that I’m storing above my head. It doesn’t affect any floor space. As you can see, it’s by years–it’s what we did for each homeschool year–and we went through the history of the whole world in six years. (We also covered all the sciences within those years.)
For example, in year 2 we studied human anatomy for a full year, so let me take that down real quick… When we did human anatomy, I just threw the things into this bin. I collected things from yard sales and used curriculum sales. You can get all kids of fun stuff. Here is a model of the lungs that we did, and the model of the human arm. We have X-rays of different parts of the human body; you can put the whole body together like a puzzle. Here are the skeletons of animals, and the bones like the femur are called the same thing in animals and humans. (So once you learn the bones of the human body, you can find and label animal skeletons, too!)
I have games about the human body, and books like Blood and Guts, which have lots of fun experiments about the human body. (It does contain evolution.) I also have coloring books of the human body, and diagrams to color for younger children. You also see I have different models, like the human heart.
So all of this is stored in this bin. That’s how I store things for different unit studies, so that the second time I teach something, it is so easy compared to the first time. As you make the different hands-on items for science or history, you can throw them into the bin. By the time you get to that time period in history, surprise, surprise! You open it up and go, “Wow! Look at all the stuff I have for the Revolutionary War!”
This is a small sample of my 2-hour video workshop, Organizing for a Fun Homeschool, where I show you every room in my house, and how I organize it for fun homeschooling.
Have you ever heard a black hole explanation coming from a six-year-old? This 44-second video was not scripted. My six-year-old actually understood how a black hole was formed, and we filmed it in front of our outer space mural.
My daughter’s favorite book when she was little was Are You My Mother? by Dr. Seuss. It is the story of a bird that hatches when its mother is away, and he goes on a journey to find his mother. Young children love the book because of the absurdity of a cow or an airplane being the mother of a bird. My daughter always laughed delightfully as we turned the pages.
Here she is at 4 years old, doing a dramatic reading of the book. She points upward, squeals, and really gets into it!
If you want to do a unit study on Are You My Mother?, you can start by doing some bird watching. Imitate some of the bird sounds. Talk about the characteristics of a bird. A great website for identifying birds is All About Birds. You can set up a bird feeder right outside your window and see which birds show up!
Here is a free lapbook for the book Are You My Mother? You will need some colorful file folders, scissors, crayons, and glue to complete the lapbook with your young child.
You can watch an egg hatch by getting an inexpensive incubator. Borrow an egg from a farmer, and give back the chick after it’s hatched. My children loved this activity so much. They called our chick Pepito and chased it around the backyard.
You can make a cute and easy nest with a paper bag, small twigs, and glue. Scrunch down the bag, pour glue on the outside, and stick the twigs on the bag. I give you a demonstration on how to make this easy craft in my free Easter Ideas video.
You can also make a next with natural materials from outdoors. Here is a blog post describing how:
Hi! I'm Susan Evans. I speak at homeschool conferences about hands-on learning and run a huge unit study membership site. I also speak at women's retreats on the topic of prayer.
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If you have young children and you are studying frogs, this is a simple and fun frog craft to make. I found it in a Family Fun Magazine. Instead of using green craft foam, I just used green construction paper. The magazine used to have a template online, but they deleted it. So, looking at the design above, you could draw that shape on a piece of green construction paper. Have your kids cut it out.
