She's Crafty

Story time "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" with Crafts

We had fun today being inspired by the famous Eric Carle book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". I've seen some awesome caterpillar prints around blog land lately using a balloon and thought my boys would really enjoy this technique.

Before we actually painted our caterpillars we had fun making one out of our balloons first.


Don't you just love how kids find joy in the simplest of things??


Anyways, on to our balloon painted caterpillar. Here is mine pictured below. They are so simple to make.


Simply dab a small balloon into paint and place it onto your paper. The caterpillar in the story has touches of blue in his body so we put some blue into our green paint and swirled it around a bit before dabbing our balloon into it.



I love that my children are very artistic! They didn't want to stop at just making a mere caterpillar like I did. They had to create the whole scene. At one point Andy said, "I need some white paint now so I can paint the white clouds in the sky like the real artists do." Oh, my sweet Andy...if he only understood how much of a REAL artist he is!



And this is why I enjoy creating things with my children. Not only are the paintings simply stunning, but it shows the creativity and color of a child. I just want to soak in their sweet innocence and beauty every day. My children are my greatest blessing!

I also printed out these cute Very Hungry Caterpillar size sequencing pictures from 1+1+1=1. I had Luke practice putting them in order from smallest to biggest, biggest to smallest, etc. and I also did some simple math problems with them. This story is obviously way out of my 6yr old's league, although he loves crafting with us in good fun, so he didn't need this step. 1+1+1=1 has several other printables you should check out.


So now that the caterpillars are done, we wanted to do something with a butterfly so we decided to make some wax butterflies. We did this last Fall making leaves, but I thought it would be fun to make butterflies.

1. Start by printing out a butterfly clip art picture from the Internet. I printed mine 4x6 size.


2. Place a sheet of wax paper on top of the butterfly and use a permanent marker to trace the outline of the butterfly.


3. Place the wax paper onto your ironing board and put crayon shavings over the butterfly print.


4. Place another sheet of wax paper on top of the crayon shavings, covering the entire butterfly.


5. Place a kitchen towel over the wax paper and apply your iron to the towel. Just enough to melt the crayon shavings below.


6. You are left with what looks like a big mess. haha But just turn it over and cut along the outline of the butterfly you drew.


7. And you are left with this. Pretty fun stuff!! You can even punch a hole in them and hang them some where with some string if you want to.


Linking up to THESE Parties.

Happy Crafting!!