Tea Cup Bookmarks

I got the idea to make these from Pinterest, but I couldn't find any tutorials.  Therefore, here is a simple picture tutorial of how I made mine.  These ones I made as holiday gifts for my book club.

1) Grab some felt in colors that you like.  Use the firmer felt for the backing and softer felt for the front. You can find it at any craft store, I bought mine at Michael's.  

2) Create a template that you like or if your super talented draw one free hand.  This one I found using google image search. (Hint: I am not super talented.)

3) Cut off the handle of the template so that you have two separate parts.  This just makes it easier to cut the inside handle piece. Cut out felt using templates.  Leave a little extra felt lengthwise on the handles to glue on.

4) Cut beige color for inside of cup and two tags.  Use soft felt for these.  I also embroidered "tea" or a leaf on one side of the tags.

5) Glue handle and oval to tea cup with fabric glue.

6) Thread the tea tag to the cup, leaving enough string so the tag can hang out of book.  I sewed my embroidery thread from back of cup to front and made a knot to look like tea tag was coming out of tea cup.  I also have my thread going between both tea tag and then sewed them together at the bottom. Lastly, I glued the two parts of the tea tag together. 

 

7) Voila!

I just noticed that at some point I forgot to sew the the string coming out of the tea cup.  Haha, way to follow my own tutorial!

Sweet and easy.

Apples

Fall is in th air, and although you would never know it here in Tucson, we are talking all about it in our classroom.  We started by doing a unit on apples, which we will continue throughout the week.  Here are some things and a riddle we worked on today.

In circle we noticed differences and similarities in apples and used them for math.

We painted with warm colors.

We did Apple Math in a small group activity.

And painting with apples.

We also taught the children this riddle about an apple:

Experimenting with Watercolor Drops in Water

The key to this is getting the children to only use small drops of water at a time.  As you can guess this can be very challenging for some children.  But if they are able to put the watercolor into the water just drops at a time, it can be quite mesmerizing and beautiful.  Some children didn't want to leave and spent their whole classroom free time at this table.

Composting Worms!

Blow paint

We used water colors, then gave the children pipettes to squirt color onto paper, and then blow around with a straw.  It was very popular, but hard to regulate the amount of paint put onto the paper.

Shrink Plastic Balloons

I didn't take nearly enough pictures of these as we made them, it was a very hectic week!  It was an end of summer present for our families and it was our biggest session.  It also required a lot of work at home to put together the finished product.  They required daily photo taking, shrinking in oven, printing, hole punching (and if I forgot this vital step back to square one), and then attaching the chain.  Most parents were very appreciative and loved these little gifts! And that is what makes it worth while.

The first part is getting the shrink plastic, or Shinky Dinks, and cutting out a ballon shape.  These ballon where about half a sheet big.  The kids then colored them in.  

Some children just did scribbles and some did very detailed drawings.  It's always important to encourage children when they draw no matter what their ability.  These look beautiful no matter what, so it's always fun to encourage children to explore the medium.  By the way, we used sharpies for drawing, but you can also use colored pencils if you are nervous about young ones and permanent markers!  We actually use sharpies often in our classroom, so children are pretty comfortable with them and understand the rules.

As you can see the trays get marked up quite a bit.

While the children were drawing, I went around and snapped photos of them standing and pretending to hold a balloon.  Lighting was very important I discovered!  Any small amount of backlighting created a very dark picture.  I then used Printshop to crop around their pictures (to save ink), tinted them to about 70%, and printed them out on  special shrink plastic made for injet printers.  I could fit about four kids vertically and a fifth horizontally per page.  Before you cut out the images, make sure you make a hole with a hole puncher first!  Often the hole is bigger than their hand and you won't be able to punch it afterwards.  

Then shrink!  I bake mine at 350 degrees F on parchment paper, colored side up for a couple of minutes.

Add chain from balloon to child's hand, glue gun a magnet on, and voila!  

Cutest magnet ever!  I also wrote "St. Mark's Preschool Summer 2015" on the back of ours.

The children each helped with wrapping their own balloon, and I added the ribbon.  You could tell the kids did the wrapping on the bottom.