ImpressYourKids » Crafts

DIY Duct Tape Flower Pen {Perfect Teacher Valentine!}

ohamanda — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:11:43 +0000

At church today, one of the tweens I work with in our Large Group preschool environment was making duct tape flowers. I have a soft spot for duct tape and asked her to teach me how to make one. And she did. And now I’m showing you!

{subscribers, click over to see the video!}
Isn’t that great? Just think of all the fun patterns, colors and shapes of flowers you could do! And I’m super impressed that even though Lydia did 98% of it herself, it still turned out adorable and does not look like a Kindergartner made it. For school, Lydia was assigned to make a Valentine for her principal–and this is what we’re sending! I think she’s gonna like it!

Have you ever made a duct tape craft?

linked to Made by You Monday, Making the World Cuter

DIY Duct Tape Flower Pen {Perfect Teacher Valentine!} is a post from: ImpressYourKids
:: :: ::
Happy New Year! Here are some of my favorite resources to help you make the most of 2012! One Bite At A Time: 52 Projects for Making Life Simpler, an ebook by Simple Mom!
Create Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule, finally get your house under control!
E-Mealz, online meal-planning with shopping lists!
:: :: ::

Love Your Neighbor Paper Heart Garland {Incredible Love}

ohamanda — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:18:22 +0000

Pin It

Can I be honest? This week of INCREDIBLE LOVE has been hard for me. I’ve wanted to lash out at my kids, roll my eyes and breathe heavy aggravated sighs at almost everything they do. Today I had a few minutes before lunch and was planning on doing this activity with them but I was so incredibly tired of interacting with them, of correcting them and leading them.

How incredibly UN-loving am I being if I can’t even do a LOVE craft with them? So, I swallowed my pride (aggravation? sin?) and grabbed a Bible, my computer and the kids.

First I turned on Seeds’ Greatest Commandment song and the kids had a dance party! (Ooh, look! I just found a LIVE video of the song!) This song is from Mark 12:30-31 and is Jesus quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and more…

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.

So, if we want to be super, not only do we need to love God with all of us, we need to love others the same way we love ourselves. I asked the kids if they loved themselves. And I’m happy to report Lydia hugged herself and said, “I looove myself!” We talked about how we know we love ourselves because we eat food we like, read books we like and do the things that we want to do!

This was an easy thought to switch over to loving others. How can we love our friends and family like we love ourselves? To help us figure this out, we made this paper heart garland and wrote our “neighbors” on the hearts. As we made each heart and wrote each name we talked about how we could love that person (sharing with someone from church, obeying our teachers, etc).

Now. The garland. It’s easy peasy.

Grab some construction paper and cut it into 1″ strips. (I do hope you have a paper cutter!) Take two strips and staple it at the bottom.

Fold the top two ends to the middle to make a heart! But don’t staple it yet!

We’re going to stick the next two pieces of paper in.

Once the second heart has been made, staple both hearts together.

Continue this until it’s as long a you like! It was a great activity to do together–one could hold it, one could put the strips of paper in and the other could staple. Then everyone can write friends names on it!

The kids absolutely loved thinking of all their friends and writing their names down. And I’m glad I worked at loving my most important neighbors–my children and did this activity with them. It softened my hard heart and helped me show them an example of incredible love (well, as incredible as I can muster!).

We only got to do two INCREDIBLE LOVE activities this week, but tomorrow I’ve got a round-up of some other fun LOVE books, music, Scriptures, crafts and activity ideas. You’ll love it!

Don’t forget to grab your free Super Hero badges!

Love Your Neighbor Paper Heart Garland {Incredible Love} is a post from: ImpressYourKids
:: :: ::
Happy New Year! Here are some of my favorite resources to help you make the most of 2012! One Bite At A Time: 52 Projects for Making Life Simpler, an ebook by Simple Mom!
Create Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule, finally get your house under control!
E-Mealz, online meal-planning with shopping lists!
:: :: ::

Incredible Love!

ohamanda — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:05:21 +0000

I’m so glad we’re on to our 3rd characteristic of a super hero! This one is appropriate as Valentine’s Day is almost upon us! Today we’re talking about INCREDIBLE LOVE!

There are some awesome love verses and it took me a long time to choose which one I wanted! (I’m still hanging onto Psalm 97 because it shows the SUPER powers of God in it!) But I settled on the verse Jesus himself said was the greatest commandment:

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind with all your strength.

I know there is all kinds of teaching and speculation about what the difference is between soul and heart and strength and mind and all that. But we just went with the basics. LOVE GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART.

That’s it, isn’t it? Not much more to say, huh? I pray my children love God with every fiber of their being! With all of them!

We made a memory verse poster (you remember, I’m a fan of hanging scripture on your walls!) and instead of writing HEART or LOVE, I drew a heart. Then we filled it up with foam stickers of hearts. I wash hoping it would turn out like one of those cute button canvases I’ve seen on Pinterest. Or the fun button canvas Kristen did last week!

Alas, it looks a little more like a bunch of heart stickers on a paper. But as we pulled the sticky backs off our heart stickers, we talked about King Saul and how he started off loving God with all his heart…but let other things become more important. Then we compared him to King David who loved God with his whole heart and was a man after God’s own heart! That’s the kind of INCREDIBLE LOVE we want to have!

I hung our new posters on our stairs so we can read it every time we walk up and down. Which seems to be about 465 times a day! I’m sure we’ll have it memorized in no time!

See you tomorrow for more Incredible Love! Don’t forget to check out all our Super Hero posts!

photo by demandaj, lovlied up by me

Incredible Love! is a post from: ImpressYourKids
:: :: ::
Happy New Year! Here are some of my favorite resources to help you make the most of 2012! One Bite At A Time: 52 Projects for Making Life Simpler, an ebook by Simple Mom!
Create Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule, finally get your house under control!
E-Mealz, online meal-planning with shopping lists!
:: :: ::