the year of the handmade valentines

Nearly every Christmas the kids and I work together to make the Christmas cards that we send to family & friends.  It's a huge undertaking, but it's always fun to work with them and let them get creative.  And each year we have a craft day as a family and make each other valentines.  But for some reason I've always bought the valentines for their classmates at the store.  Until this year.  A few weeks ago they asked me if we could make our own Valenintes to give to their school friends, and so we did.  Thank goodness for Pinterest and all of the cool ideas floating around out there on the interwebz.  Ella chose a valentine to make in which she had to sew, and she loved it.  The boys picked a monster valentine, which forced Mama to buy a new cricut cartridge (no complaints, I love it!).  I thought that making 60+ valentines was going to be a royal pain, but it ended up being fun.  The kids did much of the work themselves, and were so happy to be creating.  I think that perhaps we will make our valentines every year now.  (Hold me to that next year!)

oodles of monsters

working on valentines is a great opportunity for handwriting practice!

the outside of the monster valentine

the inside of the monster valentine

ella's sweetheart valentines

monsters on crafty crow!

I am super excited...today one of my posts (Monster Mayhem) was featured on the Crafty Crow!  It's an awesome blog with lots of great crafty inspiration!  Be sure to head over and check out all the cool crafty ideas. 

monster mayhem

many small tots are afraid of monsters...this project might be just the ticket to help make monsters a little less scary.  it's also a great opportunity to talk to kids about reality vs. make believe.  and it's just downright fun.
to begin,  i collected several books about monsters that weren't so scary and read them to the kids before starting our monster craft:

all of these books are favorites in our house.  especially Leonardo the Terrible Monster by Mo Willems, it's such a cute story!  And of course Max loves Where the Wild Things Are!
After we read the stories (some of them more than once), I collected our monster making materials.

we used pieces of colored foam (large and small), puff balls, eyeballs, pipe cleaners (we actually ended up ditching these because they were tricky to glue down), scissors, rainbow colored sharpies, tacky glue, and feathers.  the beauty of this particular project though is that you don't need these exact materials.  you can create monsters out of anything you have on hand...construction paper, crayons, empty boxes, empty toilet paper rolls, recycled materials, and the list goes on.  anything goes with monster mayhem!

so i threw all of these materials out on the table and told them to make their own monsters...and encouraged them to be as creative as they could...and they were creative indeed!  that's it, just one direction:  make a monster.

max took a few minutes to think about his monster plans before starting the project.

ella jumped right in and started cutting out body parts for her monster.

sam hardly spoke at all while working on his monster...he was so intent!  and he did not want any help or ideas from anyone.  which is just how it should be when letting the creative juices flow.

monster body

then add a monster head...and other various monster body parts and eyeballs.

and the end result is monster mayhem!

(l-r: ella, sam & max)