Wanna-be Crafty Mom - Leprechaun Trap

When I heard we had to make a leprachaun trap for my son's pre-K class, my thought was "How big is this thing supposed to be?" I know leprachauns are small but still the size of my son, right? Hopefully not the size of the leprachaun we saw at Pier 39 in San Francisco, who would require a large net and a big box!!

My kids were too afraid to take photos with this guy

After doing some online research, I will show you what we came up with. Everything we bought at Michael's. You will need:

2 packs of wooden discs

Glittery Gold Paint and a paintbrush

2 paper plates, one for your paint, the other to place your painted discs

A box (a shoebox will do

Foil, to cover your box inside and out to make it shiny

Stickers to decorate the trap

Some Easter basket grass, some glue, tape and a 4 inch stick/branch

Super easy. I had Ryan paint all the discs on one side. We let them dry on a paper plate. When they were dry, we flipped them over and painted the other side. He really enjoyed this part.

Meanwhile, we wrapped foil around our box, on the outside and lined the inside and taped it in place.

Then, we took the Easter basket grass, spread it around on the inside of the box (after squirting some Elmer's glue around haphazardly inside).

We placed the dried gold coins amongst the blades of "grass".

Ryan decorated the outside with shamrock stickers.

We took our stick, which we broke off a tree branch from our yard, and propped up our lid.

***If you are using a shoe box, use a stick that is about 2-3 inches taller than the box "bottom" so it will be propped up. Put the lid of the box on the bottom. You can always poke a little divet in the top and bottom of the box to keep the stick in place.

This was really fun and my son was occupied for a while with the painting. He also loved sticking the stickers on. I let him tape the foil in place, the putting the foil around the box and measuring it out is really the only part I did on my own. This project cost about $8.

What fun St. Patrick's Day projects are you working on at your house? How do you celebrate?

Wannabe Crafty Mom

Ok, I'm not crafty. I wish I was. I think so many crafts look like they'd be so fun to make. I see entire blogs that are devoted to crafts, and it's apparent I am just missing that gene.

My son who is in preschool needed to do a Turkey project this month. No specific guidelines. Just a turkey that we create as a family. I saw this adorable clay project online and thought it looked like something I would enjoy. Not that this assignment was supposed to be "all about me", but I thought this assignment was a good excuse to explore my crafty side. For about $12, we made this clay turkey that now sits on our fireplace mantle for us to enjoy for as long as we'd like. Better yet, this clay doesn't harden or crack, so when we are tired of it my kids can turn it into anything they want. Pretty good deal.

Here is our finished product:

We put it in a box to transport to school. It wasn't hard to make at all and we had fun. My lil Monkey rolled the clay into two balls for the head and body and stuck on the eyes and inserted the feathers. I was just on hand for some fine tuning and did the toes and gobbler which required a bit more fine motor skills.

I can't take all the credit for coming up with the idea. I found it on this site called Kaboose. I'm pretty proud of me and my boy for pulling it off.  Have you made anything fun and easy with your kids for Thanksgiving? Gobble gobble!