Birdy

I adore birds.

Well....I don't have them as pets, thank goodness.

When I knew I wanted to throw Kristen her baby shower and one of her fabrics had yellow birds on it I went with that theme! Some may say I went overboard :)

I am not an artist by any means....painting is not on my list of hobbies.

I decided to give this little project a shot and thought it would be great it if worked out and no big deal if it turned out terrible.

This project was fabulous because it was basically FREE!

I just picked up a couple bottles of acrylic paint at JoAnn.

My dad had a scrap piece of plywood and I drew an outline of a bird in pencil.

He cut out the bird, I'm assuming with a jigsaw.  

I did 2-3 coats of light grey.

Then added multiple coats of orange for the feet and beak.

Luckily I had a circle template at home that I used to make the yellow circles on the birdy.

Painting on my granite counter was not the best plan....I was scraping little dots of paint off my counter for days.....

Added a little black eye!

The last step was to add the white and black highlights.

I love how he turned out!

Now I want to make them all the time.  

How cute would an Easter egg be?  Or a pumpkin?  There might be a lot more of these in my future.

You're Invited!

I searched for a very long time to find the perfect baby shower invitations for Kristen's bird themed shower.  I wanted them to coordinate with her nursery and be absolutely adorable. 

I could not find anything!!

So.....Kristen encouraged me to make them.

I am so glad I did. They were so fun to put together (Kristen even volunteered to help) and turned out pretty cute.

I cut two rectangular pieces of black and textured grey paper for the first two layers. 

I then printed the words on white paper and cut out the shape on my cricut.

I loved the little grey and yellow birds. I can't get enough!

Then I cut out a black branch and polka dot leaves on my cricut.

Most of the invitations were hand delivered at work so I stamped their name on a little tag and tied it around the invitation with yellow ribbon.

"A little birdie told me a baby boy is on the way..."

I think I will make handmade invitations from now on, it was so easy and fun!

Birds, dogs, and kids galore!

I know I say it every time but things are crazy at school!  I hate that when I finally have a chance to sit down and update the blog I am posting things from over a week ago, I need to work on that! I don't know how these woman post something adorable and crafty every day!

We have been studying animals in science for the past couple weeks.  This last week we made birds and a nest and wrote about them.  I love how they turned out!

 The first step was for the kids to paint one side solid brown.

 Then they glued various materials to the paper plate to make it look like a nest.

(FYI- you will have nest materials all over your classroom for days...)

The last step was to glue pom poms to popsicle sticks and add googly eyes and paper beaks.

Each student wrote various facts about  birds and we attached the nest to the top of the paper and put them out in the hall!

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 Every year our school has a book parade, it is one of my favorite days of the school year.

This year our class chose the book Name That Dog! It is a precious book that has dogs from A to Z and they each have a poem about them. We have been studying poetry in reading so it was ideal. Each class dresses up as the characters in the book and creates a poster. 

I cut out the letters on my cricut and then passed it on to a sweet mom who created the rest of the poster for us.

 Since the book cover is framed pictures of dogs we picked up some $1 store frames and printed pictures of the dogs in our class!  Poncho was featured twice :)

 I thought this was adorable- his mom made a little dog house with a dog bone for him to carry in the parade, so creative!

 The kids were extremely excited!  It was a real challenge to get all 21 of them to pose for a picture. 

The beginning of the parade...

Here are some pictures from the previous book parades:

Last year we read the serious of chapter books about Clementine.  

It is a wonderful book to read to your class.

 He was asparagus!

My first year we did a Magic School Bus book and we had the best poster! Too bad I can't find those pictures.

I can't get enough of children's books. I might get more excited than my second graders do about the book parade.