Excited to have Laura here to share with us today for the new 10 Things Kids Love Post this week. I am just in love with her pouch cap creations. I must say I want to try them all. I hope you will stop by and check out her blog to see all the fun they get into over there. Now have a look for your self at all these brilliant ideas.
I’m so excited to be guest posting on FSPDT today! It is a blog I have followed even before I had my own and has inspired so much fun at our house! Today I’m here to tell you about my latest obsession: Pouch Cap Crafts.
Between our 3 year old daughter and our 9 month old son, we go through a good number of apple sauce and baby food pouches. I can never bring myself to get rid of the caps and lately I’ve been going a little crazy finding ways to use them. Seriously…crazy. Keeping-me-awake-at-night-with-excitement kind of crazy. So without further ado, here are some of the ways we have been playing and learning with pouch caps!
10 Pouch Caps Crafts & Activities
1. Color Sorting
We had a lot of these caps…before my obsession took hold. They are so vibrant that they lend themselves to color sorting right away. If you don’t have containers that match all the colors cut construction paper into circles and place them in the bottom of muffin tins or color spots on paper for the kids to sort and stack the caps onto.
We made theseweeks ago and my daughter started saying, “Mommy would you like to have a picnic with me and my little buddies?” So we’ve been calling them Bug Buddies and using them for all sorts of pretend play. All you need are some pouch caps, pipe cleaners (chenille stems) and sharpies. Twist the pipe cleaners around the spokes of the caps and trim as you go. Great minds think alike… An Educator’s Spin on It made some to use for alphabet activities.
After we made our Bugs, I had the pleasure of meeting fellow blogger Georgina from Craftulatefor a playdate with her son. The kids were playing with some of her home made play dough and she laid out some googlie eyes for the kids to add. “Everything is better with googlie eyes,” she said, and of course she is right! I told her about how I tried gluing googlie eyes on our bugs but they didn’t stay. She suggested hot glue, and they did stay on much better. So…hot glue and googlie eyes are optional and fun!
3. Book Character Puppets
Once we added in the googlie eyes, we really got going. Eric Carle’s birthday just happened so I’d bumped some of our favorite titles by him into high rotation. This gave me the idea to extend our book reading with a Very Busy Spider activity. I used another pouch cap, come pom poms, pipe cleaners and googlie eyes for the spider. We have used it to act out the book with various toy animals and we used craft sticks and string to weave our own web.
If you’d like to see the step by step instructions, I’ll post the pictures at Lalymom but it is pretty much just this: cut 2 pipe cleaners roughly in half, weave them through the cap to look like legs, hot glue eyes and small red pom pom onto a larger green pom pom, once dry glue green pom pom into the pouch cap, making sure the glue touches the legs to for extra grip.
4. Muppets
How can you look at a pom pom nose and googlie eyes and not think of these guys? All it takes is 2 pouch caps, a pipe cleaner, googlie eyes and a pom pom or craft foam for the nose. I did not glue the caps together, they are held together only by the pipe cleaner but if you don’t have pipe cleaners you could try just hot gluing the caps together or using twist ties. You could also add a pipe cleaner body…I tried but the heads were so heavy that they wouldn’t stand. I’d probably try attaching a couple more pouch caps as feet but believe it or not we didn’t have anymore in those colors! We made some other muppets too…I’ll post them up at Lalymom.com as soon as I can!
5. Prince and Princess Wands
These used extra large “milkshake straws” that we found in the seasonal aisle at Mariano’s when they had summer BBQ items on display. I imagine these would work as pencil toppers as well, but you would either need to glue them or find larger pencils. We used construction paper for the hair and constructed them like the Comet Wand below but I left more of the paper in the front to look like bangs.
We played with these a lot…dancing, singing, having picnics, etc. Ladybug gave the princess a haircut, which was great scissors practice (although our plastic safety scissors did not cut well on the small strips of hair, we needed metals safety scissors). We also decorated the crowns and bodies with glitter glue. Note that once it dried the glitter glue peels right off without even trying.
6. Clown or Rudolph Nose
Pretty simple, just tie a length of string through the cap. Although check to be sure the plastic ridges from opening the pouch are bent back or removed. They can be a little rough. I rubbed it against my own nose and pushed with my fingers on the plastic ridges until I didn’t feel any parts poking my nose. This is popular in our house year round because my daughter loves to play Rudolph.
7. Comet Wand
If you are learning about shooting stars these would be fun to let the kids run around with outside to let the wind blow the trail behind it. I did not glue this on initially and the thickness of the paper held the cap on pretty well but I would suggest using some glue if you don’t have a delicate fragile flower of a daughter like I do. She bumped it on the wall while she was running and it popped off so we glued it back on. Also my daughter is not prone to playing with things as weapons but I could see this becoming one. It MAY have been used as a microphone, drum mallet and xylophone mallet though… J You can also make this into a patriotic Fireworks Wand.
8. Monsters
This time we used a bigger googlie eye and one pipe cleaner. Start by bending the pipe cleaner lightly in half and on either side of the halfway point, form the horns. Send the stems of the pipe cleaner through the cap from top to bottom (or in terms of the monster, from the front of his face to the back of his head) and twist the long stems in back to secure the horns where you want them. Then bend the stems to form the arms and legs. Hot glue the eye in, trying to get a little on the bottom edge of the pipe cleaner (where his eye lashes would be) and squish the eye in by pressing the center, trying to get the glue to come up around the side a little bit (hold it for a minute while it cools) and you’re good to go!
9. Bingo, Board Game and Printable Worksheet Markers
Pretty self explanatory. It would have helped if my printer was working, but I just drew this one up on my own. An alphabet card is perfect for us to reinforce letters with my daughter.
10. Flowers
This one is just a flower shape cut out of craft foam. I snipped an asterisk type shape in the center so that the hot glue would have something to grip onto, instead of cutting a round hole. Ladybug requested that we put it in a glass for a vase next to her other flower. It has also been used as a microphone. 🙂
About Lalymom
I’m Laura, a Chicago stay at home mom to a 3 year old and a 9 month old. I am always on the lookout for fun educational activities for my kids, whether they are the ones I dream up or the ones I find on my favorite blogs. Fun facts about me: My favorite color is sky blue. I once won a car in a radio promotion. The song Send Me on My Way by Rusted Root makes me so happy that I call it musical coffee. Last but not least, I’d love to see you again! Come check us out! Here is my blog www.Lalymom.blogspot.com, my Facebook Page, my Pinterest Page, my Google+ page and of course Twitter. Thanks so much for having me Jaime, and thanks for the continued inspiration!
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This is a fabulous collection! Pinning and sharing immediately! Oh, and thanks for the mention. 😉