Catching Bugs!

We finished up our bug fun over the weekend. With being sick in the beginning of the week we really didn’t do much until the end of the week. And of course everything was painted so we had to wait for things to dry. But we ended up with some cute little bugs to help welcome spring to the playroom.

 

We started with a dragonfly. I really wanted to make a dragonfly last year but couldn’t find an art project I liked and that Belle could do. This year I came up with this one. We started by painting a Popsicle (craft) stick. Belle picked out pink, this is going to be our dragonfly’s body.



 

 

While the dragonfly was drying we started working on our lily pad that our dragonfly will sit on. We painted a small paper plate green. We painted the back side of the plate. Once the plate was dry I cut out a small triangle from the plate to give it a lily pad shape. We crumpled up some pink tissue paper to make the flower on top of the lily pad.

 

For the wings we used wax paper. I cut out the wings making 2 smaller and 2 larger wings. We glued the wings to the back of the Popsicle stick. The two smaller on top and the two larger on the bottom. Belle added the eyes. Once the wings were stuck on their pretty well we were able to glue our dragonfly onto the lily pad. We probably could have skipped the flower and centered the dragonfly so it sticks out a little more. But it gave us practice for the lily pad we will most likely make when we do pond week.

The next bug we made was a cute friendly little lady bug. Again we painted the backside of a paper plate, this time red. Once it was dry I cut a large triangle from the plate to make the wings. I had previously cut a circle from black construction paper for the head and small black circles for the lady bugs spots.

 

Belle glued on the head to the underside of the plate and then glued all the black spots on to the plate. We added googly eyes and hung our lady bug friend onto the closet door.

Our last bug we made was a spider. But not a creepy crawly spider, an adorable little spider. To start we painted Belle’s hands with blue paint and pressed them onto white paper with the backs of her palms touching and fingers spread. Her palms made up the spider’s body and her fingers the spiders legs. I painted her thumbs not thinking, we should have omitted them. Opps.

While we waited for Belle’s handprints to dry we started on the spider web that our spider was going to sit on. We took dark blue construction paper and used white glue to make a spider web design. We then dumped (seriously she dumped the whole bottle) some glitter onto the glue.

When everything was dry, we left the spider web to dry overnight, we cut out Belle’s hand prints and added some eyes to our spider. We then glued him onto his spider web. We tried using glue stick to glue the spider on but it wouldn’t stick to the glitter so we ended up using white glue instead and it worked great.

 

While playing outside in the beautiful weather we had before it got cold again Belle wanted to use her bug catcher we got from the dollar bins at Target. First Belle hates bugs and freaks out if an ant crawls to close to her. So when she said she wanted to bug catcher it was a big surprise but it was a dollar. I wasn’t sure if we were going to see any bugs to catch but after a few minutes we saw an ugly caterpillar on the sidewalk. We picked some grass and twigs to put in our bug catcher. We laid a twig next to him to climb on and the put him into the catcher. He mostly hid under the grass and twigs but Belle loved checking in on him every few minutes to see how he was doing. After daddy came home from work and Belle showed him her bug she caught we let him go in the grass in our back yard.

Now that we have a ton of bugs all over the playroom we are ready to add flowers and bring some in some spring. Hopefully spending the next two weeks on some spring flowers it will bring back the spring weather and it will stick around this time.