A Big (squashed) Bug

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and today’s activity is …. indoors!

Ellen found a craft book at a friend’s house a few weeks ago and asked if she could ‘borrow it’. (This is the book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Playtime-Activities-Usborne-Ray-Gibson/dp/0746033400/ref=lh_ni_t?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1WSHNM3OXLQNF, published in 1998 but still available)

In Ellen-speak ‘borrow’ means ‘I want to take this and I have no intention of ever giving it back’.  Luckily the friend is very understanding and patient because Ellen seems to want to work through every single activity in its 128 pages.  Over the past few weeks we have made a caterpillar, a hanging fish, an octopus puppet, a snake card and today Ellen decided we would make a big bug.

At the moment with RDI I am working on helping Ellen to co-ordinate her actions with mine.  Craft activities are a great way of co-ordinating activities – we can splodge the paint on together, stick things together and it’s much harder for Ellen to race ahead because she has to wait for me to be ready otherwise the task can’t be completed.

Another bonus of all this crafting is that Ellen is much better now at coping with getting paint on her fingers and it’s a good job because the painting got pretty messy.  We also discovered that sellotape doesn’t stick very well onto wet paint but that wet paint sticks very well to newspaper.

After twenty minutes of frenzied activity we were done.  This is what it should have looked like…

How the bug should have looked…..

And this is what ours looked like…

Ellen’s rather squashed looking bug

Which I admit looks more like an alien than a bug.  I am very tempted to place it in the porch and see if I can scare hubby when he swans home later tonight from his latest trip abroad…after all imagine what it would look like in the dark… 😉