Lately my little toddler has blossomed into a full blown little kid! It has been a crazy time for all of us, and as hilarious and cute as Pen may be, we definitely needed to find some things to occupy her time since she is growing out of a lot of her simpler toys.  Since she will be stating preschool in the near future I felt inclined to create some educational activities for her.  I remembered those manila folder games from kindergarten that were so much fun, I thought those would be perfect for my three year old.  After searching the internet and only finding massive hoards of hideous clip art and horrendously illustrated folder games, I then realized I could create my own in the same time it takes to do a search on google (it’s sad when I don’t realize these things sooner).

I foolishly decided to started with the alphabet.  Don’t get me wrong, it turned out just how I imagined, but it was a little ambitious for my first project (I am as far from a scrap booking, crafty type person as you can get).  It only took me a few minutes to draw out the little birds and nests, but since the color on my printer is broken I would have to color everything by hand. But not only that, I would also have to cut out all these little nests and birds.  And with two sets of the 26-letter alphabet, my 10  minute project ate up my whole nap time, and then some.

Lessons learned this time around: create simple shapes, get a new printer so I can color on the computer, and do something easier, like numbers or shapes.

All complaining aside, Penny and I had a fun time water coloring and gluing them together. She is also learning her lower case letter too, which is important.  And the birds turned out really cute 🙂

It is an uppercase-lowercase matching game I like to call “Alphabirds.”

I’m working on a few more file folder concepts and will hopefully have them available for downloading soon.

Our next project was to make stick puppets of our family!  I sat down with Penny at the computer, and she dictated what she wanted to look like (she was very specific about the super girl cape).  After drawing all of us, we printed them out, taped some sticks on, and started putting on shows!  Penny thought it was super awesome that she was playing with a puppet of herself, and then started requesting all sorts of puppets to go along with our first set!  Birds, pandas, puppies, etc.  Don’t worry, we’ll get to those soon Pen!  After we color this set, we laminate them and make them a little more durable.  It is amazing how a piece of paper and a stick can make a child so happy.

Here’s Penny’s first puppet show!

I’m looking forward to all the other fun projects I have formulating in my mind!  Now, to find the time to actually do them…