Red, White and Blue fun

This week I decided to do a red, white and blue project since tomorrow is July 4th.

The first project we did was based on a t-shirt I saw in Family Fun Magazine. Yep, I have it on my pinterest board. The concept is a reverse stencil. You decide what you want to have as the focus of your shirt and make the design with contact paper. For this project I made each child a USA and then made a ton of stars of differing sizes. The children then added the USA and the stars in whatever design they wanted.

When all contact paper design is done (and pushed down to ensure the edges are firmly sealed), begin painting. In the original directions they watered down fabric paint and added it to squirt bottles. I decided that 6 kids with squirt bottles full of paint sounded like a recipe for disaster. I altered it and used the watered down fabric paint with sponges.





When they were done we put the shirts out in the sun to dry.



When they were dry we removed the contact paper. I decided to go around all the USA's with a black sharpie marker to make them "pop". After everyone left, I decided to go over Blake and Colby's stars too.



You can see that some kids got a lot more elaborate in their designs, but they all came out really cute and are super unique. Our second project I found on Pinterest, are you on Pinterest... no? why not? When I was a teacher I used to play a game similar to this called race to 100. This one is called shape fill-in. Give 2 children one game board, which is a grid of any shape, I used stars and flags. Each child needs a crayon and the pair needs a die. The children take turns rolling the die. They then fill in that many squares on the board. You can make it a competition if you want having the one who colors the most as the winner.



If you want to modify this: you can use a deck of cards (1-10), have them roll two dice and add them together, have each child do their own board with two colors, use a 12 sided die, or any other variation you want.