Making Paper

I feel like paper making is one of those activities we've done a lot but don't really get tired of. As I was looking back at old posts, I discovered we haven't really done it that often, but we've talked about it a lot and have done it in different contexts (like for our Japan Unit, and for our Ancient Egypt Unit).

This time I decided to order a kit just to streamline the process a little. Last time I used a big tub for the pulp mix, and a homemade screen, but I threw all that stuff out when we moved! I settled on this paper making kit from Amazon and we were really happy with it.

With as little printing as was actually on our paper, it turned out surprisingly…greyish. But it was still pretty!

Making the pulp

Sandwiching the paper between the screens

Sponging the water out

Paper all laid out to dry. How fun!

Making Paper Flowers

There are tons of paper flower tutorials online! This was the basic tutorial we used. It's not QUITE as easy as the video makes it seem (is it ever?) but it wasn't hard, and once the kids got the hang of it they had fun customizing their flowers and trying to make specific kinds. I love Goldie's dandelions, above, with even one of them that's gone to seed!

Daisy made a black-eyed Susan and some baby's breath.

They were teeeeeny! I don't know if you can tell how small.

She even put it on a real flower stem

Sometimes, as here, we forgot to round of the tips of the petals. It doesn't look as good.

Fun activity!

Marbled Paper Jupiters

While looking for activity ideas, I ran across this post about Marbled Jupiters and was intrigued by the idea. We've done paper marbling before and I've always wanted to revisit it, since it didn't work perfectly last time (but was still fun!). This is also just the sort of thing that I only manage to gear up for if I have to, for a school unit! I am not normally a person who loves to do crafts with children, but when I make the effort, the kids always have so much fun!

The "marbled Jupiters" post has some instructions about paper marbling, but I thought it was explained even better here. In case that link ever breaks, here are the basic instructions:

1. Pour 2 cups of liquid starch (you get it in a large bottle by the laundry products in any grocery store--it looks like this) in a wide pan, then add 1/2 tsp alum, stirring until mixed. The alum helps the paint stick to your paper, and I think this is a key ingredient we were missing last time we tried marbling paper! The paint clung to our paper (we used cardstock, but I've also read that watercolor paper works well) much better this time!

2. Take several colors of acrylic paint and put several drops each into bowls or paper cups, one color per bowl. Mix a little water into each color of paint to thin it and make it easier to drop.

3. With an eye-dropper or just with a spoon, drop several drops of the paint onto the top of the liquid starch/alum solution.

4. Gently swirl and marble the paint with a skewer or a plastic knife. (At this point, since we were making Jupiters, we also tried to make some storm-like features, and even a Great Red Spot.)

5. Lay a sheet of paper gently on top of the starch/paint bath, pressing down firmly. You can submerge the paper slightly.

6. Rinse the paper in a clear water bath. (The paint won't wash off—amazingly! Because of the alum, I think.)

7. Lay the paper on a flat surface to dry, but be careful—the starch will make it sticky and once it dries it may stick to your surface! Maybe we'll try using wax paper as a drying surface next time.

This was a really fun projects and we LOVED our finished Jupiters! We hung them up on our bulletin board for display.

Ladybug Models

Ladybugs are so cute that it's easy to find crafts featuring them! People have ladybug birthday parties, etc., and there are all kinds of cute ideas. I was looking for one that had some degree of accuracy and not ONLY cuteness! This ladybug was a combination of a couple of other crafts I saw (chiefly this darling birthday party invitation) and it's a good illustration of the most prominent feature of the order coleoptera, which ladybugs and other beetles belong to: their hard shell-like outer wings which protect the thin inner wings. Coleoptera means "sheath wing," and in ladybugs, the red and black outer wings (or yellow and black, or whatever) are the "sheath," and the clear inner wings are the ones they use for actual flying.

These paper ladybugs have a colored outer wing, with clear wings (we used waxed paper) underneath and then their colored thoraxes and abdomens underneath that. Some of the children made legs, antennae, and probosces out of pipe cleaner, too.

As I mentioned elsewhere, we had fun making a larger number of "crafts" than usual during this unit. I leaned more toward the younger grades when choosing activities, because those types of resources were easy to find, and for Junie and Daisy's sake (and Marigold always wanted to join in too). But it surprised me how much the older boys enjoyed working on this type of thing as well. They would often spend quite a lot of time coloring or gluing and making everything just right. I think they found it kind of satisfying, and they seemed quite (quietly) proud of their finished projects.

I let the children use any colors they wanted for their ladybugs, since in real life they do come in a rainbow of colors!

Daisy wore her beetle shirt many, many of the days during this unit. She liked to accessorize with her dragonfly and butterfly hair clips as well. Here she is posing with her "I'm big" expression (she told me).

I liked Malachi's tiny ladybug, too.

Other Insect Crafts

We made a whole hive-ful of origami bees one day. We used a book from the library that had patterns for several origami insects, but you can find some similar instructions here. Here are some harder origami insects you could make. Maybe we'll attempt those sometime.

We made dragonflies by coloring clothespins with sharpies, and then gluing waxed paper wing shapes inside the clothespins. They went fast and were quite fun to make. There are lots of variations of this craft online--I liked that we didn't have to get out the paint for ours. :) But this one with pipe cleaner wings is really cute, as is this one.

Daisy had to make matching mommy-and-baby ones with some tiny clothespins, of course. :)

This is a little model of how insects move their wings: not by muscles within the wings themselves, like birds, but by contracting and flexing their thorax to make the wings vibrate. There is a lesson plan, and instructions for this model, here.

Pillbug/Roly-Poly Craft

Before we got into learning about actual insects, we spent a few days talking about things that seem like insects. Things like spiders, pillbugs, worms, millipedes, etc. I had had the "spiders aren't insects" fact drilled into me sufficiently, but I never knew that pillbugs are crustaceans (like crabs!), and it was good to review just how else these "bug-like" creatures are alike and different from each other.

For one activitiy, we made these cute little pillbugs that roll up into balls. The instructions are here, and it's fairly simple: cut seven triangles of equal size and join them with a paper fastener so the segments can slide under each other. Cute.

Weaving

After we learned about the fibers that make up different fabrics, we learned about how those fibers are spun and woven together to make fabrics. And of course, when learning about weaving, it is always fun to make paper baskets! These woven hearts are traditional decorations for Danish Christmas trees (my Danish grandmother had a whole tree full of lovely red and white ones) and, while they're slightly more complicated then just a regular double-sided woven paper mat, they aren't too hard. We had made them before so we were quite good at it! This template made them even easier.

After getting the hang of the basic "over-under-over-under" idea in weaving, we were ready to get a little more complicated. My friend let us borrow a tiny American Girl loom (I think it was for the Kirsten doll) that has a shuttle, beater, gears, and all the parts you need. That was really fun. We finally understood the warp and the weft and how the shuttle interacts with the threads to separate and lift them. Sebastian was probably the most persistent, but we all took turns weaving and making a couple of cute little woven doll sashes.

I can totally see why weaving is getting popular these days. It is really fun! Even on a doll-sized loom.

We also used my sari to demonstrate different ways that a length of woven fabric could be worn and tied and draped once it's made. There were a lot of draped styles in ancient times that didn't require sewing or much fastening at all!

Paper Airplanes (Paper Gliders)

As if one didn't have enough paper airplanes being made around one's house already! But, of course, there are so many variations on the basic paper glider. You can learn a lot from making them! There are tons of tutorials on YouTube, all promising to be the best, longest, fanciest flier in some way. My boys enjoyed making this one that looks like an F-22.

This shows how to make a paper "jet."

Here's another good model.

As I mentioned on another post, this site shows how to make a paper glider that uses flaps and elevators to move in different ways. It's a good hands-on way to experiment with how and why these surfaces affect the plane the way they do.

This site has a bunch of interesting glider designs.

This is an interesting little glider, made with two paper hoops! It works surprisingly well. Instructions here.