Made it Myself Monday: Easter kid crafts

With all the heavy posts lately (dare I even call it lately, when it was probably a month ago? Maybe I should say, "with all the heavy thinking I've been doing lately, that will at some point turn into posts that may even be thought-through....") -- I thought I'd just post a quick couple of pictures of our Easter crafts. We had a blast doing them, and I need a bit of something from the lighter side right now.

We stayed home from church on palm Sunday -- I had just returned from a business trip (at 4:00 am!) to very very sick kids. The kids were not only way too sick to go to church, we were just wiped out in general. (Poor Chester had sick kids by himself while I was gone -- what a hero!) The kids don't mind staying home, because they get to do extra cool crafts when they have a whole Sunday morning at home with Mom and Dad. Dad does the lesson, and Mom scrambles to find an appropriate, somewhat related craft.

On Palm Sunday, Chester chose to do a lesson on "Jesus is the good shepherd". He told a story illustrating the differences between a good shepherd and a bad shepherd, then read a short passage from John on Jesus being The Good Shepherd. Naturally, I thought of making sheep for a craft. So we took an old CD, covered it with white felt, added a black face, legs and tail, and some cotton wool and called it a sheep. Of course, the kids then proceeded to decide they wanted different animals than just sheep. So here's what we made. They ended up surprisingly cute. (We added a pink tongue to the yellow dog after taking this picture, he looked much better with it until Matt ripped his eyes off).




On Easter, I had the lesson for the preschool class at our church. They're a rowdy group that likes to make things, and it didn't take me long to settle on making "eggimals" (from Family Fun magazine). I thought it would go well with a "new creatures in Christ" theme, and tied it in with the resurrection by noting that if Christ hadn't risen from the dead, He couldn't give us new life.

So we gave our Easter eggs "new life" as other animals. It didn't go super smoothly (mostly due to the glue setting up more slowly than I had hoped), but they were popular anyway. Here's a smattering of a few animals (we made about 18 as a class of 10 kids). Shown is a green dog, a purple and red skunk, a blue dog, a pink pig and a yellow dog. There were also cats in the mix -- which looked about like the skunk with a more dog-like tail and no white stripe. Once the glue set up, they're really quite sturdy, and the kids like to play with them. I was surprised that the skunk was by far the most desirable animal for the preschool SS class!