Today I have a blogger here who you must meet if you have kids. Rachel, the mom behind I Heart Crafty Things, does activities with her kids which truly inspire me to do more with my children. Most of Rachel’s activities revolve around children’s literature and corresponding learning projects. (I decided to say learning projects instead of art projects since following directions, cutting, and tracing are all such important skills for little ones to learn.) Some of my favorite I Heart Crafty Things posts are Paper Plate Pirates, Red Light, Green Light Activities (wonderful beginning math concepts in this post), and the Piggy Snacks . So without furth ado…here’s Rachel.

Hi, I’m Rachel from I Heart Crafty Things. I discovered Big D & Me about a month ago and after reading about her recent Boot Camp experience, I knew she was my kind of gal. Her sense of humor is just what a stay at home Mom of 3 needs to help keep me sane on those unbearable days! That is why I was sooooo excited when Jennifer asked me to guest post.

After having my first child, I found myself in this “Oh my gosh, I have no talents or interests in my life” kind of slump, and quickly discovered an unfounded passion within myself for children’s literature and crafting. I can honestly say that over the years it is what has kept me sane and happy as a Mother. I was not a creative or imaginative child at all, and being able to instill some of that into my children has made me a really proud Mommy. Over at I Heart Crafty Things you will read about fun children’s crafts coupled with children’s books. Like when we created these Band-Aid Fireflies to go along with “The Very Lonely Firefly” by Eric Carle.

or our Eric Carle inspired Very Hungry Caterpillar’s…

I also try to keep things fun for my First Grader too with projects like this “Out of this World” Craft.

This past week I’ve been reviewing shapes with my Preschooler. We read the fun book “My Heart is like a Zoo” by Michael Hall.

It is a fabulous children’s story where the author creates animals out of heart shapes. Each page displays a different animal with descriptions that include feelings like “snappy as a crab” and “angry as a bear”. Reading this story was a great opportunity to talk about feelings, but also to review one of our shapes, the heart.

Going through every page in the story we tried to count how many hearts were used to create each animal and then we picked which one was our very favorite animal at the end of the story. The back of the story the author shows how to create the lion animal and I thought, “Hey, we can totally do that!” So using my book as a guide, I printed off several different sized hearts to create some of the animals we found in the book.

After printing off the hearts, we colored and cut them all out. I was in charge of cutting out all the tiny hearts. I knew the little hands would have a hard time with those. Then we took a brief recess as I attended to my cute baby girl (who has morning hair haha) who secretly got a hold of an orange marker and pretty much had the time of her life…

Then we picked out some colorful construction paper to glue our hearts on (I cut sheets of construction paper in half because we didn’t need the whole sheet).

I did a little bit of cutting on some of the hearts, using the book as my guide.

The kids got busy putting glue on all the hearts.

And we placed them on our paper to create some super fun animals all out of hearts. We used black circles made from a hole punch for our eyes.