Daffodil Crafts With Baking Cups

Daffodil flowers epitomize springtime and exude elegance. Their beautiful, vividly white and yellow colors are eye-catching yet appealing. To celebrate the arrival of spring in your household or classroom, provide children with paper baking cups and other inexpensive items to make creative and simple daffodil flower crafts.

1. Paper Daffodils

   • Provide children with yellow and white paper baking cups. Tell them to flatten one of the cups with their hands, then spread glue in the center of the flattened cup and paste the other cup upright on it to resemble a daffodil flower. Purchase green pipe cleaners or paint ice pop sticks green. To create stems for the flower, have them glue the pipe cleaner or ice pop stick to the bottom of the baking cup.

   Crepe Paper Daffodils

   • Have children roll one end of a green pipe cleaner into a little ball. Cut out a daffodil flower shape from yellow crepe paper, and punch a small hole in the center for the pipe cleaner to go through. Have children cut a yellow paper baking cup in half, roll it until the pleated edges touch, and then glue the edges together. This part will be used to resemble a daffodil's corona, which sticks out the front of the flower. Tell children to punch the rolled part of the pipe cleaner through the hole in the crepe paper daffodil, and then paste the corona in the center to complete the daffodil.

   Yellow Friendship Daffodils

   • Supply each child with a yellow paper baking cup, assorted crayons and a green pipe cleaner. Children will use the baking cup as their daffodil. Have them flatten the cup and use crayons to draw a smiling face in the inside of the cup. Children can tape the green pipe cleaner to the back of the cup for the flower's stem. Tell children to give their daffodil creation to a friend or family member to brighten her day.

   Dandy Daffodils

   • Purchase yellow baking cups and green pipe cleaners from an art supply store. Print a daffodil pattern out for the children, and provide them with yellow crayons to color the pattern. Have them cut out the pattern and glue a yellow baking cup to the center. Use a green pipe cleaner to glue to the back of the pattern for the flower's stem. Children can give the daffodil flower to a friend or relative.

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Paper Engineering Games for Children

Keeping children entertained can be as simple as giving them a piece of paper. There are virtually limitless ways to manipulate and fold paper into a myriad of different shapes and structures. Any project can be made into a game, a contest, or a functional piece of art.

Origami

• The ancient Japanese art of origami can be made into a fun game for children, especially if the final product turns into a medium for competition. Try making boats or jumping frogs to race. The Origami fortune teller is popular with school-aged girls. Brightly-colored paper enhances the experience and gives children the ability to customize their projects.

Paper Airplanes

• Paper airplanes can be as fun to make as they are to fly. Teach the children one or two approaches to making a paper airplane and encourage them to fold their own designs. Decorate with markers or crayons and then have a competition to see whose plane flies fastest or farthest.

Pop-up Books

• Pop-up books can be done easily by cutting out one pop-up section per page. Fold a piece of paper in half, then make two parallel slits with scissors from the fold towards the edges, about 1 inch apart and 1 inch long. Open the folded paper and press the cut part through towards you. Glue any image desired onto this pop-out section. Encourage children to write stories, draw or color pictures of characters or scenes, and then share with everyone once all are finished. Or, have each child create one page in a story you have written together.

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Outside Obstacle Course Ideas

Setting up an obstacle course outside is an easy way to provide your kids with fun exercise. You can create an obstacle course even with things lying around the house--like hurdles made from piles of stuffed animals--or purchase equipment from a store. Either way, you'll want to make sure to encourage a variety of motions, such as crawling, jumping, balancing and running.

Balancing Obstacles

• Balance beams are a fun part of any obstacle course. Balance beams are easy enough to make with a few stacked bricks and a long board. For younger kids, keep the balance beam relatively low, of course--and make sure to test the beam for stability before letting children run over and around it.

  
  

  Jumping and Crawling Obstacles

  
  

  Obstacles that force children to jump around are a popular part of obstacle courses. For more permanent obstacle courses, get a couple of old tires and place them in a zigzag pattern for kids to jump in. For an obstacle course that you're only going to set up for a little while, this can be done with hula hoops as well.

  • If there's a paved area, you can draw hopscotch squares to serve as part of the obstacle course as well.

  Weaving and Steering Obstacles

  • You can use traffic cones or sticks to create a line of obstacles that children have to zigzag around. It's okay to let them run around the traffic cones, but you can add an extra challenge by having them ride a tricycle or a scooter around the obstacles or having them run or walk backwards.

  Water Obstacles

  • Particularly on a hot day, a water obstacle might form the piece de resistance of your obstacle course. You can make a slip-and-slide if you have a hill, or set up a sprinkler at the end as a course finale. You could also set up a wading pool for children to run through.

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Temperature Effects on Polymer Degradation

A polymer is a chain of identical molecules attached to one another, typically in a long line. Each individual unit is known as a "mer," and each mer has between five and 500 atoms in its structure. The minimum number of mers in a row is about 50 for the chemical to be a polymer. Various plastics are polymers, but fossil fuels and other naturally occurring substances can also be polymers. Although polymers, such as plastics, can be very resistant to forms of degradation, such as biological degradation, other polymers, like those in fats, breakdown at quicker rates. Thermal degradation from the effects of heat on a polymer can act in several different ways on a polymer to break it up into pieces and, thereby, affect the structure of the polymer.

Breakdown

• The basic reason by which thermal energy breaks down polymers is because each mer attaches on to the next mer through a chemical bond. This chemical bond holds the two neighboring molecules together with energy. Temperature is a measure of heat energy, and if the heat energy can overcome the energy held in the bond, it can break the two molecules apart and split the polymer strand. This alters the structure of the polymer and the item that the polymer is part of begins to breakdown.

Single Degradation

• A polymer chain is like a string. Temperature effects can change the structure of either end of the string or can act on the middle part. Random initiation is a situation where the polymer breaks in the middle of the chain, at a random point. Terminal initiation describes when one mer at the end of a polymer breaks off and becomes what is known as a monomer. If this process continues, and more monomers break off, then this type of degradation is called depropogation. If a relatively short polymer splits up into all of its individual constituents, this process is called unimolecular termination.

Multiple Degradations

• One single polymer strand may breakdown without interacting with other polymers in the environment, or it may interact with them. Termination by recombination describes a situation where one polymer attaches to another to form a stable product. Another possibility is termination by disproportionation, where two polymers join and then break up into two separate polymers. Alternatively, intermolecular transfer can result if one polymer and one free molecule (a radical that has enough energy to alter other molecules) in the environment interact and produce two polymers and one free molecule.

Radicals

• Many of the degraded strings or monomers that the initial temperature degradation causes can themselves be damaging to the remainder of the polymers in the environment and adversely affect the structure of other, previously unaffected, polymers. The term "radical" applies to these chemicals.

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How to Make Felt Sweets

Felt is a very easy and forgiving material to work with. A crafter can create anything she would like with felt. One very sweet and recognizable theme for felt crafts is sweets. This can be anything from candy to pastries to ice cream. This craft can also be a very quick one using a hot glue gun, which means you can end up having many different sweets done in a day.

Things You'll Need

Felt

Pins

Scissors

Hot glue gun

Hot glue gun sticks

Pillow stuffing

Glitter

Marker

Instructions

1Decide what kind of candy you are going to create. As an example, peppermint candy is a great candy to use for this project. It's iconic, easily recognizable and has a very simple shape. Once you've decided what to create, place two pieces of felt together. Draw an outline of a piece of candy. Pin and cut out.

2Hot glue the edges of the felt pieces together, leaving a small opening for the stuffing. Allow to dry completely. Stuff the inside with craft stuffing. Hot glue the opening shut.

3Add more details like swirls or sprinkles. Details can be cut out of other pieces of different colored felt and hot glued on. If you are creating the peppermint candy mentioned earlier, cut the red swirls out of red felt and hot glue them onto the white surface. Or use confetti or sequins. Glue on white glitter to look like a sugar coating.

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Starfish Preschool Craft

Intro

Many children find starfish, also called sea stars, intriguing. When teaching your preschoolers about starfish, prepare some hands-on crafts to keep them entertained and build fine motor skills while learning more about the oceanic wonders. Awarding the preschoolers with starfish-themed stickers and coloring books for a job well done will also keep them involved in each craft.

Coloring Crafts

• For an easy craft, print pictures of starfish from the Internet and allow the children to color the pictures. Websites like First School have a variety of printable sheets to print for your preschoolers. For added decoration, have the children paint a thin layer of glue on top or around the starfish and sprinkle with sand. If you do not mind a mess, allow the preschooler to paint the starfish pictures. You can also purchase white starfish from your local craft store and give the children paint pens to color their very own starfish.

Hand Crafts

• Have the preschoolers hold their hands in the air with their fingers spread apart. Explain how their hands have five points just like a starfish has five points. Tell the children starfish use their five points to move across the bottom of the ocean. Have each preschooler place his hand on a piece of card stock paper and trace it so that it resembles a starfish. Ask them to paint glue on the starfish and give each child a small bowl of star-shaped pasta. Tell him to glue the pasta to the inside of the star. After the glue dries, help the preschoolers cut the starfish out, poke a hole in the top for a piece of string and hang up.

Playdough Crafts

• Give each child a tub of playdough to make a starfish shape. Explain to your preschoolers that starfish have no bones so they are squishy, just like the playdough. After the children get the correct shape of the starfish, give them play sand and small seashells to decorate the starfish. They can press the sand and miniature shells into the starfish to create a rough texture. The children can also lay the starfish on a piece of cardboard and use the shells and sand to decorate around the outside of the starfish.

Jewelry Crafts

• Preschoolers can make their own starfish jewelry using glue, paper clips and sand or glitter. Help each preschooler draw a starfish shape with glue on a sheet of wax paper. Bend a paper clip into a V-shape and place it at the end of one of the starfish's arms. Have the preschooler sprinkle the starfish with light brown glitter or sand. Allow the glue to dry overnight and peel the glue starfish off the wax paper. String yarn through the paper clip to create a necklace. The preschoolers can do the same thing to make starfish bracelets and anklets.

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