Dear Reader,
Hope your Thanksgiving was a good one! Ours was definitely busy. It is nice to spend time with family, though. Before we headed off to all our festivities, we needed some preschool-level distraction! So I pulled out the construction paper and printed off a corn template (free download by clicking here). while I was using it to cut out the cob and husk, I handed my preschooler some orange, white and brown paint and an orange and red(ish?) sheet of construction paper and let her paint.
while it was drying, I had her help me glue the pieces onto our main page. First the cob and then the husks. You could wait for the husks if you wanted to, since all the corn kernels are supposed to be inside the husk, but a)it was a good distraction while paint dried, and b) my little artist is an all-or-nothing type and would want to put a lot of “kernels” down where they’d be hidden. this made it easier to glue before as opposed to after.
After the paint was completely dried, I handed her my hole punch and told her to make me some confetti. This step was pretty hard for my preschooler, but she is working on her grip strength, so it was good exercise for her. She would do a couple on her own, and then I’d put my hand on hers and apply the pressure needed to keep going. Then it was onto working on our pincer grasp!
Once you have enough “kernels” punched out, cover your corn cob portion in glue stick or glitter glue. You could use liquid school glue but it makes the construction paper get a little wrinkly, so proceed with caution. the pro to school glue vs glue stick is that the modern idea of a glue stick is kinda weaksauce and a huge disappointment with how quick it dries. (seriously, Elmers. You fail. You don’t care. But you are not as good as you used to be). Then have your kiddo sprinkle the confetti onto the cob. Get a good coating and then press it down with your palms so that it’ll stick when you lift up the page to let anything that didn’t get glued down slide off.
As you can see, I lifted up the flaps a little so all the kernels ended up under the green husks. I didn’t do that for the title picture, if you want to compare. I also let her make it her own with a pen. She doesn’t like drawing or coloring at all, so any chance she’ll take to use a pen or pencil or crayon or anything is a score. It’s another way to strengthen her struggling pincer grasp.
Anyway, she had fun and it kept her busy instead of asking me if it was time to go yet or eat yet or any of the million other questions.
