Cheap and easy Mother's day gifts kids can make

Mother's day is one of my favorite days of the year!  I am reminded of how lucky I am to be a mom and have 2 wonderful kids! At school, I also love to help my students create fun gifts for their moms.  The trick is to come up with cheap and easy Mother's day gifts kids can make, especially when you are buying supplies for 20-30 kiddos.  Here are a few ideas:

Flower pens!  Simple and easy and great for preschoolers and kindergarten students.  All you need is a plastic flower, a pen, and some floral tape.  I buy all the supplies at the dollarstore.  Crafts for all seasons has a great tutorial.

Personalized mugs! These mugs work as a great keepsake. Students can add their drawings and messages to their mom right on the cup. You can see how we made these by clicking here.

Perler bead heart coasters.  The kids love making these, and it is great fine motor practice too.  Your students can create whatever design they want, hearts, flowers, or even aliens (There is one in every class, lol)! I can usually find a large bin at the dollarstore or you can order them here on Amazon.

Tea towel drawings!  This craft is always loved by moms! I buy a multi-pack of tea towels at the dollar store and then I have my students draw portraits of them and their mom or things their mom enjoys (which usually means lots of drawings of wine and coffee, lol).  Setting for four has a nice tutorial on how to make them.

Photo Bookmarks!  What mom doesn't want to open her book and see such cute smiles!

Here are some more fun mother's day ideas from some of my favorite bloggers.

Mother and child heart necklaces from Mum in the Madhouse

Garden markers from Playground Parkbench

Cupcake liner Mother's day card from Princess Pinky Girl

 

Kid Made Jewelry dish for Mom from inner child fun

 

Now I can't close this post without bragging about my own Mother's day gifts.  First off my Mother's day usually starts with coffee in bed followed by a fun breakfast that the kids help daddy with.  Last year this was my breakfast, Banana stuffed coconut french toast with chocolate sauce!  

Yummy, right?  My hubby adapted the recipe from here.


Then the presents start!  Usually they consist of many drawings and home-made cards.   Last year my daughter checked out an Usborne book called Things to make for Mother's day.  It was filled with lots of activities to make including cards and desserts. 

With grandma's help they were able to make these yummy fudge candies from a recipe in the book.  With only a couple of ingredients it was the perfect quick and yummy treat!

The kids then decorated boxes for me and filled them with tissue paper.  They were so good we copied the recipe and made the fudge candies again as part of their teachers gift at the end of the year.

They also made keychain hearts with fingerprints by using Sculpey.  A girl and a glue gun wrote a post all about how to do it.  I love them so much I never use them (shhh don't tell the kids) I just can't bear to lose or break them.

Can't you tell I'm the luckiest mommy in the world?

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Craft for kids make a beautiful fall wreath with leaves

Need a quick idea for a fall decoration or a craft for your kids?  We made this beautiful fall wreath with leaves and it was so quick and easy and most importantly the kids loved it!

Materials needed:

• Paper or Styrofoam plate
• Leaves (real or plastic)
• Berries
• Ribbon 
• Scissors
• Glue (we used white Elmers glue)
• Q-tips (optional) 

To make the fall wreath we cut out a hole in the center of the plate, and then dipped our q-tips into the glue, dabbed glue onto the berries and the leaves, added a bow out of ribbon (red) and then added a ribbon at the top of the plate (gold) to hang the wreath.   

We used real leaves in the above photo but you could certainly use plastic leaves and have the wreath last much longer.  Don't you just love all the fall colors?

Full disclaimer:  You will probably have a bit of a mess to clean up if you use real leaves.  I don't know what it is but kids LOVE to scrunch up leaves.  A quick sweep should do it though!  

Happy crafting!

Kid made recycled keurig pod Christmas ornaments

This week the kids and I started on our Christmas crafts!  The kids love to make crafts and Christmas time is the perfect time to make holiday gifts, ornaments, tags, and wrapping paper.  This week we made recycled crafts.  I love my Keurig coffee machine but I have to admit I cringe every time I throw away the empty plastic coffee container.  So this week I saved a few containers and we made some fun ornaments.

To make this snowman we used 1 coffee pod and 1 styrofoam ball.

Before we attached the ball I poked an extra hole on the bottom of the coffee pod and attached a string for hanging.  We then made a hat by cutting a bit of felt and then glued the long side together to form the hat.

We attached the hat, and drew in eyes, nose (sticker), and mouth.  We then glued the head onto the coffee pod (we found a low heat glue gun worked best), added buttons and a ribbon for a scarf and ended up with some cute snowman!!

To make this snowman we used 3 coffee pods and threaded the string through the holes in the bottom of the coffee pods.  We tied a bead along the string after each pod to give it a layer look.  The kids added googly eyes, a nose and mouth and there we had another cutie snowman.

So after making our snowman the kids wanted to make a reindeer so I said sure.  We figured if we glued a pompom onto the bottom of the coffee pod it looked just like a reindeer.  We added some goodly eyes, poked pipe cleaner through the coffee pod for antlers and we ended up with some cute reindeer.

Now if I had planned it ahead of time, I would have painted the coffee pods brown, but since this was an on the fly type of craft we ended up with white reindeer.  We will probably try this one again and paint them brown.  Goodness knows I have lots of coffee pods around!!

This post is part of the 20 Days of a Kid-Made Christmas series.  Several of the best kid bloggers are sharing their favorite kid-made ornament ideas!  

You can also hop on over to the Kid-Made Christmas Pinterest board to see all the ornament ideas.


Need more Christmas ornament ideas, but don't have the time to search around?  One of my favorite blogs is selling their book which is filled with 30 Christmas ornament ideas, so you can get crafting today! Click on the picture below to be taken to the Red Ted blog.

Find your favourite Christmas Ornaments for the Whole Family to enjoy in one handy downloadable and printable format!

Make delicious painted Easter cookies with your kids

There were a lot of great art activities this week linked up to the weekly kids co-op.  My favorite was from Putti's world.  They made Painted Easter cookies.  How much fun is that?  It's an edible art activity!  Click on the picture to be taken to the recipe.

Now it's your turn!  Make sure you link up below!

Need some Easter and bunny books.  These are a few of my favorites.

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Use edible paint to make colorful Easter egg paintings

How to make a crystal clover for St. Patrick's day

Today on the weekly kids co-op, I want to share my favorite kids craft from the link up last week.  Frogs & Snails & Puppy dog tails, shared how to make a crystal clover for St. Patrick's day.

I think they turned out so beautiful!  I would love to hear which link up was your favorite, please comment below!  And don't forget to link up below!

Need some great books for your unit?  Check out these great reads!

I may get commissions made from purchases through links in this post. For more information about this please see our disclosure policy

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I may get commissions based on purchases made through links on this site. For more information please see my disclosure page.