Contact Paper Chick

Now that St. Patrick's Day is over, Kingston and I have dove head first into projects and activities geared toward Easter and Spring! This will be my little man's first Easter so I am really excited to do some fun things with him in preparation for the holiday.

One of the Spring/Easter projects we did this week was a contact paper chick! This was both a sensory activity and a craft project. Kingston got to explore a material that was brand new to him: feathers!!

For this project you will need: a piece of contact paper large enough to fit two eggs (I free-handed my egg, but there are a lot of patterns available online and via Pinterest!), a bag of yellow feathers, two pieces of white cardstock, a pair of scissors, masking tape (if your little one requires their projects taped down while they work .. my little guy sure does!!), two large googly eyes, and a piece of orange construction paper & an orange marker (which are not pictured)

I cut an egg out of the contact paper and taped it sticky side up to K's high chair. Then, I put a stack of yellow feathers next to the egg in front of him.

When I first gave Kingston the feathers to explore, I didn't know what to expect! I planned on monitoring him very closely to ensure that he didn't try to eat any of the feathers. When he first got his hands on them, however, he was to enthralled by their color and texture to even think about putting them in his mouth.

He loved how soft they were and rubbed them all over his hands. I then demonstrated how to stick them to the contact paper. He more so grabbed handfuls of them and dropped them all over the paper, and in his attempt to pick them back up adhered them to the egg! It was so cute and funny to watch. We did this at my parents house, so Kingston's Glam*Ma got a kick out of watching him explore too!

While he played and stuck the feathers down, I talked to him about the color yellow. We had just read the book Spring Peeps! by Cindy Eng  that I had picked up at the Used Book Superstore prior to making this chick, so Kingston was able to see a chick and touch a "chick". This book has a giant touch and feel yellow chick in the middle of it, so all throughout the book K felt the chick. During his project, I pointed at his art and said "chick", then I showed him the chick from the book again and repeated "chick" to help him correlate the two.

Then we talked about how a chick says, "peep peep"! He thinks I am so amusing when I make animal noises.

After a little bit, he decided to test the waters and attempt to put the feathers in his mouth. Although feathers pose a choking hazard, so do most craft materials that you use with infants. I was directly in front of Kingston sitting on the floor with him and focusing solely on him. I believe that all projects such as these should be highly supervised, but that it is important to let babies experience these kinds of sensory activities as well. As soon as K tried to put the feathers in his mouth, I reached out and said "No, No, No" and he stopped! He made the funniest face too, as if  to tell me "Who me?!"

After he finished, I placed the contact paper egg onto the leftover section of contact paper and cut it out. I then glued it to a piece of cardstock and glued the googly eyes on. A simple orange construction paper triangle made up the nose; and I drew orange marker legs! I think it came out very cute!