Egg Carton Dragon Puppet

Remember the royal toilet paper roll puppets I shared over at Enchanted Homeschooling Mom.

To go with them, I put together this egg carton dragon puppet! You start with 2 egg cartons.

Paint the bumpy part white. Then I painted the area between what would become the teeth red for gums,  but you could easily leave it white too.

If your egg carton has holes in the top you can just hot glue a piece of cardboard over them and then paint the rest green.

Cut off the last two bumps on both egg cartons. This makes a spot for you to put in your hand (fingers on tops and thumb on the bottom), so your dragon can open his mouth to eat the villagers talk. If I had been thinking I would have cut off the back of the egg carton before painting it.

One of the sections you cut off becomes the dragons eyes with a little black paint and hot glue.

Then you should have something that looks a bit like this. I made hits be a dragon, but he could easily be a dinosaur or an alligator too.

The next step is to make a neck to hide your arm.  If you are lucky you have an old long sleeved shirt that matches lying around, so you can just cut off the sleeve and use it. (I happened to have an old green sweater that worked well!  If not you have to sew a sleeve. Then you hot glue it around the entire back of your dragon (including his teeth; it helps keep him together).

All you have to do now is insert your hand and put on a show (or eat the other puppets)!

The girls really enjoy their dragon, but he is a bit big for their little hands. This puppet is best operated by an older child or an adult. In our case Daddy makes the best dragon. Eli really enjoyed him and kept coming up to the puppet, yelling "BITE," and giggling as he ran away!

O is for Optometrist

Our Community Helper is Optometrist or Ophthalmologist! To be honest neither of my girls have been to an Optometrist yet; their doctor does use a simple eye chart with them each year, and there has never been any cause for concern. But since they have never been they had no idea what one was! I couldn't easily set up all the equipment they use, but I could set up a little eye chart for them. The first one I set up for Bria to practice reading.

Then she made one up for Nadia that would be a little easier.

After one of them read the chart they came over and picked out a pair of glasses with the help of the pretend Optometrist.

They really enjoyed taking turns making new eye charts. We easily could have practiced sight words or letters or numbers.

Then we made some eyeballs to introduce them to some of the parts of the eye.  We started with white balloons and milk cartons. I cut a small circle out of the concave circle on the side of the milk jug (about an inch in diameter).

We stuck the circle in the balloon pressing the convex side down into the balloon as far as it could go to act as our lens. (I know you can't see it in the picture, but I promise it is there!)

Then we filled the balloons with hair gel.to act as the vitreous. (Sorry no picture; the gel was too hard for the girls to squeeze.) We tied the balloons and the tie was our optic nerve.

Then the girls drew on an iris, a pupil, and some blood vessels in the sclera (white part of your eye).  Just make sure not to use washable markers like we did (or your eye will be all over your hands)!

  

We also talked a little about how what we see is turned upside down on the retina and the optic nerve takes it to the brain where it translates the image right side up. Then we looked into spoons to see what our image would look like on the retina.

I am sure they won't remember all the big names, but hopefully they remember a little about how the eye works, and it gave them some insight into Optometry!

M is for Mechanic

Our second Community Helper for M is Mechanic! To start with we went over different parts of a car. We found some great sheets on Twinkl where you label the parts of a car. (I did make my own list since we name things a bit different here in the states).

Then I got out a big box and let them paint it like a car. They added tires, wheels, controls on the dash,  a number, and a happy face, of course. Once it was dry I told them they could play in it, but they didn't want to. They just wanted to pretend to fix it with their little tool set, so off they went to get their tools and be Mechanics!

They decided on Number 11.

And the dashboard they painted.

After watching them saw, hammer, and drill their pretend car, I got out play dough; with the play dough they could really see how the tools worked.

They learned a little about cars and tools although I think they were most interested in the play dough. I do have a feeling that this will be a lot more fun when Eli gets a little older. After all he is already very into "vrooms!"

L is for Librarian

Our Community Helper for L is Librarian! My kids are all familiar with our librarians since we are frequently at the library; however, they didn't really know what the librarians did other then check out books.  We talked about how the librarians also have to organize the books. Of course they organize by the Dewey Decimal System, which I told the girls about, but it was much too difficult for the girls. So we went a bit easier and just grabbed all the alphabet books. This way the girls would be able to organize the books while practicing alphabet order.

After the girls had all the books in alphabetical order they took turns playing librarian. One of them would select a few books to check out while the other would pretend to scan them and then, upon return, place them back in alphabetical order on the shelf.

This simple activity kept them entertained for nearly an hour until their Daddy came home. They were so excited about it they were even talking about it at dinner!

And since we are at our library so often we wanted to show our librarians how much we appreciate them, so we took them cupcakes! They seemed quit surprised (maybe since we broke the no food in the library rule)! Unfortunately Eli was not too thrilled about giving away the cupcakes and had a little melt down, so I was unable to take any pictures. The poor librarians felt bad for him too, but I assured them I had more at home for him (which I did). Luckily he was able to calm down and enjoy story time still! 

  

H is for Hair Stylist

Our community helper for H is Hair Stylist! The girls got a brief introduction to this last week when grandma helped cut Eli's hair.  Well Bria helped with the spray bottle.  As you can see from Nadia's hair, Bria helped a lot!

They were actually have a great time playing with just the spray bottle (full of water) and a brush.

So this week we added a comb as well as hair clips and headbands! They took turns doing each others hair, and they even tried to do mine! 

After an hour or so Bria decided she needed more customers. So she tried to make a sign to advertise on our door.

 Of course there was no way anyone would have seen it or have believed it if they did see it! So she turned to her dolls to be customers.  

This was really a great activity for them and it required very little set up!  Just grab a tiny spray bottle of water, a comb and brush, and some hair accessories! They were entertained for A LOT of time; way more then I expected!