Shelly and her children make some pretty butterfly jars using printables from Activity Village in this lovely guest post. This is a really easy but fun activity to enjoy with the kids, so why not try making your own?
Making Butterfly Jars
By Shelly
With all the changes in our normal routine due to the lockdown, one of the activities that we have really been enjoying are our nature walks. It is been a real highlight of the last few weeks, just getting out walking and spotting small creatures. One of our favourite small creatures to spot are butterflies. I'm sorry that we don't have photos of the butterflies that we have spotted while out walking, but they always flutter away before I can even think about getting a photograph!
We thought a butterfly craft might be a good idea. At first we considered creating butterfly cards to send to friends, but my son wanted to make the butterflies with wings sticking out, like they were actually flying; on cards the butterfly wings would have been squashed down when we posted them. He did not like that idea, so instead we decided to decorate the many glass jars that I keep.
For this activity we used butterfly scrapbook page 1 and butterfly scrapbook page 2 and these butterfly images. We also used some Mod Podge (which is a craft glue that I tend to keep in the house just because you can use it for a number of crafting activities) and glass jars (old jam jars that we soaked in soapy water to remove all the labels). You can use white school glue instead.
The kids then started cutting out the mages – with this you do not need to be exact.
Cutting out the images
And then they stuck their images down.
Sticking just the bodies of the butterflies down
My son only glued the butterfly bodies onto his glass jar because he wanted to create the effect of the butterfly wings fluttering in the wind.
My son's jar taking shape!
Sticking the butterflies flat onto a jar
My daughter decided to stick her images totally flat. With Mod Podge you can just glue over the images and the white glue will dry clear.
Gluing the butterfly images - painting over the top with Mod Podge
Butterfly images covered in Mod Podge
With Modge Podge we tend to pour some out onto a small lid and the kids use small brushes to apply the glue to their images. The glue does get onto their hands but we have never had an issue with it, it always washed off with some soapy water. This is a useful idea for kids with sensory issues; this is one of the activities that we did with ours when they were younger to help them get used to that feeling of glue on their hands and these days both of mine are not at all fussed by it.
We left our jars to dry properly overnight. And here are the results...
This one we are using as a pencil holder:
Our finished butterfly jar holding pencils
Our smaller jar looks really nice with a tea candles in it. We are going to make a few more smaller ones so we can leave them all together on a windowsill.
Small butterfly jar holding a tea light
And here's my son’s fluttering butterfly jar.
The finished fluttering butterfly jar
We haven't decided what we are going to do with it yet. For now he is keeping it on his desk just because he likes it. In fact, he has asked if we could make a dinosaur version this coming week but I think we may need to find something else to stick the dinosaurs onto as the jars are not that wide!
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
