Fishy Carrots!

I shared yesterday that I was going into our church's pre-school room to do a craft with the kids. These kids are 3 & 4 years old, mostly boys and full of energy!! My husband plays his guitar and sings with them every week. They scream with delight as soon as he enters the room. I joke with him that they think he is a rock star and that he missed his calling to be a Wiggles-like performer, lol. He is a tough act to follow!
Anyway, they don't have much patience for sitting still, but not many 3 & 4 years do. What ever craft I did had to be fairly easy and keep their attention for no more than 5-10 minutes. Since Easter is around the corner I thought we could use that as our theme.

You have probably seen these cone bags before. I have done projects similar to this in the past. I purchased 100 of these cello type cone bags at clearbags last year but in a pinch you can go to the local craft store and buy frosting bags. When orange jelly beans became difficult to find, I opted for the ever-so-kid-friendly Goldfish crackers. In this case, they were the mini variety. I actually think it was a better choice for many reasons. They held open their bags as I poured the crackers in. It was a good thing they just had cheese crackers for snack or we would have eaten as many as we packaged up, lol. Green ribbon at the top was our attempt to mimic the green leaves at the top of a carrot. They totally got that. I helped them punch out the scallop circles and stamp the carrots onto white card stock. They used crayons to color theirs in. I love their method of coloring...drag the crayon over the image with absolutely no attention paid to staying inside the line. It was like they were in a hurry and I was clearly keeping them from valuable play time. Maybe they have been conditioned by all those Color Wonder pads where the color only appears inside the lines no matter how messy they color with the marker. Our paper was clearly not of the Color Wonder variety! But they beamed with pride none the less. I did take along my Cuttlebug so they could emboss their scallop circles with the bubble folder. I let them crank the handle of Miss Tracy's Magic Machine. They were so fascinated. All in all, they did a fantastic job and I enjoyed it too. I still don't have rock star status like DH, but there was a slight chanting of my name going on at one point. At least I think there was, lol.

The carrot image and sentiment are from Anna's Whipper Snapper set, Spring has Sprung.