Preparing to Make a Bumble Bee: Arts & Crafts for Kids

Preparing to Make a Bumble Bee: Arts & Crafts for Kids
Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com. These are called Happyhangers. This is the bee we are going to talk about making today. These two, of course, are your Mr. Bee’s antennas and you will need a nose. Then we have and of course we folded our papers the magic cutting, we need two wings, two eyes, you are only going to need one smile, but I went ahead and put it on that piece. You are going to need three sets of legs. I added a little stinger here on the same piece of paper and you are going to need three strips about two inches wide for his stripes, and you’ll need a black circle for the bee’s head. Okay, now that you have your pieces cut out and they are in a baggy, stay nice and organized and not lost, we need to work on our hanger. Now hangers come in different thicknesses; for a little hands the thinner ones work a little bit better so, I found that the cleaners, the white ones that come in the laundry are a little bit easier to bend than the heavy duty or more heavy duty ones. This one is just a kind of average one. Again this is such great opportunity to work on those fine motor skills. We talk about what shape we need them bumblebee is going to be round, so we need to change this into something round, talk about stretching the hanger, down as long as we can, talk about being safe and not aiming towards somebody’s face or your face or popping it into your face, keep it down onto the ground or low away from your face. Now we have these little bumps in it, take your thumbs and push, get the bumps out, push. Now we still don’t have a circle, so we are going to have to work on getting that a little more rounded, talk about pushing until you get a circle. Now the fancy part and the tissue, we moved it to the very end, and our hook is off of the paper and we fold it over and make sure that it is going to completely covered, then we are good. I like to use this kind of glue you can use glue sticks but for me it is hard for you to see where the glue is and sometimes the tissue does not stick. We talked about not using too much of glue; if we make puddles it’s just not going to work. We squiggle the glue over the hanger, it’s got to be over the hanger so that the tissue will stick to the hanger and we talk about not coming way out here, because that is going to make a big glue spot in the middle of your bumble bee’s body, so don’t push too hard, skinny little line, squiggling all the way around. After you do that, very carefully fold the tissue over and we stretch it out tight, and touch all the way around until we know it’s stuck, flip it over, touch it again, make sure everything stuck. So you put if away, let it dry for at least 30 minutes; often we will do this part in the morning, and then do the other part in the afternoon, spread it out, it is a two phase activity. Okay, you have given your hanger a little bit time to dry, and so now we are going to talk about cutting it out; now this can get tricky too! If you get too close to the hanger, then it’s going to pull away and then won’t stick. So we talk about leaving a little bit of an edge outside of the hanger, and we don’t want a big giant edge, you will want to chop it up and then this gets a little hard for some kids and they might need some help.