Monday, October 25, 2010

Pumpkin Jar Lanterns

Look what I made today.  Aren't they adorable?




One of the parts of my job as a Speech-Language Pathologist, that I enjoy the most is working with a special class for children with learning disabilities.  Twice a week I go into the class and we work on early literacy skills.  I try to make it fun so we play a lot of games and do different activities while we are practicing clapping syllables, making rhyming words, and identifying sounds in a word.  

Last October I got the idea from someone's blog (sorry it was in my pre-blogging days so I didn't keep track of the source) for these adorable pumpkin lanterns.  I emailed the idea to the teacher and she loved them as much as I did, so we made them last year and again this year with a new group of students.  Now don't think it was all fun and games in the class.  We made the students work on their rhyming skills before they got each strip of orange tissue paper to glue onto the jar.  The kids were so excited to make them and even more excited when we lit the tea lights so they could see them glow.  

I wanted to show you in case any of you want an easy fun Hallowe'en craft.  And thanks to whoever's blog I got the idea from.

Up-date:
I've been asked to divulge how I made these lanterns, so here goes -
1.  We painted glass mason jars with watered-down white glue.
2.  Then we put 1-inch wide strips of orange tissue paper onto the jars vertically.  The strips of tissue paper look best if they overlap a bit so it looks like the ridges and folds on a real pumpkin. 
3.  Then we gently painted more glue on top of the all the orange so all the edges were stuck down and the lantern will look shiny when the glue is dry. 
4.  We cut out eyes, nose, and mouth from black construction paper and used the watered down glue to attach them.  We also painted glue on top of the black paper so they would look shiny as well. 
5.  Finally, we put green tape (it might be tape for painting or for gardening, I'm not sure which) around the mouth of the jar to look like the stem and to finish the top edges of the tissue paper.  You can put the jar upside down to dry. 

10 comments:

  1. Grace, those are so cute. What a great project for kids to work on.

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  2. Oh these are adorable! Sounds like a great activity for the students :D

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  3. What a great idea! Those are so cool. I love going into those classes and working with the kids. I especially enjoy inclusion services and team teaching with a great teacher. Thanks for sharing this!

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  4. What a great idea for kids and kids at heart to do for Halloween.

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  5. Grace, this is a brilliant idea. Good on you for spotting it. I'd say you have a very talented group of children to work with. Is it just a little candle inside? I am thinking this could be a lot of fun for Christmas...imagine the snowflake images from this one!

    Many thanks for the inspiration!

    Jeanne xx

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  6. Great kid project! Why didn't I ever think of that!

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  7. What a great project! They are adorable.

    Kathy

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  8. can you explain exactly how you did it? looks great!

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  9. THis is adorable Grace! How fun are you!!! I can tell you are great at your job!!
    Pamela xo

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  10. Those are so cute. Plus, they won't rot at the end of the season, so you can reuse them every year.

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