Penguin Place Mat!

Who doesn’t like penguins? This penguin place mat craft could easily be turned into a plain old paper craft with white paper instead of a paper towel. You can find contact paper almost anywhere these days, both Walmart and Target carry it in my neck of the woods and of course the big craft stores do too! We use these place mats for play dough, crafts and yes dinner time too. Putting out the place mats for dinner is my son’s job so making something new and fun is a great way to keep it fresh!

1. Gather your materials you will need 1 sheet of black construction paper, a sheet of paper towel ( paper will work too),contact paper,  some glue, silver and blue sequins, 2 googly eyes, an orange marker, scissors and some white construction paper.
2. Start by drawing an outline of a penguin with the marker on the black paper.
3. Cut out and glue onto the paper towel.
4. Add glue for the sequins.
5. Add the snow – the sequins! This is awesome for fine tuning those fine motor skills. Those sequins are tricky.
6. We had no orange paper so instead I had my son color this white piece to use for the beak and feet.
7. Next cut out the beak and feet from the colored paper.
8. Add the eyes.
9. Add the beak and feet.
10. Let dry -  I didn’t because daylight and my ability for ok photos was fading fast in my cloudy sky town! But you will want to to avoid globs of glue stuck under contact paper.
11. Measure your contact paper to fit – you will want to sandwich the place mat between 2 sides of a long rectangular  piece. Peel back only half the backing , place the place mat face down on the sticky side.  Doing it this way will prevent big bubbles and wrinkles on the front.
12. Peel the rest of the backing off the contact paper and press to sandwich the place mat. Press firmly to seal.
13. Trim the edges and voila!

Books !

Tacky the Penguin by Helen Lester is such a cute and funny story, your kids will love it! Tacky is an odd bird but when hunters come to get some pretty penguins is funny odd ways of doing things turn off the hunters and saves Tacky and his perfectly not odd companions. This is a sweet look at being different and being happy as pie about being different.  My son loves this book and will often point out that Tacky is proud to sing just the way he wants. I love that it can preach to kids without preaching at all.

Penguin Dreams by Vivian Walsh is a crazy trip of a book. Both my son and I loved it but it wasn’t at all what I expected. I am not sure what I expected but I’ll summarize. The story is simply one penguin’s dream.  He dreams he can fly ,  and readers follow along as he flies through his clever and off beat dream.  I loved thinking about whether or not penguins even dream and that thought had my son and I talking for quite sometime before he himself drifted off to sleep. It’s fun, it’s weird and it’s perfect for creative imagination driven kids!