June 2, 2009 | 22 Comments

Father’s Day Frame ( updated with iphone)

Blackberry Picture

Frame

My son is rather smitten with my husband’s blackberry. When he pretends to be his dad he goes to the front hall, grabs the blackberry, a pretend coffee mug and tells us he’s off to the office. It was only fitting to try to do some father’s day craft with that as the inspirations. Here is what we came up with.

Gather your materials. You will need 2 sheets of foam(one black one white, paper will do but foam will look better), a fine tip marker, scissors some tin foil, glue, magnets or magnetic strips and a picture.
Start by writing out the alphabet or you can write out “Happy Father’s Day” remember to make each letter individual so it looks like a keyboard. I didn’t bother because I knew my son would not be able to put it in order and I wanted him to do it since he loves to glue.
Cut the letters out. If your child is too young for tiny pieces, do 3 rows of keys instead of cutting each out.
Make a space bar and cut out.
I tapes off the upper half of the black foam so that my son had a physical line not to cross with the glue.
Glue the letters on. With little guys you can spread the glue, it doesn’t dry completely clear there will be a reflection so if your child is able to carefully put glue under each key , try. If not it’s no biggie!
While they do that cut a frame from the other piece of foam. Mine is black but I should have done it with the white, I have 2/3 of a sheet left over after the letters.
Cover it with the tin foil. The best way is to put the foil over the frame, then cut out the middle, leaving some extra to squeeze around the frame. This was actually sorta tricky, I got all consumed by this and my son was gluing his hands together .Ooops.
Take off the tape when your child is done gluing and glue their picture on.
Add the foil frame- use lots of glue for this.
Let dry
Add some magnetic strips or my favorite use those free marketing magnets companies send you!

Song!

I love my daddy
He’s really smart
He’s got big muscles and a bigger heart
When I get all cranky and I pout
He gives me hugs and never shouts!

Books!

“This Is The Van That Dad Cleaned” by Lisa Campbell Ernst gave me a good chuckle, I only have one child and my car seems to multiply sippy cups, cheddar bunny crumbs and a mess on it’s own! This book is about a dad with a van, a clean van and 3 kids who ruin that very quickly. The siblings act like siblings teasing and fighting while making a growing mess in their poor dad’s clean van. The book is a poem that keeps growing and growing like the mess. In the end the kids are the ones that clean up the mess and I like that, in our house like the book even the baby helps clean up.

“Molly and her Dad” by Jan Ormerod was a great find. Molly doesn’t see her dad often because he lives a plane ride away and when he comes to take care of her things aren’t perfect at first. There are so many little things about this book I like. I like that there are details like baby photos of Molly and both her parents together, I like that Molly tells her dad how he is doing things wrong and doesn’t warm up to him immediately and I like how he doesn’t get mad. I think this is a pretty realistic portrayal of children’s emotions when spending time with a parent they don’t see often but still have a great relationship with.