Here’s what you’ll need: background piece of paper, 1 large heart, 3 medium sized hearts, 1 small heart, 1 teeny-tiny heart, glue and something to decorate your fish with (we used sequins).

Glue your fish together.  The large heart is for the body of the fish, the 3 mediums are for a tail and fins, the small one is for his mouth and the teeny tiny one is for an eye.

Add some decorations to the fish.

The finished fish.

Here’s what you’ll need- construction paper- black, orange, white and blue, glue, wiggle eyes, scissors and some items to decorate your penguin.

Cut out a black body for your penguin, then white for his stomach. Cut two arms out of the black paper, two legs and a beak out of the orange paper.  I cut up some blue and purple paper for decorating.

 Hailey decorated the tummy of the penguin using stickers and the blue and purple pieces of paper.

Then Hailey put her penguin together on a piece of blue construction paper, for sturdiness.  She also added pom poms to the penguins tummy.

Here is the finished penguin.

Here’s what you’ll need: 2 pieces of construction paper, some paint and something to paint with, contact paper and not pictured- scissors and a stapler.

You’ll also need the animals from the story.  I printed these animals back when I used to get the Mailbox Etc magazine.  But you can find some very similar printable animals here.

Paint the construction paper.

Cut out two mitten shapes.  You’ll need the contact paper in a minute… so it shouldn’t really been in this picture.

Staple the two pieces of mitten together.  Be sure to leave the bottom of the mitten open.  Then cover with contact paper to make it last longer.

Get “The Mitten” by Jan Brett, the mitten and your animals.

Read the story together and put the animals into the mitten as you come to that part of the story.

Here’s what you’ll need: green, blue, yellow and orange construction paper, glue, scissors and a black marker.

Leave the green construction paper a full piece of paper. Cut the blue construction paper to look like a body of water. The cut 4 small dome shapes and 4 small circles from the yellow paper. Cut 4 very small triangles from the orange paper . For older children I would let them do the cutting but since this was a toddler project I did all of the cutting.

Glue the blue onto the green paper. Then glue the shapes together to create the ducks. After the duck pond has dried, add a black dot for the eyes on the ducks.

The finished duck pond.

Here’s what you’ll need- paper, a duck and a stamp pad.  (As a side note- my stamp pads are for kids and are non-toxic.  But they were missing the all important word “washable.”  So you might want to make sure you get washable stamp pads.  I’m just sayin’)

Give the items to your child and let the creativity flow.  Hailey is working on figuring out exactly how it is working.

Having fun stamping the paper.

While I turned my head for about 2 seconds, Hailey picked up the stamp pad and stamped her face.

The finished duck stamping piece of art.

Hailey absolutely loves this song, so I decided we should make some pieces for our felt board so that she can play with the pieces while we sing it.

Here’s what you’ll need: 5 little ducks and a mommy duck, some crayons and not pictured- contact paper, scissors, glue and felt.

Hailey colored the ducks.

Then I put contact paper on the front side of the ducks.

Glue the backs of the ducks to a piece of felt or Velcro.

After the glue dries, cut out the ducks and put them on your felt board. (My felt board is just a big piece of felt nailed to a wall in Hailey’s play room.) Then I sang the song to Hailey showing her how we could move the ducks to go along with the words of the song.

And Hailey loved it!

And here’s the words, just in case you need them:

Five Little Ducks

Five little ducks went out one day
Over the hills and far away
Mama duck said, “Quack, quack, quack, quack,”
but only four little ducks came back…

Four little ducks went out one day
Over the hills and far away
Mama duck said, “Quack, quack, quack, quack,”
but only three little ducks came back…

Three little ducks went out one day
Over the hills and far away
Mama duck said, “Quack, quack, quack, quack,”
but only two little ducks came back…

Two little ducks went out one day
Over the hills and far away
Mama duck said, “Quack, quack, quack, quack,”
but only one little duck came back…

One little duck went out one day
Over the hills and far away
Mama duck said, “Quack, quack, quack, quack,”
but no little ducks came back…

Mama duck went out one day
Over the hills and far away
Mama duck said, “Quack, quack, quack, quack,”
and five little ducks came back.