Quiet Book Pages with Spray Paint {and a neighbor page exchange!}

A few years ago a neighbor friend asked if I wanted to participate in a quiet book page exchange. I had never heard of anyone doing this and I instantly loved the idea.

I love to create. I love to collaborate. I love to teach. I love kids.
It was the perfect project for me.

One of the other moms in our group went to Joanns and got a giant piece of white felt (using a coupon to help cut costs) and I volunteered to cut it in 8.5"x11" pages for everyone, then we distributed the appropriate number of pages to everyone. I think we had six people in the group and each person made duplicates of their own two pages for a total of twelve pages total, six copies of each page.

I liked to sew, but I wasn't crazy about sewing elaborate details over and over again since we were each making several duplicates. I also didn't want to glue my page pieces together because I was confident in my kids destructive abilities 😆 and knew if I invested the time and money into making it I wanted the pages to last.

I also didn't want to add extra cost purchasing several sheets of several different colors of felt for each page (in hindsight at about $0.50 a sheet this seems like a small expense, but at the time I guess I was feeling frugal 😄).

I had lots of spray paint on hand already from several various projects so I decided I was going to try spray-painting felt. I had never seen it done before and honestly, wasn't sure how it would turn out, but in the end, was really happy with the unique results!

Solar System Page

Space has always been one of my favorite subjects to teach. There's something really mysterious and exciting and intriguing about this vast, expansive world beyond ours that we know so much and still so little about. When I taught preschool and elementary I had a set of glow-in-the-dark planets that hung from the ceiling, and I always found a way to squeeze space into our curriculum, so when I contemplated what pages I wanted to make and exchange with our group it was easy to settle on a Solar System page.

How I made it: 

First I collected circular objects of various sizes from around the house - a water bottle lid, a milk lid, a mason jar lid, a plate for the sun, etc. Then I laid out all my circles on my white felt page where I wanted them. With my circles in place I sprayed the page with black spray paint followed by a few mists of white and glitter spray paint for star galaxies.

Next, using my collection of circular items I traced a bunch of circles on my extra white felt and cut them all out by hand. I sprayed all my duplicates, 6 Earths, 6 Jupiters, 6 Mars, etc. at the same time. I added velcro to the page and each piece, hand-wrote the name of each planet for emerging readers, and viola! Easy-peasy.

Shape Matching Page

The concept behind this page was similar to the solar system planet matching page, except instead of simply matching to the correct size circle I wanted to add in colors, shapes and shape names.  I noticed it was easy to practice common shapes like circles, squares, and triangles with my kids because they are easy to spot in our environment, but less popular shapes are trickier, so I was excited to incorporate a page with other shapes too - kind of like those wooden-shape-sorting block-boxes. 

How I Made it: 

First I cut all of my shapes out of cardstock then I laid them out on my white felt pages similar to how I did the solar system page. Then I simply sprayed the page gray with spray paint. 

Botta bing, botta boom! 

Next I cut my shapes out of felt, using my same cardstock pieces as my template for each shape. I double layered each one, stitched them together and added a smile and two buttons for a face. How fun would it be to make all different expressions on each shape?! Then I used whatever craft or kids paint I had on hand and a set of stamps I had for my preschoolers to stamp the name of each shape in a corresponding paint color. I messed up on the spelling on trapezoid and had to fix it by sewing a white trapezoid over the top of the mishap. But that was only 1/7, not too bad. 

 

Camping Pretend Play Page

Back in my sewing days (I sold my sewing machine, custom-made sewing cabinet that Colby made, and serger before our world travels) 😓I used to always shop the remnant fabrics. They're like 50% off and an additional 50% off that. They're small pieces of fabric, usually less than a yard, but since I usually didn't have projects in mind, I would just go browse and see what I fancied. It was like a treasure hunt for hidden gems! I think that's actually how I came up with this page design - I found the fabric and it made me think 'tent material' and it all exploded from there. 

How I Made it: 

I used my same cardstock overlay technique for spray-painting this page. I cut a page in half using an uneven zigzag and then laid it over the bottom half of my page, spraying the sunset sky first. With my "mountains" in place I placed my mini start stickers and then sprayed away with orange, pink, purple, whatever colors I had on hand that fit a sunset. It was fun! 

Then when that was dry I removed the star stickers and covered up the top half with the opposite zig-zag jigsaw piece and sprayed the bottom. From there it was just a matter of sewing my detail pieces - the tent, rocks, campfire, etc. There was a little person with a roasting stick and sleeping bag at one point that they kids loved to put in and out of the tent, but those have long since gotten lost. 

Buckle the Dog's Collar Page

Are all little kids obsessed with doing buckles, or is that just mine? As I thought through various skills I wanted to incorporate in my quiet book I settled easily on a buckle page. The dog was just a fitting afterthought. Feeling thrifty again I hunted through my house for a buckle I could use and found one on an old, dilapidated backpack I was ready to donate and repurpose anyway. 

How I Made it: 

I sprayed my page green first, using a letter D cutout to leave a silhouette of the letter behind. Then it was just a matter of cutting out all my dog pieces and sewing them together. I intentionally left my pup's tongue and ears flappy so he could give some slobbery kisses or bashfully hide his eyes and play peek a boo. 

Truthfully I wish I had thought of more skills or activities to incorporate with this page, but my kids definitely didn't care. They love to do the buckle time and time again and as my older two have gotten older I've celebrated that they're able to undo it themselves and don't beg for me to undo it every 2.5 seconds. 

Feed the Monkey Page

When Crew was a baby he had a little sock-monkey carseat toy that stretched and vibrated and I thought the thing was adorable. Maybe it inspired this feed-the-monkey-page, I don't remember? But I also loved the idea of feeding the monkey fruits and it brought back reminiscent memories of wild monkeys jumping on my kayak to steal our fruit as we rafted through mangrove forests in the ocean in Thailand so many years ago. 

How I Made it: 

Making this page was much like the making of the dog buckle page - I sprayed painted the page blue but instead of adhering a D to it I painted over a stencil of the letter M in pink to coordinate with the monkey's polka-dot shirt. I was sure to include a few more skills on this page than I had with the dog buckle page too. I cut out all my monkey pieces, sewed my zipper, pocket, and button holes for her shirt, then layered everything and sewed it in place. The fruits I included - an apple, an orange, and a banana, I made out of scrap pieces I had laying around. I put some velcro on her hand so she could hold them or they could be stored inside her mouth. All three gives her a nice big mouthful. 

Piggy Bank Page

This page is one of my favorites because it's so interactive, educational and you can shake up your change and hear it rattle inside just like a real piggy bank! 

How I Made it:

This was one of the few pages I left white. Making the pig was fairly simple, just a matter of cutting and stitching, with a button-hole for the coins and velcro on his underside to remove them. I added some of my trademark spray paint for a finishing touch and left his curly piggy tail loose for little fingers to twirl. 

I didn't make this apple-picking page with snaps on the back, but it's also one of our favorites. I had wanted to incorporate a page with snaps, but silly enough, was too intimidated by them to do it! I'm amazed we still have all five apples almost five years later. A neighbor friend made it and I had to include it in our roundup because it's SO dang cute.

To see more of the pages my neighbor friends made (minus the ones we lost in our latest move), plus a demo of my pages and tutorial for how I made them check out the YouTube video below:

https://youtu.be/ePfbJKiX0k4

If this post inspires you to make your own quiet book pages I would LOVE to see yours!!!
Please leave me a comment, send me a message with pictures or tag me if you post about it. It makes my heart happy to share with others.


xoxo,
Emily

PS - Looking for something else? Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store with 70+ educational resources for parents and educators with hundreds of reviews, many of them FREE.

Seriously Spectacular Space Projects

2 Summers ago I saw these little bags of styrofoam balls at DollarTree. They caught my attention instantly because an idea had already been tumbling around in my head for a couple of years but

styrofoam balls from the craft store are ridiculously overpriced, especially when you need about 8 (sorry Pluto :{ ) for 25 or so kids.  

I just couldn't believe how perfect these little $1 bags were.  Each one has 8 styrofoam balls AND 4 of them are small and 4 of them are larger!  Could it be more perfect?  

(Well... actually, yes, I suppose it could, and I did have a little discussion with my kiddos about how these 8 little balls weren't PERFECTLY proportionate to all 8 planets, but they are perfect for approximately representing the 4 inner Rocky Midgets and the 4 outer Gas Giants.) 

Anyway, I'm sure you can see where this was headed.  I saw the bags;  The idea was already brewing and just waiting to burst out of my brain; I had to buy them, that is 30 bags of them.  :)  So there they sat in my classroom cupboard for 2 years waiting for the perfect opportunity to be put to use.  I wanted to use them with my little firsties last year but it just seemed like a little much.  So this year when I switched to third grade the timing was perfect and they couldn't have turned out any more amazing!

WANT TO MAKE SOME WITH YOUR STUDENTS? YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR FREE HERE.

I gave each student a little bag of balls and a note of instructions that explained that they needed to represent the sun, all 8 planets, (and Pluto if they wanted), the stars, and the asteroid belt and each celestial body needed to be labeled.  I gave them some ideas for mounting/displayed their project and offered wire hangers for any students that wanted them, but most found their own way and they seriously turned out so awesome.  Can you believe 3rd graders did this?

We left them on display in the entryway of the school and they were quite the hit!  

Some kids cut them in half and mounted them.  Some kids used wires and sticks to mount them.  Some hung them.  

Quite simply: They were amazing.

This one was quite possibly my favorite. It's impossible to tell from this poor phone photo, but she went far above and beyond.  She labeled several stars and even added little labeled moons to the planets with toothpicks.  And of course you can just barely see little Pluto there on the end.  The whole thing was about 5-6 feet long and pretty impressive hanging from our ceiling.

When we were all finished learning about the solar system and completing our Planet Books, (click image to purchase)

and had finished our test, we celebrated by making delectable Solar System Cookies. 

I haven't quite caught back up with blogging/teaching/mommying/and creating teaching projects... so I don't have a picture of the 3rd grade cookies from this year, but here's one from a few years ago.  You can check out more details about the cookies and a few highlights of our Space activities from last year here.  

ALL about SPACE! And Giveaway update...

Right before the Thanksgiving break we finished studying all about Space.  It is always one of my favorite things to teach and I was sad we had to squeeze it into less time than usual. :(  But we still managed to do TONS of fun things.  Check them out!

First we learned all about Earth and it's layers (plus volcanoes, geysers, etc... all that fun stuff) so we made these fun layers using an awesome recipe from First Grade Fanatics (thank you!)

 Then we dove into the universe and learned all about each planet.  After learning about each one and its place in the solar system and distance from the sun we made these fun posters to display in our hallway.

  (Hint: The stars ("constellations" are just normal white paint put into a regular spray bottle, then sprayed on.  Looks fantastic and it's so easy.  You might need to dilute the paint.)

The kids were THRILLED to discover the planets magically hanging from our ceiling when they came to school mid-unit one day. You can't see in this picture, but each one is labeled on the ceiling.  We practice singing their order and pointing to them and the kids just LOVE lining up under them.  (Our song goes "Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these are the planets and their order in our solar system" to the tune of One Little, Two Little Indians)

Each student all made their own Planet Booklet with a secret page.  I'm not sure what the "true name" of this kind of book is, I just remember doing it when I was in school and thinking the secret page was the coolest thing ever.

 Inside we drew and wrote about each of the planets.  

 Then last of all we took a Field Trip to the local Planetarium.  We got to see "Perfect Little Planet" and it was a perfect culmination.  The kids LOVED it and it was so educational.

Of course they had to play on the moon...

And on Mars...

And last of all we made Solar System Space Cookies. My wonderful student's parents provided all of the materials and the kids had a blast. 

Here's what one from last year turned out like.

Leave me a comment and post a link to what you do for space, I always love to get great new ideas!

PS - My giftcard giveaway is STILL going on! I just posted it on Facebook and was thrilled to see that TeachersNotebook is going to match my $10 giftcard giveaway.  What was going to be $10 has now doubled and is $20.  Can beat that!  It's free!  So hurry and check out my previous post already.  

Click here to go straight to that post.