Balloon People

My daughter loves balloons.  I'm guessing most kids do.  We keep a bag of balloons on hand for when Tiffany wants to play what she calls 'balloon catch.'  The other day she asked to play balloon catch and it was then that I realized we had used the last of the balloons.  However, I did have some of those skinny hot dog balloons so I blew one up but Tiffany wasn't interested.  She threw it to the side saying it was too small.  The balloon hung around for a few days until a light bulb went off and I said, "I can make this balloon look like a person!"  I was off and running.  The first balloon person I made was a girl skier.  Here is what I used:
pipe cleaner (to serve as arms/hands and is also what gives the balloon it's head and body shape)
googly eyes
basket filler (for hair)
tooth picks (to serve as ski poles)
craft sticks (to serve as skis)
black marker

It was super easy and fun to make the skier.  After looking at it you can tell how I put it together.  Initially, I wanted to make more skiers and use them to learn the alphabet but I wasn't going to make 25 more skiers!! So, I put an upper case and lower case "A" on the skies and thought we would use this skier as a prop to learn that letter. To go along with our balloon skier and learning the letter "A" I had Tiffany take a brown paper bag and go around the house finding things that started with the letter "A." I didn't get pictures of that, unfortunately

Next up is our balloon Fairy.  I made this fairy to represent a star shape and she would also be our prop for learning other shapes.  Hence, our Shape Fairy!  I used mostly the same things as I used for the Skier.  For the wand I again used a toothpick and cut a star from craft foam.  For the fairies crown I cut a piece from a toilet paper roll, painted it and glued beads to it.  I needed each of the balloon people to stand on something.  The skier was easy but for the Fairy I  used the top of a Pringles potato chip container and glued her to that.

As an activity to learning about the star shape I printed a star glued it to construction paper, put out star stickers and had Tiffany decorate the star.  We talked about different shapes, how many sides shapes have and which things we could find in our house that were of the same shapes.

Here is Tiffany just flying her Fairy around!

Our last balloon person is our Monster Bowler.  I had the most fun making this one!  Here is what I used:
pipe cleaner
googly eye
large black pom pom
cardboard
q-tips
black marker

As with the other two balloon people I used the pipe cleaner to act as the arms/hands.  I glued our monster bowler to a piece of cardboard which I cut from a juice bag box and this serves as the bowling alley and is also what helps our monster bowler stand! The pins are q-tips cut in half and of course the pom pom is the bowling ball.  Our Monster Bowler helped us learn numbers.  I wrote numbers 1-10 next to each 'pin' and Tiffany counted and identified with each.  After playing a bit with our Monster Bowler I took out our bowling set and we bowled a few frames!

I paired our balloon people to a book called, Emily's Balloon.  Their are other books I would have liked to include but our local library did not have the others available.

It was fun creating our balloon friends and incorporating them into learning activities.  Several times over the course of this past week I've caught Tiffany using her imagination and playing with her balloon friends!