Textured Turtle

Once again my little guy asked to do a project this afternoon and wanted it to be a turtle. I wonder sometimes where his ideas come from... but I love them! When he said turtle, I thought "hard shell!" Perfect! Hard starts with a letter h and we are studying letter h this week. Yay! While we drove home this afternoon we practiced writing the letter h in the air and saying the letter name, key word (house), and /h/ sound. We also talked about how a turtle's house is it's hard shell... and once we got home we got to work creating!

Materials Needed:

- glue

- foam sheets

- scissors

- markers

- felt or foam heart stickers (we hated the ones we used because they are hard for little hands to pull the backing off!.. so don't get glittery felt hearts from Michaels)

- cardstock

- rocks or pebbles (or anything else hard that you can think of)

- glue gun

- googly eyes

Directions:

1. Cut out an oval out of foam. My son drew one and I tried to use most of it (but made it a little bit bigger).

2. Glue the foam oval onto cardstock.

3. Cut out a triangle and another small oval from foam. Glue them on as a head and a tail. We glued them partially underneath the shell.

4. Add googly eyes.

5. Add heart shaped feet! Since we have tons of heart shaped things around our house right now, these are our favorite things to use as feet.

6. Draw some designs on your shell.

My son really wanted to write some "letters" on his paper, so he did that too. I love that he thinks writing letters is so cool.

7. Lay out your hard objects on the shell in whatever pattern/way that you would like. Talk about how they feel (hard, smooth, cold, etc.).

8. Warm up the glue gun and send your little one off on a hunt to find some more hard objects while you glue the hard pebbles onto the turtle shells.

9. Have your child use his hands to feel the shells once they are stuck. The cold hard glue gun remnants will also be a fun texture for them to check out.

End the activity by reading your favorite turtle themed book. Our current favorite is when Franklin is scared of his hard dark shell!

Franklin in the Dark by Paulette Bourgeois