Little Snail Craft Project

On Thursday we made these adorable little snail crafts.   These were inspired by a couple of pins that I found on Pinterest, but when I tried to link to them I just got a photo not a blog post.  I did tweak the original ideas a bit to combine a few that I liked and also to work with the materials I had on hand.  For the bodies, we used little wood pieces that I THINK came from some canvases I bought a long time ago for an art project at home.  Anyway, they seemed about the right size.  We also used pipe cleaners, pony beads and googly eyes.  You can see our materials below.

First, the littles chose a wooden piece and colored it with a marker.  Then they took a pipe cleaner that had been cut in half and threaded pony beads onto it.  Using their hands together to do this required great concentration on the part of the littles.  Threading and bead-stringing is a fantastic way to improve fine motor skills. 

The pipe cleaner was then twisted into a snail shell shape.  The shell and eye stalks had to be attached using hot glue which, of course, was done by an adult.  Small pieces of pipe cleaner were used as eye stalks and a googly eye was attached to the end of them.  Uber-cute!!  We are super crazy about snails!!