This project is similar to Friendship quilts I have made with my students... except this time we made a Cousins Quilt! My son doesn't live that close to his cousins, so I've been looking for ways to help him practice their names and match their names with their faces.
Materials: Colored cardstock, a large piece of white paper, scissors and a paper cutter (optional), photos of friends or family members, stickers, markers, crayons, and double-stick tape.
Directions:
Prep ahead
Cut out pictures of your family members so that each photo is about the same size. Ours were 3 X 2.5 just because of how the pictures copied. Cut cardstock into small square pieces. Ours were 4 X 4.
1. Have your little one decorate all the colored cardstock squares with stickers, markers, and crayons.
We practiced different drawing styles with each square- polka dots, zig zags, squiggles, spirals, etc.
2. Lay out your squares and admire them 🙂 We talked about all the different shapes, colors, and styles of drawing that we saw. We also talked about the stickers and counted the baseballs and soccer balls.
3. Have your little one help put double stick tape on the back of each picture. Practice the name of each family member or friend. I also had my son decide which cardstock square we should use for each cousin.
4. Stick the picture on the square. We talked a lot about the "edges" and "the middle" and we practiced trying to keep the pictures on the squares. My son was able to recognize when the picture went off the page and would take it off and try again.
5. Admire your finished product 🙂 We practiced the names of our cousins again.
6. Grab your big white paper and tape the finished squares onto the paper so that they make a big quilt shape. I did this part by myself because my son was recovering from the trauma of sticking a raisin up his nose. 🙂 (He did that between step 5 and 6... but used a great clear sentence to tell me what he'd done, so I couldn't be too mad! It is amazing how quickly things like that can happen.)
7. Trim the edges of the white paper and hang your quilt somewhere in your house that has heavy traffic so that you and your child can talk about their friends or family members often! I might frame ours and put it in my son's room so that we can have daily conversations about his cool cousins.
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