Circus. Afro. Polka dot. Circus!

To get into a CIRCUS frame of mind, I recommend you watch/listen
to this before/while reading on:



THURSDAY - God's Power over Death
(because Circus tricks are death defying!)

My brain for Circus related ideas circled around: Tightrope. Juggling. Animals. Trapeze. Acrobats. Clowns. Madagascar. Clowns. Juggling. Tightrope. Clowns...

:)

Morning tea craft today was an ice-cream cone clown. This idea (sort of) came from the kids dessert menu at Silver Spur Steakhouse, which is: a scoop of ice cream (in a bowl), with an upside down cone on top (for the clown's hat), smarties and 100s & 1000s for decorations.

Ours today was similar, but an upside-down version of that, so to speak! The children started with their cone, then had a scoop of ice cream on top, dipped half of it into 100s & 1000s, and on the other side added smarties as eyes, and teeth/lips lollies as a mouth. Well, that was the initial idea...

Being a designated 'ice cream scooper' today, I was not able to wander around and find the best ice cream clowns to take photos of, and, by the time I got to my children (who I'd shown the instruction sheet to prior to today, so knew -I think- what they were doing), they had pretty much finished them! Not to worry. I'm sure you can imagine what it might have looked like anyway... I'm certain they were delicious, even if some 'clowns' had 3 eyes and Smartie mouths, like this one :)

Craft today started with juggling balls! I thought that preparation was the key for this craft, so made plenty bags of rice so there were enough for 3 for every child (because you can't juggle with 1 or 2)...

I called this my 'Juggling Ball Production Line':

Rice was measured and put into bags

Bags were tied up

The tops of the bags were snipped

Bags were counted, and grouped into 10s

As I started, my rice measurements were pretty consistent... But really, after about 20 (or 30, I lost count many times) near enough is good enough!! ... 'Give or take' was certainly my mindset during this repetitive preparative task!

While I was snipping the tops off these multiple bags of rice, though, I couldn't help but be reminded of a Dr Seuss book we often read to our children: One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. In particular the part where the little 'Zeds' need a hair cut every day because their hair grows so fast...

Anyway, here's the set up for the craft:

Some of the craft today ended with ripped balloons, uncertain faces, confused leaders, and rice all over the ground... There were plenty of rice bags to use, but this was certainly a tricky craft for small children (and some adults!)... Lots of help/supervision was needed, so I was unable to take photos of my children actually making their juggling balls, BUT, a lot of the children were so keen for their juggling balls to work that they had managed all by themselves and even cut holes in their top layer balloons for extra effect/colour!

Here is Tamara with her finished (I think I even made two of those) juggling balls:

Next craft was clown puppets. This was a much simpler task! I had printed out outlines of the clown's upper body for the kids to colour in, cut out, and stick onto a brown paper bag. I had ample amounts of coloured wool in my pantry, so cut that up to use as the clown's hair. I found some craft pom poms that were used as noses, or on the tops of the clown's hats - it's near the end of the week, so it didn't really matter!

Here's the outlines for the clown:

And here's my finished clown, and a child's finished clown
(who had time to make it colourful):

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If you would like to see more photos of today's Magic, please visit Ropes Crossing Church's Facebook page. There's only 1 more day of creativeness and mag left, so if you are local to Ropes Crossing, why not come and join us! :)