Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Visual Daily Routine from Paint Cards

First, before anything else, if you didn't know this already, I entered a "Creative Bloggers Got Talent" contest over at Every Creative Endevor. The second round of voting has started, so head over there and VOTE! One of the projects is mine, but I can't tell you which one. :) Have fun!

Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming. ;)

Several months ago, I saw a daily rhythm chart in a giveaway on one of my favorite idea websites and thought "I could make one of those!" I at first thought I wanted to do felt (and that would still be cute), but I wanted to do something fairly simple since I don't have a lot of time on my hands during the week. While I was walking past the paint cards at Lowes a few weeks ago, inspiration hit!
A refrigerator daily rhythm chart, complete with pictures of our sweet kiddos!
I grabbed a TON of paint cards, some from each set of color, and cut them up.
 Then I laminated them--the laminator was our big family Christmas present!-- and cut them out.
 I used one of these little edge-cutters to round the sharp edges, but it took some babying.
 I cut some small sections of adhesive magnet...
 And stuck them on each color!
 First stage is done! That's a whole lotta cards!
Next, I printed out a bunch of pictures of the kiddos doing our daily things...
 Cut them out so that only the thing we are supposed to do is showing....
 And laminated them!
 After cutting them out, I added magnets to the back of each one.
 Finally, I wrote each daily activity on a card and matched them up with the pictures. I did some color organization: orange is food-related, green is self-care related, blue is playtime related, and purple is sleep related. There are a few pictures (like waking up and storytime) that didn't fit into those categories, so they got their own colors. I kept everything focused on activities and didn't worry about the time that we do them, only the order, since our 3 year old hasn't learned time-keeping yet (and I'm not planning to teach it soon).


 I still had a ton of cards left, so I decided to try something else. I took 10 of the more brilliant colors and arranged them in rainbow order. Then I wrote a number and added the corresponding number of dots on each one. These are now on the back of our daughter's easel (an Ikea one modded to be magnetic on the "chalkboard" side).
 And I still have 28 more! I temporarily felt like I MUST do something with them right away, but then I realized that it is OK for me to store them away for more inspiration. :)


~Regina

3 comments:

  1. That's really good!! What a great idea!

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  2. Super cute and fun idea!! How did you mod your Ikea easel to be magnetic?

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    1. Thank you! I'm glad you liked the idea.

      To make the easel magnetic, my husband took a left-over piece of sheet metal and cut it down to size. He glued it in and then painted over it. You could also buy some magnetic paint from a home improvement store (and even paint over that with chalkboard paint if you want to keep the chalkboard!). It's a tiny area, so it wouldn't take much paint at all.

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