Holiday Play: Bubble Wrap Flag

Happy Independence Day, Philippines!  In your honor, Ladybug Girl and I made your flag to celebrate.

We had already planned for the day to include making the flag but I hadn't thought beyond that.  But as  I picked up some bubble wrap from Awesome Guy's toy organizing session in the dining room floor, this use came to mind:

Freehand painting on bubble wrap during one playdate activity with her cousin, at three years old.

  And so in five minutes flat this was set up:

First I taped down the bubble wrap over the bench so it wouldn't move.  It was already making a very nice rectangle shape for the flag, but any table would do if you pre-cut the bubble wrap.  Then I drew a flag with a black permanent marker.

Now mix up each paint color with with equal parts glue.  This makes the paint stick to the bubble wrap.

Ladybug Girl mixed in some glitter with paint, too.

Now paint!

Before painting, we looked at the flag and talked about which colors go where.  

I filled in the tricker parts of the flag while Ladybug Girl did the blue section.

But I was really just itching to try it out myself.  (So fun)

Now the yellow, my favorite part of our flag.

But here was Ladybug Girl's favorite part: sprinkling more glitter on.

Skip this if you don't want more mess.  Not only did glitter end up on the floor, there's no guarantee that every granule will stick to the paint mixture when dry.  The little girl absolutely loved it though.

We forgot the white, so I hurriedly painted it on while Ladybug Girl followed my brush with some silver glitter.  We laughed together as she teased me to hurry up.

So few materials and such a lot of fun!
I just cut away the extra bubble wrap on the sides, and had ourselves a flag.

Here is our flag, all dry and proudly hanging up in her room.

It really sparkles in person!

We even did a 'print' of the whole thing: I cut some white craft paper from her easel, and she did the print all by herself.

And then the celebration went on with her "preparing for a party".

She ran to get her window crayons to decorate the mirror and made Ube ice cream from her sweet shop.
Flag stickers are from Kultura.

"Party preps"

And now I need advice.  How do you explain to a four-year old about Independence Day?  And to my little Dove who tears up whenever there's a story with conflict -- let alone a war?

A page from Filipino Celebrations.

This was my spur-of-the-moment attempt during bedtime:

Can you guess who the bad piggies and angry birds were?  
Ladybug Girl laughed and said "but Mommy, Spain is not bad!"  "Well they were back then, sweetheart!"

This was probably not very politically correct, but you must admit it is very preschool-friendly.

See more play ideas on the GALLERIES tab on the upper right side of the blog.  

All super easy and working-mom tested.