More creativity!

So I don't know if maybe Clara is going to be a very creative person and some of her creativity is wearing off on me while she is in utero or what, but I have been more creative than ever lately.  My latest project came because I was wanting to find ways for Gray to work on his fine motor skills.  I looked online and one suggestion was lacing cards.  I liked this idea, but then decided to take it a step farther and make them number lacing cards so he could work on number recognition at the same time. :)  These were pretty inexpensive to make and I made them basically from start to finish during one of Gray's naps.

Last night I had printed out numbers to use as templates, but had not cut them out or anything like that.  Today the first thing I did was pick out 10 different colors of craft foam.  Gray and I bought these this morning at Wal-Mart.  The entire pack (50 of them) cost about $5.

I then cut out the number templates I had printed and placed them on the craft foam.  I traced around these numbers with a pencil.  The pencil leaves a slight indention which is nice, especially when it came to the black foam.

After I traced all the numbers onto the foam, I cut out the foam numbers.

I then went around the edge of the numbers with a hole punch and made holes all the way around.  I knew that sometimes kids thread the yarn in loops instead of a straight line from one hole to the next so I chose to do it this way knowing it was the way that would need the longest yarn.  I looped the yarn through all the holes and then cut off the extra yarn and tied it to a hole near the bottom of each number.

This is Gray's first attempt at lacing one of his new numbers.

 This is a picture of Gray this morning playing with rice while waiting on breakfast.  I had him dump it out on his tray and pick up each grain and put back in the bowl.  He loved the dumping it out part, the picking it back up part lost some of the fun once he realized he was hungry.