Little Mermaid Movie Night

We had our second Disney family movie night yesterday. This time we chose to watch The Little Mermaid. HD received it for Christmas and we haven't gotten around to watching it yet. So it seemed the perfect reason to make it our feature presentation.

We started our crafts in the morning before HD went to school. We made Ariel's starfish necklaces out of salt dough. I got this idea from spoonful.com. The dough has to cook for two hours and I still wanted to allow time to paint the starfish and let them dry so HD could wear her necklace during the movie.

HD helped me roll out the dough before cutting out different size stars using our cookie cutters.

Then we poked holes in the tops of the starfish with a toothpick before putting them into the oven for two hours. In hindsight, I would have made the holes bigger.

While they cooked I painted some old fashioned clothespins and cut out mermaid tails from craft foam. These were going to become mermaid dolls later. This idea also came from spoonful.com as well.

After lunch I let the kids paint and decorate the starfish. Little Man loved it!

I gave HD several color options and then let her sprinkle glitter on some of them while the paint was still wet.

Then we laid them out to dry for a couple of hours.

While they were drying I put Little Man down for a nap and let HD play Disneyland on the xbox while I spent some time decorating. $2 worth of crepe paper became ocean waves and sea weed so that we could dine 'under the sea.' I got this cute idea from Delia Creates.

Then I filled our sensory bin with some play sand ($3 for a 50 lb bag from Lowes. I didn't really feel like trekking through the snow to get some out of our sand box.) In the sand I placed Ariel and numerous ocean life figures I have for sensory bins.

This became our Sebastian's sand search game.

For dessert I made oyster cookies.

For dinner we had Ariel's cheesy Sea Shells topped with an Ursula octopus, Sebastian crab rolls, Flounder's seaweed and green sea kelp smoothies. I found the idea for the rolls on Pretty Lucky Mama. She used martini olives on hers which do look better. However I knew my kids wouldn't eat them so I figured it was pointless to buy a jar of them.

HD was so excited when she saw her plate.

All ready for dinner!

HD is really loving our movie nights so far and thanked me the entire day!

I used our menus again because I think they are a fun way to pull it all together.

I googled and found a cute poster for the Little Mermaid. I downloaded the font Amazonica and then put our names at the bottom to personalize it.

I liked the way our Cinderella menus looked so decided I'd use the same format with the silhouettes. I found several I liked and then changed them all to a reddish color.

Here is the side announcing the menu for the evening.

The other side has the crafts and games we were going to do before ending the night watching the movie.

Then I put another poster image for the back cover.

Little Man loved all the frosting in the cookies!

After dinner the kids spent some time digging through the sand to find all the hidden items.

Then HD painted a mermaid sun catcher I'd found at Michael's.

This was very messy but swept up easy enough.

HD also chose which starfish she wanted for her necklace and Mr. put some thread through it. Then HD decorated it with some beads to finish it off. I tried to let Little Man make one as well but he stuffed five beads in his mouth thinking they were candy. After fishing them out he went back to play in the sand. 

Then we glued the mermaid tails onto the painted clothespins, added hair, and drew on a seashell top and a face.

All finished.

 

We'd meant to play a game of "What would Scuttle Say" but never got around to it. Since Scuttle has funny names for everything (dingle hopper anyone) I thought it would be a hoot to pick up different items and try to come up with what he would have called it. I found this suggestion on pinterest but can't seem to find it now. We had a great night and HD can't wait until our next family movie night.  

 

For all the blogs and websites I got inspiration from please check out my Little Mermaid Movie Night board on Pinterest.