Mermaid Activities

As a prize for earning enough stars on their chore chart, the girls were going to be allowed to watch The Little Mermaid movie for the very first time. Tracking down a copy of the movie was no easy task, thanks to the Disney vault, but luckily Amazon came through, and the movie arrived just in time for family movie night, which at our house, occurs most Friday nights. In honor of the movie premiere at the Lily Pad we had an entire afternoon devoted to an "Under the Sea" theme.  We kicked off the festivities with an indoor beach party in the basement playroom. I cranked the heat and my bikini clad mermaids splashed in the kiddie pool which I hauled in from the shed and with Jim's help, filled with a couple inches of warm water. We also filled some containers and buckets with a little more depth so the girls could experiment with objects that float and sink.  After the pool party, we set out to make  a Little Mermaid craft. The girls painted two paper-plates then glued on seashells and sequins. I then stapled the plates together to make Ariel's clam-shell house.  We printed images of Arielle off the computer and glued her in along with some green seaweed.  We folded Arielle and the seaweed so they would pop up when the clam-shell was opened. For dinner I served fish, more because it was a Friday during Lent, not really thinking about the theme.  In hindsight, serving Flounder for dinner before watching the Little Mermaid wasn't the best idea but I think it went over the Littles' heads. We snacked on Goldfish and Swedish fish as we watched the movie and although there were a few scary parts where the girls had to hide there eyes and one part where Ella shouted, "Oh My God!" with nervousness that the prince wasn't actually going to kiss Arielle and break the spell, all in all it was a great family movie and the boys even enjoyed it!