Discovery Jars

I've been looking at discovery jars online and have seen people post a few cute ones recently and saw an ocean one in this month's Family Fun magazine.

I had all of the supplies to make eye spy ones so that's what I did this week with my nieces and nephews. I bought the supplies last fall to make an eye spy bag for my son but most of the little things came in dozens so I separated them into bags to make one eye spy bag for each of our sibling's families. Once I started sewing those vinyl windows on my plans changed. I made one that I never took a picture of and my niece took it home. It's pretty crooked. I've since sewn two more but have yet to fill them because I need to sew on the list of things to find to the back and the printable fabric I bought requires an ink jet printer and I keep forgetting to take the fabric with me to someone else's house. SOMEDAY, I'll finish them and post a picture. But, I digress...back to the jars. I figured I had plenty of extra supplies so I emptied some Gatorade bottles for the kiddos and they each got to pick little trinkets to go in theirs and everyone got to make their own "eye spy" discovery jar. Here are a few of the trinkets they used.
Here are the finished jars.
We filled them with the trinkets to find, poly filler beads and then I hot glued the lids on. Since there are four siblings, I wrote their names on the lids. I also included alphabet beads with the letters in their names in their jar. I added the entire alphabet to my son's as well as a quarter, dime, nickle & penny.

Don't ask where I bought the beads. People online say you can buy poly filler beads at Michael's, JoAnn's or Hobby Lobby (those are the three main craft stores around here) and I've yet to find them at any of those. They are all over the Internet but I lucked out when my mother-in-law gave me a huge bag of them when I told her what I was doing. She'd been holding onto them and they were perfect for what I was doing.

We're going to learn about Christmas this week (for Christmas in July) but we'll do oceans and beaches next week and post the ocean discovery jar we make.