Crafting melt down

Dawn just posted about felting gone sour with her kids. Today was my turn :) I had planned some crafting to go with our green hour challenge and the river theme. We were supposed to create an underwater scenery complete with some real sand on the bottom of the paper, some felt weeds and silvery fish.

The kids were really keen to start. I actually had suggested we'd do some English first but they insisted on the crafting so I agreed. It went bad right from the beginning. I gave them some pens and washed foil lids where I asked them to draw some fishes I could then help them to cut out. Lucas refused to draw to start with and Luana had a melt down when she wasn't able to colour the fish. I explained her it was ok just to draw the shape of the fish as I'd cut it for her but she insisted she wanted to colour. After a lot of explaining and reasoning and increasing whining I told them it clearly wasn't going to work so we'd better do the crafting at some other point. I told them crafting was supposed to be pleasant and we were supposed to have fun doing it and as we clearly weren't we might just as well stop.

I'm not sure what really went wrong. The activity was easy, planned and prepared. Maybe it was the material I gave them. Go figure. I'll try it again tomorrow and maybe I'll cut a few fishes ready so they can see what I'm after.