DIY Colored Glass Gems for Learning, Play, and Decor

Do you have a light box or ever used one? It’s a super cool way to play, learn, and explore. We’ve done an attempt at a DIY light box before but weren’t too happy with the long term results of it. It worked well for tracing and handwriting practice, checking out a few cool manipulatives on the lights, but…well, you can read about our thoughts in the end. We wanted to try another attempt and so this time, we did something just as simple and easy, but it worked WAY better. That post should be up this week. For now, we wanted to share what we’ve been playing with on the light box. Our own DIY colored glass gems!

Create your own colored glass gems easily for learning, decor, and play.

These cuties were very easy to make and VERY fun to play with. We’ve been sorting, counting, patterning, and making shapes with our colored gems and on the light box, do they ever look awesome!

Use your colored glass gems on the light table for learning and play.

Check out that light shining through our gems! WOW! Seriously, this was so cool. So, how did we make these gorgeous gems??

Create your own colored glass gems in any color for decor, learning, and play

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We started out with a pile of assorted colored tissue paper

cut into little squares. You’ll also need a bunch of clear large glass gems

. We used the 1 and 1/4″ sized gems that are flat on one side. We found them in the dollar store but the are also available in the link above.

Create your own colored glass gems for learning and play

Add a little bit of glue
with some water and mix together with a paint brush.

Next, trace your gems onto a piece of tissue paper. I cut out a whole stack at once and it worked well to cover each gem. A pretty princess pencil makes it more fun 😉

Creating your own colored glass gems is a great activity for kids

Baby Girl helped with the next part. She painted the glue mixture onto the flat side of each gem while I stuck the tissue paper on.

Make your own colored glass gems for learning and play.

They are starting to look pretty fun!

colored glass gems for play and learning. These are easy and fun to make your own colors!

Once the glue dried, we started playing! We didn’t even pull out the light box yet. Just playing with these colored stones on the table was fun. These would be so pretty in a flat dish with a Spring centerpiece or perfect for math activities. We sorted, stacked, made shapes, counted, named colors…how many ways can you think of to play and learn with colored gemstones?

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Comments

Emma @ P is for Preschooler says

March 18, 2014 at 7:15 pm

These would make great manipulatives for patterns or as loose parts. I bet they're going to look awesome on the light table!
Dhiyana says

March 25, 2014 at 6:35 pm

Wow! Great addition to the manipulatives. Cool idea. Thanks for Sharing.

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