Advent Activity Bags

I did these last year and I’m doing them again with a few modifications to make it run more smoothly!

Last year I was heavy on the home-made, time-intensive activity options, this year I am reining it in and replacing them with activities that are easier and quicker to pull together and less daunting for me!

I browsed my Christmas Pinterest board for ideas again but also used some things that are unique to our family….

• ·         Write letters to Santa (we do this on the 1^st to give me time to rustle up their request if at all possible…. They ask for one thing for them, one for someone they love and something for the whole world)
• ·         Make Christmas biscuits (ambiguous enough so that if I feel like putting together the ingredients for the Rudolph cupcakes I can, or if it boils down to cookie cutters and butter biscuits that fits too!)
• ·         Set up for a party (we aren’t spending Christmas with my parents this year so will be having a special pre-Christmas rendevue with nibbles and drinks to exchange gifts)
• ·         Visit the Christmas market (an annual special event to ride the enormous old carousel, browse the shops and eat hot-dogs by the fountain!)
• ·         Make hot chocolate with marshmallows in (Idris LOVES hot chocolate so this is for him!)
• ·         Make a gingerbread house (with the kit from Ikea – told you I wasn’t doing homemade this year!)
• ·         Visit Hooties to look at the lights (a warehouse near us with a darkened area for trees, lights and inflatable decorations)
• ·         Lolly stick snowflakes
• ·         Paper village scene for the windows
• ·         M and m’s nativity poems – make to give to friends
• ·         Call some family to wish them the best of the season
• ·         Decorate oranges with cloves and ribbons
• ·         Make candy cane mice
• ·         Make thank you notes ready to go (these will cover all the children in one – separate ones have proved over ambitious to get sent out in the past!)
• ·         Take a box of food to the food bank
• ·         Make oreo-pops
• ·         Hama bead snowflakes
• ·         Make paper chains
• ·         Make mince pies
• ·         Make paper snowflakes
• ·         Make strawberry santas
• ·         Toast marshmallows on the fire
• ·         Decorate the tree (always done mid-December the day after Daddy’s birthday)
• ·         Hang up the stockings!

Apart from the few things that are date fixed like decorating the tree and writing letters, I have made a little stack of the papers in the cupboard and I will pick one to go in every day depending on whether I have the resources needed or the energy required!!

The bags came from Ikea last year, and they have three chocolates in each of them from a variety of Christmas chocolates that I found around and about…. This year’s new addition is a Christmas joke in each bag – I had a real giggle finding jokes to write out and I know the girls will find them hilarious, especially Faith, our resident joker!

I’d love to hang them all down the banister with the tinsel and the lights but last year Idris quickly worked out that they contain fun things to eat and I fear that all the chocolates would get scoffed in a day if I did so they are in the dresser to be drip fed!!

More toddler maths

With this activity Idris explored one to one correspondence and capacity as well as some patterning and a touch of probability! This activity was created to build on an interest that Idris showed in this egg box from the recycling pile. I watched him take it out and experiment with putting other objects inside and trying to close the lid. Initially I gave him a box of coloured cotton spools to put in and out of the box, but they didn't seem to interest him too much. Later on in the day I found a tube of Christmas tree decorative bells and they appealed to him much more! There is no picture of this set of equipment all pretty and ready to go as Idris was far too eager to explore it!

 He spent quite a bit of time putting them one at a time into the sections of the egg box. He always built a square of nine, even when he filled them up in a different order!

 He added some of the cotton spools in after a while. The metal tubs that you can see are 3 sets of differently sized sauce and dipping pots that I picked up in the pound shop. They fitted pretty well into the sections on the egg box and Idris experimented with how many bells would fit into each pot and whether he could stack the pots on top of each other.

 If he was really careful he could balance all ten bells in the largest of the pots. His fine motor control, hand strength and finger dexterity got a great workout with these as he was holding two or three at a time in one hand and rolling them through his fingers to place them in a cup.

 He started an impromptu game of hide the bell and was delighted when we hid one under a cup and moved them all around and he had to guess which one the bell was under! He was very good natured about this age old magician's trick and loved the pantomime of looking under each one and shaking his head no when there was nothing there!

After losing interest in hide the bell he concentrated on stacking different combinations of pots on top of each other. This is an enduring interest of his. He likes to try and stack all sorts of things of all shapes and sizes.

An Advent Calendar of Activities!

Inspired by my sister-in-law and by these bags that I found in Ikea today (apologies for the upside down photo, I am getting to grips with drop box and an android phone - bear with me!), I have put together an advent of activities for the children and us to enjoy throughout December. I downloaded printable Christmassy labels and edited them to show all of the activities that I have come up with. I have more than 24 as I plan to tweak both the order and the activity in the bag to suit the day and the circumstances! I think that I'm going to hang them down our beautiful banister rail so they will look really decorative as well as being their advent calendar. I'm not as organised as my sister-in-law as I haven't yet GOT all the ingredients and materials needed but there's plenty of time for that! This was very spur of the moment but I had no trouble thinking of things as we always do quite a few fun activities in December and I have been thinking about doing this for several years now! Events just collided to make me do it this year! Thanks Lorri and Ikea! Here is our list - some are specific to our area, and some are general!

• Shop for Christmas gifts for the children at The Haven
• Put up and decorate the tree (always on the 14th after Daddy's Birthday!!)
• Make mini gingerbread houses (a work in progress as we can't get graham crackers here and that was the idea that I saw....... watch this space!)
• Go Ice skating or to snow play, depending on deals and offers!
• Go for a walk to see the lighted houses near Granny and Grandpa's house
• Make marshmallows
• Make new ornaments for the tiny Christmas trees and decorate the trees
• Make ice-candles
• Make ice-cream cone Christmas trees to eat
• Treat the birds
• Decorate the Christmas cake
• m&m's Christmas story
• Christmas tree play dough
• Write letters to Santa (something for me, something for someone else, something for the world)
• Make reindeer food
• Learn a new Christmas carol
• Make hand print ornaments
• Make paper chains (we always do this, it's a tradition in our house!)
• Make lolly stick snowflakes for the walls
• Have a family pow-wow and say nice things about each other - write them down to keep!
• Make mince pies and give to the local people we know who are in need (Jack (92) is first on the list, he always carried a boneo in his pocket for our dog, and he was the only person she never barked at as she rushed out to sit and beg waiting for her treat then scuttled off again without a backward glance - pure cupboard love but we have come to love Jack and after a bout of pneumonia earlier this year, we no longer see him take his daily walk and we miss him!)
• Go to the Christmas tree festival at Church
• Make paper snowflakes
• Enjoy hot chocolate with all the trimmings!

I might pop the odd sweet or chocolate in there to make the children giggle, like red smarties for Rudolph's nose and chocolate coated raisins for reindeer poo! I'm really happy I did this this year and I'm looking forwards to it! Have fun making yours!

An Impromptu Pumpkin Carving Session!

 These were the spooky results of our impromptu pumpkin carving session last week - courtesy of the fab offer that a certain supermarket had on! Dewi went all technical and made a spider on a web....

 I made an owl sitting on a branch with a cloud floating atmospherically past, although on reflection, it looks far more like a cat sitting on a branch, and by the time I took the pictures, it had flopped over backwards and was being propped up by an apple twig through the beak - painful!

 This is Eve's - she went to town with haunted houses, ghosts, bats etc etc - there wasn't a lot of pumpkin left really afterwards!!!!

 Faith did a special on witches hats - all carved free hand and a very impressive selection I thought!

 There were a few classic pumpkin faces just for good measure......

And they looked great all glowing away together in the gloom outside!

 This was the scene mid-carving........

 Faith wielding the pumpkin carving mini-saw like a seasoned pro!

 Eve realised that she needed a larger opening to get her pumpkin innards out of!

 Dewi being all technical about the process........

And guess who wanted a piece of the action - he was desperate to get his hands on a pumpkin saw but had to settle for a scooper instead!!

Autumn Planters

We made these Autumn planters last week. I found the ceramic pots at the pound shop, and the plants came from the supermarket. We put one Heather in each pot and then some tiny plug plants of citrus coloured Pansies and Primroses. They are grouped together here on my bird table (more like an albatross table, it is made from scaffold planks!). They need to be above ground level so that Idris doesn't 'unplant' them several times! They will wing their way off to various people this coming week, one home with my baby mindee and one at my parent's house as a welcome home present for when they arrive home from a long visit to my brother in Canada. My little mindee aged 11 months had a fabulous time doing these. I've been trying to encourage her to put things into pots as well as take them out and when the compost came out she got the idea and chuckled away as she put handfuls of it in. Idris was more creative with the compost than that.... isn't he always?!!

Olympic Activities

 Knowing that we were seeing the torch relay, I planned an Olympic Activity morning for a few child Minders that I know and we all got together for some fun. We made Olympic ring paintings with plastic cups and plates of paint.......

......followed by Olympic medals with salt dough and cookie cutters and baked them. I have gold, silver and bronze paints ready to go for next week to paint them and then we can put ribbons on them and wear them!



 I was interested watching this little one who quietly worked away practising making them long after the others had drifted away! She doesn't follow verbal instructions for making things very well and struggled until shown how, then she was off and away!

I had baked a batch of little 'O' biscuits that morning (tweaked from an idea on activity village) and we iced them in the Olympic colours, then sat down and ate them whilst I read 'Peggy the Much Wenlock Piglet' to them to explain how the modern Olympic games came about. It was a great fun morning and a good start to the other activities that I have planned.

Painting With Feet!

This was born out of a lovely idea that I had to make butterflies from foot prints on canvasses- I may put he pics up if they are a success! The children so loved the sensation of paint on their feet, that we extended the activity. I taped a line of white paper along the lounge floor and then the children painted each other's feet before walking or running or jumping along the line.

Eve was very creative about how she painted Faith's feet, making symmetrical patterns....

....... that were wasted on Faith as she jumped around the paper!!

 Hopping, skipping, jumping, running walking - forwards, backwards, sideways - anyway you did it, it made a lovely mess, and not just on the paper (predictably)!!!!!

 Of course, Idris just couldn't resist getting in on the action....... oooh, scrumply paper.....

 Hang on a minute - is that paint on the floor....... really Mum? Really? Oh you fool!

 Thankfully for his taste buds he turned the brush around before seeing how it tasted!

 Clean-up time was just as much fun - look at that tongue stuck out in concentration!!!!

It was such a good fun afternoon - I'm going to print some of the pictures and put them up with the sheets of painty paper in a display and write up what the girls remember about it.

My mindee said it was' tickly and beautiful' - what a quote!!

Plastic Bag Butterflies

We had a lovely time today making these plastic bag butterflies - I had the idea from here. It provided lots of opportunities for practising scissor skills, talking about the sizes, shapes and colours of the items going into the bags, using some ordinal numbers, counting and discussing the lengths of strings to hang them from!

Eve experimented by making her pipe cleaner antennae into different twisty shapes....

 Faith carefully chose lots of Easter card toppers to go in her butterflies (we raided all the left over bits and bobs from the bottom of the craft box!!

 This is one of Eve's butterflies.....

 We hung them up from the curtain pole with wool, some high, some low......

 Idris really loved looking at them when I held him up to show them to him, and I have to admit, although very simple to make, they are very effective! My little mindee let me hang one up and took one home to her Mum!!

Making Sock Rabbits!

We made these really sweet sock bunnies last week. I made them at a 'Messy Church' update evening that I went to with our Vicar and Youth Worker a few weeks back. I knew the girls would love them even though the practise run I made on the evening looked a tad scary! They are really simple:

Flatten out a sock and cut from the toe to the heel up the centre. Make sure you choose a sock that has an equal amount of 'foot' to 'heel' as ankle socks won't work (as I found out the hard way!)

Turn the sock inside out and tie a tight knot in the top of the sock then turn it back the right way around (this is the rabbit's bottom!). Fill the sock with rice or beans up to the base of the cut - not too tight full as you need to be able to mould it.

Tie a double knot in the cut toe parts - and arrange the ears as desired! use a ribbon/cord or pipe cleaner to tie around the middle of the rabbit's body to differentiate between the head and the body.

Add some eyes and a nose - we used gems and beads but you could use googly eyes or fabric or buttons. once dry - play away but beware, you will be picking up bits of rice from random corners around your house for weeks!!!!

Home-made Bath Paints

We had some fun with these last week - it was an idea that I 'pinned' to my pinterest board (which was the only reason I joined facebook in the end, so that I could use pinterest! I can actually find links to things again instead of plodding through umpteen saved links!). The original idea comes from The Imagination Tree. They are very simply made by mixing a small amount of food colouring into shaving foam...

Then add paintbrushes and voila - bath time fun........ Eve is very taken with the idea of painting her nails at the minute, so she painted her nails with it!

Faith meanwhile painted as much of the bathroom wall as she possibly could - I can only show you a small part of it though as after the Winter in my little old and cold house, the grout needs scrubbing clean again!!!!!

We tried to make red, blue, purple and green too but they went amazingly wrong! When we added the red and blue to the shaving foam, it turned the foam a pale grey and formed capsules of red and blue colouring. We pulled the capsules out and they were powdery inside - a fascinating reaction with the foam and just as entertaining as the bath paints but left us with a sadly depleted colour palette!! The green simply went yellow!

Making Wildflower Seed Bombs!

Faith and I tried making a batch of these yesterday so that we were ready pre-pared for the Home Education group today where we are running this as an activity for others to try out! They don't look that attractive in the pictures but they are packed full of British Hedgerow Wildflower seeds, varieties that will grow in semi-shade, and so carry the potential to be really beautiful! I can't remember where I saw the idea but it comes from the 'guerilla gardening' movement where people go under cover of darkness usually to garden derelict areas and make them beautiful and more useful for wildlife. I believe the original bombs were much larger and made from clay and compost but our version is made from recycled paper pulp! Here's how we did them:

Sheets of newspaper torn into small pieces and soaked in water (we found that four sheets of a tabloid sized paper filled one of our ice-cube trays)......

We then blended a large spoonful at a time with about a half-pint more water so as to be kind to our blender!

This was the result - sloppy paper pulp that Faith had fun playing with!

We mixed a tablespoonful of the wildflower seed into the pulp and stirred it in well then tipped the mix into a muslin cloth tied over a large pan. We twisted the cloth up and hand-squeezed as much water as possible out of the mix.

We took small amounts of the pulp and pushied it into the ice-cube compartments, squeezing any more water out as we went. They were a little tricky to get out of this ice-cube tray - I think that a silicone one would be easier to use, and it would make some fun shapes as well! Once popped out we lined them up on the radiators to dry as they need to be completely dry for storage or the seeds will try to germinate prematurely!

I remembered too late for this batch that when we made paper we added coloured tissue paper and it turned the paper purple, so tomorrow I'm going to try adding yellow and orange tissue paper for a Spring-like look!

Once dried these can be put into a bag and carried with you on a walk or drive and chucked into the base of a hegerow where the seeds will hopefully germinate and the flowers will grow! This was why I chose the native wildflower seeds as so many hedgerows have been lost, reducing the number of habitats for insects, birds and animals and particularly affecting butterflies. This is a fun way to try and redress the balance - we are going to try and 'bomb' our local canal-side hedges with these!