1st Day of Advent

Making happy memories, creating special moments  is very important to me, having an candle to light each day is something my children look forward too. Tonight we lit out advent calendar and I read stories to M and L from the books we chose. Last night I made a small felt star to go with L's book, Advent Stories, she loved it and held it throughout the story and then introduced the star to teddy.

                                   

The first activity from our advent calender was to make a robin out of a paper plate, we used a large paper plate for the body and a small paper plate for the wings, you can get two birds out each set of plates. Now when I do planned crafts activity like this, it's not just here's the cut out paper plates, paint here and here and I'll stick it together. So I thought I would talk through what we do in a bit more detail.

I asked the children if they could remember seeing a robin and if yes where, we talked about the robin we see up the allotment and the one we see on the garden fence.

We then listened to the robin's song and watched a short film clip on the RSPB site, we also enjoyed some of this one.

We talked about the colours and sorted out the paints, we then attempted to mix the right colours from our collection of paint.

Then I got the children who can use scissors ok to cut the paper plates in half, for those too young to use scissors I did the cutting out and shaping round the head.

They then decided what colour paint to paint where and then when dried we worked together to glue all the pieces together.

Art for me is creative process as well as seeing what we might produce at the end but it is also a way to learn so much more about the world around you. A chance to observe nature, make maps etc, do hedgehogs have ears, where do reindeer's eyes go, do bears have tails, are just a couple of the questions that have come up from previous sessions.

They spent this afternoon making lots of Christmas cards.