Christmas Paper decorations

Our first craft in our advent calendar was to make paper star decorations, so this is the first one we made, it is called a Finnish Star.

You will need to cut 12 strips of paper mine were roughly 12mm by 22cm, they don't need to be perfectly cut for it work.

Fold 2 strips in half, so you have a centre point.

Unfold and glue together

Then take the other 4 strips and weave them as shown in the next 2 photos and glue each strip in place.

Then repeat so you have 2 crosses made of 6 strips of paper each.

 Then take 2 corner strips, twist them and glue them in place,

repeat this in the other 3 corners, so you crosses should look like those below, hopefully.

Now lay to the 2 shapes on top of each other

 

and match up one twisted corner from one shape with the straight piece of the other shape and glue together.

When you have finished gluing, you can carefully cut each corner to a point, as below.

 

Then I take a needle and cotton, to piece a small hole in the paper and make a hanging loop with the cotton.

Our Advent Calendar.

We've always made some sort of advent calender but for the last few years we've made an activity one. Instead of just making a Christmas to count down the days, we've made one and then behind each door we had a Christmas craft / activity to do for that day. In the run up to advent I would talk to the children about different crafts etc that they would like to do, making paper chains is always on the list and I would add some crafts and Christmas stories as well. This year we we were going to do the same but having seen lots of lovely pictures of toilet roll Christmas trees, I thought we would use that as our base. So unfortunately me trying to save enough rolls didn't work, my husband is rather to efficient on the recycling front, so I had to cut mine in half to have enough. Then the children set about painting the 24 rolls, 3 brown for the trunk and the rest green. When they were dry, I spent some time gluing them all together.

 We then added a star and a couple of presents and of course some glitter

in each roll I made a little scroll tied with red string, inside the scroll I've written the days craft / activity.

Our planned activities this year are :-
                                                   1 - Paper star decorations
                                                   2 - Make salt dough decorations
                                                   3 - Snowman scrape art
                                                   4 - Fir cone Christmas trees
                                                   5 - St Nicholas story
                                                   6 - Make paper chains
                                                   7 - Make bath bombs
                                                   8 - Make candles
                                                   9 - Melted snowman biscuits
                                                   10 - Oasis block painting wrapping paper
                                                   11 - Gingerbread house
                                                   12 - More paper decorations
                                                   13 - Make Christmas cards
                                                   14 - Mini chocolate Christmas puddings
                                                   15 - Watch a Christmas film
                                                   16 - Decorate porcelain Christmas trees
                                                   17 - Snowman pictures
                                                   18 - Decopatch reindeer
                                                   19 - Paper doves
                                                   20 - Paint paper mache stars etc
                                                   21 - Learn a Christmas Carol
                                                   22 - Read the Christmas Story
                                                   23 - Make tissue paper wreaths
                                                   24 - read the Night Before Christmas
but sshh don't tell the children I've written out the list here as it is supposed to be a surprise.

Scones

Today I thought I would try my scone recipe but make it with dairy / soya free spread and oat milk and they turned out to be very yummy indeed we will have to make more. As you can tell from the picture the children did most of the rolling and cutting out, which made for some variety in shape and size but still tasted good.

So we have another yummy recipe for snack time, sometimes we serve with home made jam, other times marmite or seed butters, or just buttered and served with some fresh fruit. We also sometimes make them with half wholemeal and half white flour and add 15ml of ground flax seeds to make them extra nutritious. Lovely served warm or cold.

                                         200g plain flour
                                         15ml baking powder
                                         50g butter / dairy free spread
                                         10ml sugar
                                         140ml milk / oat milk

1-Sift flour and baking powder together.
2-Rub in butter / dairy free spread.
3-Stir in sugar.
4-Stir in milk to make a soft dough, do this gradually as you might not need all the milk.
5-knead out onto a floured surface.
6-Roll out to about 1.5cm thick (1/2inch) and cut out scones.
7-Cook at Gas 8 for about 10 to 15 minutes.

Number Activity Box

While I've been enjoying a couple of weeks holiday, I have been busy planning for next term and now have several themes planned that I can dip into. I have also been busy sewing and making a number box.

 

The children are loving the rag numbers, sequencing and making up different numbers has become a real fun activity.

We even made a washing line to peg them onto.

I've made up some different peg cards for the little ones to use, 2 different levels depending on where they are. Peg cards are brilliant as not only are the children able to have fun while counting and playing with the pegs, they are learning how to manipulate and use the pegs and developing their muscles in their hands which will help with writing later on.

I also made up some laminated numbers as well and we can use them as a matching game with the rag numbers or a colour matching game with the shapes.

I have also made up several number song cards,

and some shape cards, that we can use for counting sides, colour recognition / matching games etc, I love it when I can make a resource that will be able to be used in more than one way. Not only are we learning numbers etc in a fun way, we have lots of opportunities for language as well

As the rag numbers went down so well ( I've actually made and sold some more sets), I thought I would make middle one some felt fraction manipulatives, haven't finished them yet but here's a photo of them, hoping they will help her understand fractions easier.

My poor husband was getting rather excited as he saw my stash of fabric going down, that was until Middle one and I had a trip to the fabric shop to replace what  I had used and came back with even more, oops!

I Spy Bottles

I put together some I spy bottles for the older children to play with and see what they could find. Basically a plastic bottle, filled with rice but not completely too the top, so the rice will move around and a variety of small objects. I took photo of each object before it went into the bottle and made up some spotters card. So if the children wanted to, they could cover each picture as they found it, so they knew what was left to find.

Meet Kaya and Other activities

Inspired while reading Meet Kaya, and we are now working through the rest of the books in  the series, middle one became interested in how they lived. I then put together some activities to go with this for her and the minded children.

Each book from the American Girl series has a chapter at the end covering factual information about how life would have been for the Nez Perce at the time the Kaya stories were set. As Kaya was part of the Nez Perce tribe, we found this website which had lots more information.

After showing the younger children some pictures from the story of Kaya, they set about making tepees and canoes, we used brown wrapping paper as a more authentic base for the tepees and canoes, rather than white paper.

This did cause a lot of discussion on what was it? Followed by why did they dry the animal skins etc. So I talked to them about why they would use animal skins etc

These were some of the other books we used.

We made dream catchers and told the story from the Ojibwa tribe about the spider's gift.

They also made bead necklaces from cut up pieces of plastic straw, they sorted them first into colours and then created different patterned necklaces.

 As we had talked about tracking and hunting, I used this sheet of tracks from the Nature Detectives website and printed of some pictures of the animals for the children to try and match up

Some of the other activities I created were to help the children with their numbers and counting, using spiders and number 8 from the dream catcher story as the theme. They loved playing draw a Spider Game, which involves very simply throwing a dice and depending on what number you throw as to which body part you draw but you must throw a 1 first for a body to draw everything else onto.  So lots of counting as well as fun.

I also made up some number clip cards with Native American symbols on.

and out came the number 8 play dough mat, as spiders have 8 legs.

After looking at the Nez Perce tribe, we read about Lewis and Clark in and how President Thomas Jefferson sent out Lewis and Clark to explore the unknown lands. As their goal was to map the land, we set about making a map of our local area. They then went on an adventure to unknown territories (my garden) to try and map it and while they were there, they were to draw any plants of interest. we later collected a few flowers to press.

So as well as joining in most of the activities with the younger children, middle one also wrote a short story about going exploring, sketched flowers in the garden and found out some more information about them from the gardening books. Mapped were some of the different tribes lived and looked at some of the different types of housing etc as well as learning a lot about the Nez Perce tribe from the Kaya books. Studied spiders, how and why they spin webs, the different types of webs they spin etc

There was probably a lot more that we talked about but it would take ages for me to write everything up but this gives some idea how the childminding and home ed can work together well. We do follow a maths and English curriculum that she follows as well as doing all of the above.

10th Birthday

In our house we celebrate going into double figures as an extra special birthday. So my M turned 10, we had a party, it was a big success and remarkably relaxing, mind you she had planned everything before hand and presented me with a to do list for the day, just in case I forgot anything! Luckily our to do lists were the same, so both happily crossed of our to dos together. So our morning past with very organised birthday prep and I don't think we missed anything out.

She had originally said she wanted a craft party but then couldn't decide what crafts, so when I suggested cake decorating she loved this idea. So she and her friends created her birthday cake.

I was very pleased with how the cake turned out.

I baked 10 butterfly shapes, one for each year of her life, actually I made more than 10 as I thought my minded children would love to decorate some on Monday.

I then iced them all with white icing the night before,

Then I collected up a mixture of edible icing pens, tubes of icing gel and a mixture of sprinkles, so on the party day the girls could all decorate a cake each.

Then all 10 butterflies were arranged on a blue board to represent the sky and a candle was put in each cake, everyone loved the result  and a very happy birthday girl :-)

We also had a lovely birthday tea and some yummy home made bread and for the puddings we had mixed fruit and I made a couple of homemade fruit jellies, couldn't resist a photo, they were lovely and so easy to make.

So a big thank you to all our friends that made her day so special and to my lovely minded children for making today special as well.