Christmas Sensory Box

Over December I put together some different sensory boxes for the children to explore as well as having a session on different Christmas smells, we had some frankinsense essential oil, fresh pine, oranges, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, peppermint and vanilla. What smells remind you of Christmas?

We made some cloud dough and added lots of silver glitter and some tinsel, the older ones loved this, for some reason the younger ones (under 2s) were a bit more suspicious of it but once they had tentatively poked and prodded it they had fun.

Cloud dough recipe is 2 cups of plain flour mixed with 1/2 a cup of baby oil and mix well, it should be like damp sand, when you squeeze it together it will mould into a ball but easily crumble and not sticky to touch.

Had fun with loads of shaving foam and glitter, for a very pretty snowy time.

Then decided to add some clear water beads for a different texture, the children really loved this.

I also dyed some rice in lovely Christmas green and red colours and when dried added some Christmas sequins, the children enjoyed playing and making patterns in the rice. To get the best, deepest colour, we used a dye paste rather than the liquid food colouring. I added a little paste to about 30ml of water and then mixed it into 2 cups of rice, leave it to soak up the colour and then tip out an old cardboard box and leave until thoroughly dried.

Then a selection of different coloured tinsels, they had great fun pretending to be a Christmas tree.

Gingerbread House and Flower Decorations

We all love to eat gingerbread biscuits, so a perfect Christmas activity is making a gingerbread house.

We made some paper flowers with the older children, take 10 paper chains

stack them up and fold them in half and staple on the fold line.

Take one piece and fold in half and stick at the fold line, repeat for each piece of paper.

Christmas Crafts

To say we love the run up to Christmas is an understatement! The fact there are so many lovely arts and crafts for this time of year is great, the only downside is I usually have to many ideas and not enough time do everything. M and I had a lovely afternoon making these little people, she did most of the stitching, needed a little help with french knots and I finished of gluing them all together with the glue gun. We think they are very cute.

All my children, my own and minded ones love doing any form of scrape art and these snowmen were particularly cute.

Fir cone Christmas trees

Rolled beeswax candles, love the fact that even my littleones can make a simple candle.

Melted snowmen biscuits, we made some gingerbread biscuits for the base, covered them in white icing and used a white marsh mellow for the body, then decorated with a variety of bits.

Salt Dough Decorations

I had seen some salt dough decorations on The Imagination Tree blog and loved them so we had to give them a try, now I didn't have enough enough bicarb to make this recipe, so found another one using salt.

1 cup of salt

1/3 cup of water

1/2 cup of cornflour

1/4 cup very cold water.

Mix salt and the 1/3 cup of water in a saucepan over a low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Remove from the heat, add the cornflour and cold water and mix, it should look like mash potato! 

When cool enough to handle, knead, if sticky add more cornflour.

Leave to dry in an oven on a very low heat for a few hours.

We added glitter to make ours extra sparkly, the silver glitter worked very well but the red glitter just made them look a little odd!

Alternative white clay recipe using bicarbonate of soda

1 cup of bicarbonate of soda

1/2 cup of cornflour

3/4 cup of warm water

silver glitter

Mix the dry ingredients together in a saucepan, then stir through the warm water.

Mix over a medium heat until it starts to bubble and come away from the pan. When it has started to dry and resembles play dough consistency, take it of the heat.

When it is cool enough to handle, knead for a couple of minutes to make it pliable.

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.