OK, I’m a little behind on posting our Merry Making.
So let’s see…
All the way back on Thursday David and I made another really easy craft. I have to keep things simple for him, and frankly I’m not real good at complicated crafts myself.
I found some tiny Christmas bows at the store last week. They were just so cute, I couldn’t resist. We made a garland out of them by just pulling a string through. Actually it’s some bias tape I had lying around the house.
I don’t know why I had bias taped lying around the house, because I am quite sure I have never made anything so major that it required the use of biased tape.
Kids like anything that’s colorful, shiny and sparkly, so David actually thought this was a lot of fun. And since it was so easy, the frustration level on this project was zero. For both of us.
I have a few Christmas books that were mine as a child I keep packed away in a box and only bring out in December for a few weeks each year to preserve. Of all of them my favorite is my ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas pop-up book, printed in 1967. (No, I am not that old. Just the book.)
I remember spending lots of time as a kid looking at the pretty illustrations,and pulling on the tabs that make the pictures magically pop-up. I though they were the most beautiful drawings I’d ever seen.
Friday night David and I read the book together. We read it the last few years, but this was the first year he was old enough to really appreciate it. He seemed to think the book was just as magical as I did.
He wanted to keep looking at it long after we finished reading it. We did have to read it three times in a row first.
David is kind of rough on those 40-something year old pages, so I feel like I have to supervise him while he looks at it. I found used copies of this book for sale on Amazon for a much as $397! Oh, my. I really have to take good care of this now.
Saturday evening the boys and I just danced around the house to some Christmas music on a local radio station that plays it 24/7 from Thanksgiving to New Years’. That was all the merriment I could take after Dave and I attempted to finish Christmas shopping the second to last Saturday before Christmas. Bad, bad idea. The crowds were big, rude and obnoxious.
We left David at Grandma’s because we needed to still get a couple things for him. It was too bad he wasn’t with us. We ran into to Comet when we were out.
I guess he’s on his pre-Christmas Santa promotional tour.
We had a busy week last week, and a busy weekend.
The first weekend in December is like our Black Friday when it comes to the Family Business. (No we are not in the mob.) I even pitched in to help. So Dave and I weren’t home much. My mom came up from Indiana to watch David and Wade while we merrily made some money.
And Mom didn’t let me down. She arrived with all kinds of Christmas things to do with David. She has a pretty good repertoire of stuff like that built up after years of teaching school. (She should have her own blog or write a book or something.)
I though I’d share the crafts David made with her. They all have a theme by the way. Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. David loves that cartoon. I think it’s weird and creepy. All the stuff about misfit toys and the big foot looking creature. It didn’t seem strange when I was a kid, but now… (Shudder.)
Anyway, these are all really simple things you can do at home, and you probably have most supplies on hand already.
The first is this clothespin Rudolph ornament.
Just glue two clothespins back to back. Here’s a view from the side.
Then glue a third near the top of the other two, upside down to make the antlers. A small red pom-pom makes the nose. You can draw on the eyes, or glue on some little plastic googly eyes. Finally, tie some yarn around the body for hanging on the tree.
David likes to play with puppets, so the next thing Mom made with David was a Rudolph sock puppet.
All you need is an old sock, a red button for the nose, two buttons for the eyes. She used white buttons and colored them in a little with a permanent marker. The antlers are cut from felt. She tried to talk David into some other color, but he insisted on yellow. You’ll probably have to help little ones with the sewing, but then they’ll have lots of fun doing puppet shows for you afterward.
The last craft is this big Rudolph face.
All you need for this is some construction paper, glue, scissors and something to draw with.
Cut out a pear-shape for the head. A paper bag will do in a pinch if you don’t have brown construction paper. Then cut out some ears in a leaf shape and two half-moons for eyelids from the same paper. The nose is a red circle of course. Cut out black and white circles to make the eyes. The curved black strip above the nose is his bridle. Finally cut out some antlers. Then just glue it all together, and draw on the mouth.
Hope you can have some fun with one of these crafts at your house.
And thanks Mom!
David can count to 10 out loud and he can recite his ABC’s. So now I’ve been working on teaching him to read letters and numbers. I thought I’d share some things we’ve been doing, and a few resources I found.
I got the idea for this Ice Cream Cone Counting Chart from First School Preschool Activities and Crafts. I add a new scoop with each number that I introduce. It’s really simple, but David get excited every time we get to top off the cone with another scoop.
First-School has all kinds of free activities, craft ideas and printable worksheets and coloring pages. There’s something for just about any skill or topic you want to teach your pre-schooler. I’ve been using their alphabet coloring sheets to teach David his letters.
We also started memorizing the days of the week. I found several charts and printables to help with that at Easy Learning Activities. And Enchanted Learning has pages and pages of activities for teaching all aspects of time from days to months to clocks. All of these sites are free.
Since Martin Luther King Day is coming up on Monday David and I talked about that a little bit today too. Racial relations are kind of deep subject for a four-year-old. We looked at some pictures of King on line, and we talked about how God loves everyone and we treat everyone equally and with respect even if they are different from us in some way. I told him King tried to teach that to people. I wasn’t sure what kind of craft I could find to go along with that lesson. But I came across this printable to make a little Martin Luther King figure fat DLTK’s Crafts for Kids.
My printer inconveniently decided to run out of ink this morning, so that’s why the poor man is covered in stripes. I knew David wasn’t going to really sit and listen to the King’s I Have a Dream Speech, but I pulled up a video of it on the computer, and let it play in the background while we made the craft.
So there’s just a few things we’ve been doing around here. Do you have any good resources for pre-school activities on an idea of your own to share?
What have I gotten myself into?
I’ve set out to try and sew something. I don’t mean just a few stitches and some hot glue. I’m talking about really making something substantial.
I grew up watching my mom sew all the time. In fact, for the first eight or nine years of my life she made almost every piece of clothing that I wore. Then I got old enough that wearing “homemade” clothes wasn’t “cool”. I wanted to look like all the other kids who shopped at the mall.
She tried to teach me how to sew a few times when I was in junior high. Thirteen is not a good age for a mother to try and teach a daughter anything. It usually ended in some kind of argument after I got bored and frustrated.
See, I utterly lack patience when it comes to learning new things. A lot of things come easily to me, but when they doesn’t, I can’t handle it. And sewing does not come easily. Mostly because a side effect of lack of patience is lack of attention to detail. Attention to detail is kind of important when you’re sewing.
But I really do want learn how to sew. I have piles of fabric I’ve been buying up for years.
Then the other day I actually bought a pattern.
Tonight I started.
I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was afraid to even cut the pattern pieces apart. I did end up cutting a piece in half that I had to tape back together.
The Aftermath of Sewing Day One
I got the pattern pinned on and most of the pieces cut out before I’d had enough for the evening. I think I did O.K. Just how closely do you have to follow that cutting line?
The whole time I kept asking myself why I didn’t pay more attention to my mother during those sewing lessons years ago?
I need to finish cutting out the pieces tomorrow, then I’ll be breaking out the sewing machine. That’s usually where it starts to get hairy for me.
I’ll have my seam ripper close at hand.
What am I making? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll keep you posted.
Well, it’s pretty odd to be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and Easter in the same week. Will the Easter Bunny bring a pot of gold instead of eggs this year? I hope so!
We’ve been getting into the holiday spirit with some crafts. Here’s a couple things we made this week.
This first is an Easter Bunny craft idea that my SIL over at A Cup of Joy found while she was Ultimate Blog Party hopping. It was posted at The Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.
This second craft is a Leprechaun hat that we made. My very own invention. I know. I know. It’s hard to believe I came up with this all on my own. Ha!
My son did wear it around the house for a little while, but he refused to be photographed with it. I guess that’s not how he rolls.
To make the hat we just cut out a shape like this:
I drew ours freehand. I didn’t think to make a pattern like this on the computer first. Then we added an extra strip of paper to the band to make it fit around my son’s head. We decorated it with a hat band, buckle and a four leaf clover. We also glued an extra scrap of paper to the back of the hat to reinforce it and help it stand up.
Well, we’re closing in on 100 inches of snow for the season. Over forty inches of that fell just in the month of February. Mix in a little freezing rain, days of temperatures in the twenties and teens and wind chills below zero, and you’ve got the perfect conditions for catching cabin fever. It’s March 2nd now. It’s in the forties and all that snow is finally melting. But the end of winter isn’t in sight yet. They’re calling for more cold and snow in just a few days.
So what do you do with an energetic three-year-old when you can’t go outside for more than 20 minutes because the wind will freeze your nose off ? If you don’t keep his hands busy and his mind occupied he’ll climb the walls, literally. I saw him try. He’ll also use your couch for a trampoline, scatter all your pots, pans and kitchen utensils from one end of the house to the other, scribble on your fridge with crayons (saves you the trouble of having to hang the art up with magnets) and grind red play dough in to your carpet.
Here’s a few photos of what we did this winter while we were trapped inside for days and loosing our minds.
Our little fishing hole in the middle of the living room. We made fish out of construction paper and glued on magnets. The fishing pole is fashioned from string and the handle of my Swiffer Sweeper that I don’t use, because Swiffer can’t handle the mess on my kitchen floor. (Notice the Legos that are scattered about. Bored with making things out of them after a long winter, now he just likes to dump them out of the box all over the floor. I think he does it because he knows it drives me nuts.)
Reeling in the Big One. It’s at least a 1 ouncer!
Frying the catch of the day over a camp fire.
Come and get it!
We made crowns from construction paper and glued on some shiny things I bought in the craft section at Walmart. A Superman cape completes the royal outfit. I’m not sure what he’s doing. Showing off his kingly strength with push-ups or something, I guess.
Best friends. I wrote a post already about our plastic pop bottle pig, but I just had to post this one again. What a cute pair.
We started homeschooling this week. O.K., everyone who knows me pick your jaws up off the floor. I don’t plan on homeschooling my son for the next 15 years. I’m just doing pre-school home-school, because quite honestly the only way we could afford to send him to pre-school is if I went back to work. That would sort of undo this whole SAHM thing I’ve been doing for the last three years.
Now you committed home-schoolers out there, don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against homeschooling. It’s just not for me. I utterly lack the patience years of homeschooling would require. And frankly, selfish as it may sound, I look forward to the day I can load my son on the bus and take an uninterrupted shower and my freshly mopped floor will actually dry before little feet pad across it.
We did all kinds of activities this week. My son’s favorite craft was the pig we made out of a pop bottle. Martha Stewart and her quarterly magazine Good Things for Kids was the inspiration behind it. My son bestowed the simple name pig upon him. Pig has been a constant companion these last few days. Except for Wednesday night when my son had what I call a “boy” moment and decided to tear pig apart. Then he cried because he missed pig. Unlike Humpty-Dumpty, we were able to put pig back together again the next day.
Pig sleeps on the bookshelf beside his my son’s bed. Pig rode with us in the car yesterday evening to run errands. Pig watched TV with us and joined us for school this morning. Pig played Ring Around the Rosy with us this afternoon. Pig joined us for dinner tonight. My son craddles pig in his arms, and pets pig saying, “He’s a nice pig.” This is big stuff for a vessel that had humble beginnings as a Mt. Dew bottle. (It has crossed my mind BTW that I will not be getting my 10 cents back for that bottle.)
So at the end of home-school pre-school week 1 my son learned a couple new songs, started using safety scissors, is beginning to understand how to read a face clock and made friends with a paper and plastic pig tacked together with tape and glue sticks.
Just as I finished this post my son had another “boy” moment, and used Pig as a hockey puck. Pig looks like any of us would if we’d been pummeled by a toy hockey stick. My son’s not crying this time. Guess that’s the end of Pig. Good thing he’s immortalized forever on my blog.
