Toilet Roll Christmas Wreath and other crafts

Posted on December 12, 2014 by ofamily

It seems like Christmas is the season to do arts and crafts with your kids.  Which I love but I also think it is the season to use old toilet rolls and egg cartons and to try to keep it simple so that the kids can truly enjoy the craft.  Our crafts are mainly completed by the kids (sometimes I need to help if the cutting is a bit tricky especially with my youngest) so nothing ends up perfect, when we paint our toilet rolls they do have streaks and sometimes a few patches remain unpainted but my main concern is that the kids are having fun being creative.  So here some of what we have been doing lately.

Last week the kids went on a bit of a toilet roll painting craze and we ended up with lots of red and green toilet rolls.  So I thought we would use them to make a Christmas wreath.  We cut the painted toilet rolls in half – I did have to help my youngest with this (we used 3 green and 3 red toilet rolls).  Then we cut out 2 paper plates so that we just had the rim and I cut it and the kids “threaded” the toilet rolls onto the paper plate.

paper plate

Once we have filled it up we just used some sticky tape to seal the two ends of the paper plate.

toilet roll wreathI really like the way this one turned out. Sometimes simple is better !!

Another paper plate Christmas wreath that we made recently was this one using pipe cleaners.  Very simple but great for little hands

Pipe cleaner Christmas wreath

Pipe cleaner wreath

 

What else to do with painted toilet rolls.  I have seen the idea of stacking the toilet rolls to make a Christmas tree in a couple of places so I thought we would give it a go but my daughter did not think it looked quiet right – she wanted to add something inside the toilet rolls.  So we ended up getting some cotton wool balls, dipped them in green paint and added those.  This did get very messy and my daughter did not totally finish doing it – you can see some of the toilet rolls need more cotton wool balls added – I have left it on the kitchen table and I am hoping that she might come back and finish it herself.

Toilet roll christmas tree

Toilet roll Christmas tree 2

And lastly my favourite egg carton Christmas craft has to be this lovely Christmas tree that my daughter made.  We painted the egg cartons, glued them together added a lolly stick for the tree trunk and decorated it.  I just love it.

egg carton tree

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Stick man Oh Stick man we love you

Posted on December 10, 2014 by ofamily

Yes we love the Julia Donaldson books in our house and Stick Man is currently my son’s favourite.  And yes a favourite book means an excuse to do some “activities” around the book.  We have already done some crafty type activities so I thought we would use our current favourite Stick Man to practice some of our counting / maths.  I found these fab stick man posters (yes on Twinkl – gold).  I printed 4 of them on a page, laminated them and made them into lovely number cards.

I mixed the cards up and Blue started sorting them out in the correct order.

Stick man cards

Once he had finished big sister got out her counters and practiced her counting in 2’s (with a bit of help from little brother of course).

Stick man cards 2The kids also used the stick people that they made last week (see the Stick Man activities post) and practiced counting in 5’s by jumping with their stick people from 5 to 10 etc etc.  This is the type of Maths learning that really seems to work with Pink.  If she can do a hands on activity she tend to remember what she learns.

stick man cards 3Then they got out our lovely snap cubes (affiliate link) and Pink practiced using the cubes to represent the numbers correctly.  Blue actually thought this looked like fun so he also joined in (first time he has done this but he really seemed to get the hang of it very quickly).

stick man cards 4stick man 5If you have a Stick Man fan in your house these number cards are truly great for some fun learning.

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One Christmas Night painting

Posted on December 9, 2014 by ofamily

One of our favourite Christmas books to read is One Christmas Night by Christina Butler.  The kids love little hedgehog and her friends and I like the fact that the story is about giving and friendship.  The graphics in the book are lovely and one of my daughters favourite pages are these snow covered trees.

One Christmas Night

So we thought we would have a bash at making our own snow covered tree picture.

I started off by setting the sence for the kids by sticking down a basic snow covered hill on some coloured paper so that they would have an idea of where the trees should go.  Pink helped me cut out some basic triangle shapes for the trees (different sizes).

Christmas night picture

We then started sticking down our trees, I did have to remind the kids that it was okay for the trees to overlap (my son was not too keen on this idea – at first he just wanted a straight line but after he saw what big sister was doing he got the idea).

Christmas night picture 2And then we added the white paint and some silver glitter.  A good idea for getting the effect of snow on the trees is to let the kids use some ear buds.  Blue loves painting but he still makes very big strokes when he paints, he finds using the ear buds much easier for the smaller snow flakes.  Pink actually mixed her silver glitter into her paint.

christmas day picture 3

Christmas night picture 3

I think the end result was quiet sweet.

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Colourful Santa fun

Posted on December 8, 2014 by ofamily

We are loving our colourful Santa’s (classic on Twinkl).  I stumbled onto them by accident last week and decided that even though I had a bunch of Christmas themed activities already planned and printed I just had to add these to our Christmas activities.  The ideas of how you could use these are just endless, you could use them to help with colour mixing activities (Blue is very into this at the moment), you could use them to practice ordinal numbers, or get the kids to practice writing the colour words…just too many options not to print them out.

We started off using our Santa’s to do some colour mixing.  Blue loved this. I gave the kids a colour mixing card and they had to use the Santa’s to “mix” the correct colour.

colourful Santa

colour mixing santaThe colour mixing cards that we used are FREE to download from Twinkl.

Then I wrote the ordinal number words out on some scrap card and then the kids had to match the correct colour Santa to the correct position eg Pink Santa is in third position.

Ordinal Santa'sAfter that my daughter practiced her writing and spelling by writing out all the colours and adding them underneath the Santa’s

Colourful Santa 3

And she also added the 1st, 2nd, 3rd cards that we had.

Colorful Santa 4

Colourful Santa 5

And the best part the kids have asked me not to pack the Santa’s away.  They want to make up a story about the colourful Santa’s and my daughter is even going to write out the story.

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FREE christmas pages on Twinkl

Posted on December 4, 2014 by ofamily

After seeing some comments looking for free Twinkl pages for Christmas/ winter I remembered my half completed post and thought I would try to finish it.

Here are some of the FREE pages that we like. Sorry that there are not a lot of pictures included in the list below but most of these pages are things that we are still planning on doing in the build up to Christmas. I hope you find one of two goodies to do with you kids.

Patterned presents from Twinkl – these are great for some collages.

Present collages 1

Twinkl have also got a lovely nativity word mat. (This has been moved onto their paid for subscription)

I also found these nativity stick puppets which we are going to be using this year (These are have now been moved to their paid for subscription)

We love these great snowman themed writing pages.

Numbered snowmen 0-31.  These are great for making number cards (print 4 on a page) and get the kids to practice putting them in the correct order or play place the correct number of objects on each snowman.

Editable self registration snowmen – We like using these as rhyming cards.  Print them out on card, laminate them and get the kids to practice writing rhyming words on 2 matching cards

Complete the christmas pattern – I have just printed these out for my little boy to do.

Christmas Vocabulary poster – we like using the vocabulary posters to make 3 part cards, great for helping the kids recognise the words.

Christmas alphabet ordering worksheet – on my list for my daughter to do in the build up to Christmas.

Christmas shadow matching worksheet

Christmas themed letter writing page – great to laminate and get the little ones to practice tracing their numbers on it.

Christmas number comparison page – this is actually in my daughters folder for her to do next week.

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