Santa and Ice Decorations

Today we read  Jolly Old Santa Claus by Alice Leedy Mason and George Hinke

This is the condensed board book version but it still features some of the beautiful oil paintings by George Hinke. The story line seems a bit cut up in this version though. Alex enjoyed looking at the pictures and pointing out details that he thought were interesting. We do have a paper back version too, but Alex's attention span isn't that long to listen to the whole story.


After reading about Santa we made a hand print Santa. I helped Alex put white paint on his hand and then stamp it on a piece of blue paper. We then added a face and hat out of construction paper, some googly eyes and cotton balls. We added a couple of craft foam snowflakes to the background. It came out very cute.

A few days ago I saw this post by the Artful Parent and have been wanting to try making natural ice wreath and ornaments. The idea is very easy just add water and some colorful berries or leaves into a containers, add a string for hanging and freeze. It was about 20 degrees today so it was plenty cold enough. We bundled up and went out around our yard to find some colorful leaves and berries. It was cold!!! We quickly found some stuff to use, we put them together inside because it was so cold.

He was cold and was giving me the evil eye

leaves and berries we found

Alex making the wreath

working on the ornaments

I added strings to each one and put them outside to freeze

A preview

Its dark out now, so I will post pictures of them all frozen and hanging up tomorrow.


I'm linking up to Kids Get Crafty and the Play Academy

Tot School 1st Day

10/18/10

~Alex is currently 32 months~

I decided that we would concentrate on color identification.The only color that I know for sure he knows in red. Today's theme was Autumn Colors.

The Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert

This is a great book. We read it together and pointed out the different colors of the leaves.  I thought a craft that he would enjoy would be to make a fall tree using fingerprints. I cut out a tree trunk shape piece of paper and had him start to paint it brown while I cut out another round shape to use as the leaves.

He started out doing finger prints....

Then it was more fun to finger paint with all the colors.

"Look at my hand, Mommy!"

The finished tree

 Next we did a outside color scavenger hunt. I got this idea from No Time For Flash Card's Nature Match post.            

I used a egg carton and painted the colors in the bottom.

Then we went outside to see what we could find to match each color. Alex did pretty good, especially with red and purple.

Later in the afternoon I dumped everything out on the table and we matched our treasures with the colors again.

The last project of the day that Alex had very little interest in was a leaf collage from some leaves that we had collected and flattened in a phone book from last week. Mommy ended up doing most of it, but we hung it up in the window so we can name the colors later.

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