We’ve been making paper snowflakes today – which I’m sure you made when you were a child so you won’t need any instructions. But you might like to try these virtual snowflakes. We love them and even my 3 year old managed to make one with a little help with the mouse. But be warned – they’re rather addictive! You can use the ‘Find a Flake’ to see the one Nurturestore made.
Nativity scene shepherds picture – more cotton wool fun!
The children loved the cotton wool so much yesterday that they’ve used it again today – this time to make sheep for a nativity shepherds scene. Here are the results:
while shepherds watched their flocks by night
an angel of the Lord came down and glory shone around!
Make a cotton wool snowman
December 1st and it’s all frosty here – which got us thinking about the possibility of snow! The children loved making these snowmen. Cotton wool is a lovely texture to work with and this is easy for even the youngest children to create.
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- gather your materials
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- add eyes, carrot nose and a scarf to keep him warm
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- draw an outline and fill with cotton wool
Make a dove of peace Christmas decoration
A white dove is a universal symbol of peace and a beautiful way to start your Christmas celebration – and so easy for children to make.
Step One
draw round a template and cut out - we used some sparkle card
Step Two
glue on a sequin eye and feather wings
Step Three
thread through a ribbon and hang on tree - or give away as an alternative Christmas card
happily shared with Violet Posy’s Thrifty Christmas and Kids Get Crafty and Making Monday Marvellous and Mad Skills Monday and Making the World Cuter and Today’s Creative Blog
Make a toy shop
This week we have a toy shop to play with. Very simple to set up, all you need is:
A till – we have a toy till which we filled with real (small denomination) money. If younger children are playing – who might be tempted to put the coins in their mouth – you might like to make some enlarged replica coins from cardboard (which you might like to laminate) so they can’t swallow them. If you haven’t got a toy till already you might like to add one of these to your Christmas list – or simply use yogurt pots filled with the coins instead. Add some old till receipts from your purse.
Use real money and till recipts
Something to sell – we made a grocery store and used some toy food and some egg boxes and empty packets of food.
the produce section
Baskets and bags / purses – We have a couple of mini shopping baskets and each child had an old handbag with a purse with a few coins in.
Signs – making an open/closed sign and some listing the shop’s special offers is a good way to sneak in some letters and reading. As you can see, we are nativity play crazy here so our store is called the Bethlehem Shop!
open for business
include some letter recognition
Shopping lists – provide some paper and pencils and give the children a chance to practice ‘writing’ with a purpose, so they don’t forget anything on their list.
'write' your shopping list
In addition to role-playing the shopping experience, with a child being the shop keeper and some being customers, using coins allows you to include some maths skills. You can add price labels to the food and help the children count out the right number of coins to buy what they want. You can also sort the coins into denominations to put them in the right till drawers – which works on classifying and matching skills.
One child playing today was really interested in the coins and spent time sorting them into colour groups and also size groups. Just shows that providing children with open-ended resources allows them to be creative and explore areas which they are interested in.
sorting coins by size - big and small
sorting coins by colour
Make a model house
a cardboard mansion
My 3 year old has been asking lots of questions about houses recently: what’s under the floor? which room is on top of this one? how many families live in a block of flats? I’m also keen to encourage her to pick up a pencil and do some mark making and drawing, as this isn’t an activity she tends to choose for herself but obviously is a skill she needs to develop. I always like to take the individual child as a starting point for any activity I’m planning – what are they interested in and what skills are they currently developing?- so with all this in mind we decided to make some model houses.
We used some cardboard boxes which we opened up flat. This gave us a clear side to draw on and it was much easier using a flat surface rather than a 3D one. We cut out a door to start with and coloured it and the roof in with wax crayons. We talked about what shapes windows are and had a look at the ones in our house. I helped my daughter cut out some rectangles from some paper and she used a glue stick to stick them on by herself. She used a crayon to put crosses on each of the windows to make them look like the ones we have at home. I was really pleased to see she carefully held the crayon in a palmar grip and placed the crosses right in the centre of each window – she’s improving her pencil control. She also added some beautiful flowers, which gave the opportunity to try making vertical and circular marks. Every front door needs a house number so she checked our number line and decided on a ‘3’. We then folded it all back up again and fastened it with stickytape – very simple but I think it looks great and she’s really pleased with it.
So that’s fine motor skills, mark making, decision making, numeracy, three dimensional modeling, shapes, colours, art, collage, and some ‘Mummy and me’ time – all from her current interest in houses. Amazing how many skills you can nurture in one simple activity.
straight lines and circles - developing pencil control
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