Stained Glass Paper Trees

Today we made Stained Glass Paper Trees. I was reminded of this fun activity idea when I visited Alpha Mom's Blog.

What To Do:

- cut a tree out of construction paper
- cut holes in it (like you would a paper snowflake, or just fold here & there & cut a piece out)
- glue pieces of tissue paper on the back like this:



- hold up to the window & watch the light shine through! :)

Paper Puppet Christmas Pageant

My parents were recently getting rid of a ton of "The Friend" magazines that they had collected over the years. I gladly accepted a box full of them, to use for pictures to cut out for different projects with Talia.

They came in handy this week for another use, as well! I started searching the internet for some fun, religious, Christmas activities to do with Talia. It was hard to find good ones! (If you have any, or any links to a good resource, please point me to them in the comments!!)
So, I searched through the box of magazines and pulled out all of the December issues. I found today's activity in the December 1995 issue! While you can find that issue online, the illustrations aren't available that far back. However, you can find illustrations and activities to print out in the more recent issues if you go to this website (they're organized by date).

Here's what we did:

- I glued the pages onto cardstock
- I cut the pictures out
- I laminated them
- I cut them out
- I used a gluegun to glue the sticks on
- We discussed the story of Jesus' birth
- Talia played!

I'm glad I decided to laminate them, because I'm hoping they'll last long enough to actually pack them away with the Christmas stuff and use them again next year!

Here's Talia, finding new & exciting uses for the popsicle sticks while waiting for me to finish my part in the craft... note: the dye used for popsicle sticks WILL come off when moistened... ahem.

Here are some scriptures that can be used for Family Home Evening, if you want to do a Puppet Christmas Pageant:

- Christmas in America

Helaman 14:1-5, 3 Nephi 1:4-21

- The Birth of Jesus Christ

Luke 2:1-7

- Glad Tidings of Great Joy
Luke 2:8-20

- Wise Men from the East

Matthew 2:1-12

Wrapping CDs

As mentioned in one of the wrapping paper posts, we are wrapping Christmas CDs this year, to open one each day as Christmas gets closer.

It's a great advent-ish thing to do, and lets your kids open something before Christmas.

I hope to be able to do this with Christmas books one year when we have enough of them! (We wrapped a few this time).

Paper Snowflakes

We've been making these paper snowflakes over the last couple of days.

It has been fun to do with Talia- she can make them herself, with a little help.

And when she gets tired of cutting, she likes me to cut them, and then she unfolds them to reveal the finished product.

It's like magic when you open one up to see how it turned out! :)

Apple Pumpkin Stamps

I have seen this activity before but I can't remember where.

You just cut an apple in half, dip it in paint (or paint it with a paintbrush) and then use it as a stamp. We used them to make pumpkins.

We did the stamping in the evening, and since they used a lot of paint,we let them dry overnight before adding googly eyes & paper jack-o-lantern faces. (I cut out the pieces & Talia arranged them).

Tissue Ghosts

This morning, Talia & I made ghosts out of tissues.

To make one of these you need:
2 tissues
1 marker
1 ribbon or pipe cleaner or string

You just crumple up one tissue, wrap the other around it (creating the head), and tie the ribbon (or string or pipe cleaner) around the neck, to hold it in place. Then add the face with a marker.

We made about 70 of them this morning (a whole box of tissues worth). We are using them for invitations to a Hallowe'en event, so we needed a lot of them :)

Observations:

Talia was able to do everything except tie the knot in the ribbon (pipe cleaner probably would've worked better for her).
She would do one 'job' for a while & then suggest that we switch jobs.
She went from crumpling the head, to cutting the ribbon, to putting the finished ghosts in the bag, to wrapping the ribbon (I got the knot ready, then she pulled the ends to make it tight).

Bee Study

Talia's insect of choice yesterday was the Bee. We read two books about bees, and then made a paper Bee similar to the ladybug she made the other day.

This time I let her make more choices and do more of the work on her own.

Observations:

She liked being "the cutting person" :)
She wanted me to help her with gluing a few of the things, but seemed to enjoy doing it herself as well.

Note the long tongue for drinking nectar (it is not a stinger-and did you know only females have stingers?) It was good to let Talia do the cutting because not only did she enjoy cutting, but we were able to discuss how many legs we needed, how big the tongue should be, how many wings a bee has, etc.