Christmas crafts and decorations

Here are our Christmas projects for this year.  We put as many as we could up to decorate before sending them home for winter break.


Handprint Christmas Trees, laminated and bordered with decorative duct tape

snowflake picture frames with their pictures in them

shoe traced reindeer with hand print antlers

decorated Christmas Trees

Paper name chains in Christmas colors

Porcupines

Looking at all sorts of animals around us, so the kids made porcupines!

Leaf Glitter

This was a fantastic project!  The kids and I went for several walks in the surrounding neighborhoods for a couple of weeks in the fantastic fall weather.  We gathered leaves of every size, shape, color that we could find and brought it back to our room.
We chose the biggest ones to glue on our paper, then the rest we crunched up and made Leaf Glitter!
The kids then made swirling lines with the glue (with help) around their big leaf and sprinkled on the leaf glitter.  They turned out wonderfully!

Fish Bowls

We were reading books about fish tanks and such and decided to make our own.

Thanksgiving gift to parents

As a gift to the parents before Thanksgiving break, the kiddo's and I made turkeys!  We traced out their hand prints and cut a lot of them out in fall colors.  Then used baby food jars, painted the inside with clear glue, covered in glitter, then glued on the hand prints in a turkey feather fan pattern on the back.  They came out super nice and I even made a teacher one for myself that has one hand print from each child as the feathers.

Scarecrow

The kids had fun choosing different color "straw" hair and noses and such.  I prepped the wood popsicle sticks at home the night before to save some time.

Fall Sensory Bin

The kids loved playing around the pumpkins so much in our last project that I made a sensory bin of fall leaves (fake, it was too wet outside for real ones), and pumpkins (gourds) I picked up in the produce section of our grochery store.  This lasted for 3 weeks and I just threw out a pumpkin or 2 a week as they started to go bad.  The kids loved it!  They were able to explore different shapes, weights, textures, all sorts of things.

The Pumpkin Project

There were some ups and downs with this project.  The original idea was to have the pumpkin seeds sprout in our classroom so the kids could see it, then send them home with the families after.  Unfortunately, our pumpkins tended to mold a little faster then they sprouted (which they did indeed sprout, just not faster then the yucky mold).  So next time when we do this, we will send the pumpkins home the same day we "plant" the seeds!

This project did require prep work at home ahead of time for me.  I wasn't going to try to carve pumpkins in class with a knife next to a class full of curious toddlers!

So at home the night before I carved out the top of enough small pumpkins for each child to have one.

I used a spoon to loosen up the seeds and  insides a little to help with the sprouting after the kids would add the dirt to the inside.

Still carving.......

The day came and the kids were super excited to see the pumpkins, even more when they found out what we were doing with them.

After we were done, we sent them high on a shelf next to the window to get some light.  Again, next time, sending them home as soon as we are done with the "planting" part!

Just for those that were curious, this is what they ended up like after.  As you can see, some of them did sprout, but the yucky smelly mold was a huge minus.  But you learn something new every day.  Now we know how to do it better!

Name Caterpillars

Forgive the photo shopping on the art, but we do try to protect our kids identities at all times here, so no faces in pictures or complete names.

That being said, we used this as an opportunity to help the little ones know their names and the names of their friends.

I had the circles all cut out and ready and would write the letters of their names as they said them after me, then they placed them on the glue on the paper to make their caterpillars.

October Hand Print

Bats (or spiders, lol) and pumpkins!

C is for Carrot

Art for You Fundraising Project 2012

This is a fundraiser we do every fall.  Each class comes up with a project for their kids to do with certain restrictions (size, craft items allowed, etc), and has all their kids do one.  Then the parents get to order anything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, to tote bags, and so much more with this art image on it.  We send off the orders and a few weeks later (in plenty of time for Christmas gifts!), the items come back and get handed out.  This is what our class chose to do:

While you can't see their faces in the pictures (security reasons), what you are missing is priceless.  The expressions of wonder and ooooooooooo while I'm painting their feet were great!

They each chose the colors they wanted for their hand flowers.

Added names and dates for the finishing touch.  Wonderful project all around!

September Hand print

Since September is usually the first month back to school, I did a hand print that really embraced that feeling.  :-)
The kids loved seeing me paint each of their fingers a different color!

Bee Handprint