I know that this is true, but if I walk outside of my Louisiana home right now I could easily work up a sweat.
Still, I was excited to get ready (a day early) and have my kids paint the letters that spell out WINTER and display the season in our playroom over all of our Christmasy art.
Is Christmasy a word? I use it a lot.
I printed this printable and pulled out my paints.
We painted the letters “W” and “T” dark blue.
We painted the letters “I” and “E” light blue.
And we painted the letters “N” and “R” gray.
I deemed these wintry colors.
Is wintry a word? I don’t have time to “google” this stuff y’all.
You could probably back these letters to construction paper to make this even cuter, which I might do when my life slows down. Don’t wait up.
Chatting with my friend Allie this morning about the kid’s nativity sets and books that our kids love, I knew I needed to share all of our favorites along with Part 1 of the Nativity Templates I made.
Allie really recommends this one:
Her kids play with it a lot and sing along to the music. It lights up so they like to play with with the lights off too.
I want this (I love advent calendars and felt boards):
Here are the 3 books we absolutely LOVE (see if your local library has them):
Finally, here is Part One of the templates that I made as an extension activity to all that you are doing learning about the birth of Jesus:
The templates I made are GREAT to use as play dough mats, dry-erase tracing mats, patterns to put along side your paper as you draw the pictures shape by shape, and using for construction paper art.
This Part 1 of the templates include: Joseph and Mary, an Angel, a Star, and baby Jesus.
It is included in my membership because I sell this template set on TeachersPayTeachers, but you can get it included in the membership for just $5 right now (limited time price).
Here is a quick little YouTube video for using the angel template:
My mother-in-law just did a super fun and easy Halloween craft with the kids (and me…she brought extra supplies because she knew I’d want to do one too!).
We made ghost and pumpkin window peels/decals and decorated the kid’s bathroom for Halloween. We had so much fun doing this super easy craft that I think we might just have to make our own window decals for every holiday!
Materials for Ghost Window Decals:
transparency sheets
white paper
school glue
permanent marker
googly eyes (optional)
nail polish remover
Step 1: Place a blank paper underneath your transparency (easier to see that you are not writing on your table with a permanent marker).
Step 2: Draw your picture onto your transparency using your permanent marker.
Tip: My 6-year-old had the genius idea to TRACE a picture. Look through a few coloring books or print a picture off the computer of a simple shape to trace.
Step 3: Pour a whole lot of glue inside the outline of your picture and use your finger to “paint” the picture.* Make sure the glue is thick and even across your entire picture. It’s ok if the glue goes out of the lines, you can trim that off later.
Step 4: Place your transparencies on a flat surface to dry. You will be finishing your craft tomorrow. When all of your glue has turned from white to transparent, it is dry. (We let ours sit for about 24 hours).
Step 5: Using a small amount of glue, place googly eyes on your ghost. Wait for the glue to dry.
Step 6: Peel off and stick to your window or mirror! (Getting it started to peel off is the tricky part. Try bending the transparency while using your finger nail to lift it from the sheet. Then gently peel it off.)
Step 7: Use nail polish remover to erase the permanent marker from the transparencies and begin the craft all over again!
*To make COLOR decals, when doing Step 3, add a few drops of food coloring to your glue and mix together while you are spreading it. For our pumpkins, we added 4 drops of yellow to 1 drop of red in the glue and mixed it together to make orange.
Another option is to use fabric paints instead of glue, but 1. I love finger painting with glue, and 2. using glue is a cheaper alternative to fabric paint.
“I’m going to school on a bus today mom” says my 3 year old as he walks toward the door with his backpack on. He doesn’t ride a bus to school so I reply, “Yes! Let’s pretend to do that Sean Patrick. Are you going to drive the bus or is the driver going to pick you up? ” and the conversation continued as we made our way to the stairs where we pretended to be riding on a bus singing “Wheels on the Bus” and looking out the pretend window pointing things out to each other.
I asked him what friends were riding with us in our imagination and he named his cousin and a few other friends.
This gave me the idea to make this:
He is obsessed with school buses. He tells people when he is six he can ride the school bus. I am hoping he gets to ride one on a field trip this year.
We have a school bus toy that we drive all over our neighborhood road rug that looks something like this:
We read “Gus The Bus” pretty often and there are other great school bus books like and and obviously The Magic School Bus episodes and books are great.
So, he had a blast coloring his school bus picture…
And he did a great job drawing the eyes on the faces… one was shaped like a square so he told me that Mckayla had a square eye haha.
Anyway, click on the link below to download the FREE printable if you think your child would enjoy this too. You can help your child practice sounding out their friend’s names or just writing the first letter in their name. Have fun!
[purchase_link id=”3920″ style=”text link” color=”” text=”Download the School Bus Printable now… FREE”]
The other day a friend instagrammed a picture of her and her son coloring as she drank her cup of coffee. It made me think of my mother-in-law because she is so great about sitting down and participating with my kids as they color or as they play with play dough and many other simple tasks that she makes the most of.
You can purpose tons of learning sitting down with a coloring book…. one page at a time.
You are teaching color recognition, but you are also helping to build your little one’s vocabulary by discussing the pictures. And activity books have lots of little problem solving opportunities to teach with mazes and categorizing (which one does not belong?
Here is one great activity book that teaches the ABC’s and some other problem solving strategies as well…
There are MILLIONS of books like this but I want to share this one to share a FEW quick IDEAS that can apply to most activity books…
1) Trace over black with white ….
Make use of your WHITE crayon!
2) Color inside of bubble letters (not just on pages like this one that are made for them)… I ask “What letter do you want mommy to color?” Then I talk through the formation of the letter “climb down the ladder, frog jump up to the monkey bars, hop across, climb up and down on the other side to make an H” or whatever silly way you want to say it. Then I say…. “Your turn… what letter do you want to color?”
3) For little writers you could draw speech bubbles on your color pages and make your characters talk to each other.
4) Count how many times you see the same object on a page (like the balloons in the next picture)…
Share your favorite coloring or activity books in a comment below and share any tips that you may have for us.
