paint a wooden ornament {and wrap it up!}

 

Blank wooden ornaments can be found at most craft stores. Usually fairly priced as $2 or $3 they can pack a lot of punch without breaking your piggy bank. If you pick them up now for next year you can get them for under fifty-cents (I need to do this)!

 

 

 

Use acrylic paints for the ornaments and let your kiddos choose two or three colors. I had the children at school pick two similar colors and we added white. We are always talking about the color wheel and complimentary colors. For this project we first talked about warm and cool colors and then the children got to decide of they wanted warm or cool colored paint for their ornaments. Young children love to mix paint together and they will mix any and all colors they can. This is science at its best and the children have ample opportunity to mix away in the classroom For this project however we focused on our colorwheel and went with colors that would not muddy up.

Use wax paper to lay the ornaments down to dry. The ornaments won't stick too much and any drippy paint will be left on the paper and not on your table. If we had any glitter left, I am certain the children would have glittered their ornaments up. Even without, the ornaments are snazzy, don't ya think?

After the ornaments were dry, it was time to wrap them up. We used plain white paper (their painted wrapping paper was a gift to take home) and washi tape. I placed each ornament on its own sqaure of paper and had the children fold and crease their presents. They chose which washi tape they wanted to use and I helped them tear off pieces in the size they indicated.

Next up was yarn. They chose the yarn and I tied it around their presents  (unless they wanted to o it) as they hit up the giftwrap table for a bow. After peeling off the back paper they stuck their bow where they wanted and proudly posed for a photo before running the present to their cubby. So cool!

it's a wrap!

In Rabbit's Gift, each animal in the story returns home with a different type of vegetable. To add to the literature, the children used various vegetables to create their own wrapping paper to take home for the holidays.

I brought in my acrylic paints and let each child choose up to three colors. To keep the paper from getting muddy, we kept each vegetable to one color with the children choosing which veggie got which color.

 

One child worked at a time at our smaller art table. I kept an eye out and rotated the paper a little to keep the stamping an all over process rather than a cluster in one place. Some children chose to stand and walk around as they stamped.

We rolled up their paper and secured it with a pipe cleaner to take home on the last day before winter break. Some of the parents in other classrooms were really dazzled by how modern the paper looked.

a preschool classic: pinecone christmas trees

I remember making pinecone trees back in the 70s when I was a wee one. As a preschool teacher I had to have this available for my kiddos, had too! This time around, not only was there glitter but sequins too! 

 We found that it was easier to just pour the glue over the pinecone. Make sure there is wax paper underneath so that your pinecone does not stick.

 Some of the children pinched and dropped their glitter while other dumped a bottle or two onto their wax paper before grabbing as much as they could to sprinkle on top.

Sequins were added to a few as well. I love how the vintage white sequins turned out!

I looped a bit of yarn around the top so that the wee trees could be hung on a tree or elsewhere. The children got to choose between yellow, red, green, or blue yarn. Red was a favorite.Aren't they fun?

bows, bows, and more bows...

Our last week before winter break we read Rabbit's Gift. To tie in the literature we had a lot of bow play going on (even though there were no wrapped presents in the book the children talked about presents and what they looked like so bows it was).

 

 

We had magnetic bows to sort and match and bows to count and measure with.

We had a table of boxes and bows to create gifts with which the children thoroughly enjoyed. I must have received a dozen boxes of dinosaurs, cars, acorns, and rubber insects!

pinterest in the classroom

 

The families that organized our holiday party really did a tremendous job! Each child got their own supplies to create edible snowpeople and Christmas trees. The green frosting might have covered every inch of the children but it did not keep their smiles from beaming through!

painting christmas trees on the easel

I put out paint in Christmas Tree colors at our easel. I asked if the children wanted to paint a picture of a Christmas tree. This is what I found on the easel, star on top and all.

holiday play dough fun

 

 

My co-teacher whipped up a batch of gingerbread playdough for the kiddos to enjoy while I brought in a bag of tiny bows. We piled it all onto a thrifted tray (my magic place) with as many holiday cookie cutters as we could find and let the play begin!

painting with holiday bows

We painted with our bow brushes using our tempera paints on fingerpaint paper. The glossiness of the paper gave our paintings a fun bit of shine. The children enjoyed painting with our bow brushes and took it upon themselves not to mix the paint up. I had done this before years ago with the children dipping their bows in paint. I wish I had thought of gluing them to craft sticks but then again it was so long ago you needed to save your popsicle sticks if you wanted some. So happy I found the idea and this pin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

our felt christmas trees

This tree is a place mat from either Target, The Dollar Tree, or Michael's...I cannot remember where. The ornaments are from Michael's and had sticky backs. The children worked their fine motor skills peeling off the backs. We had the tree out for two weeks and it got a lot of play. Some children decorated it by themselves while others worked together on a plan.

I wish I had a picture of the tree with all the buttons on it. The classroom was super busy, it's pretty astounding I got as many photos as I did during the week. Each child had a different technique with the buttons. Some dumped them on top or put one button on each point while others only put the red buttons on, or very carefully filled in each tree. Yay for felt trees!

hanging snowflakes on our classroom tree

 

Our apple tree has turned into a classroom tree. From apples to autumn to winter, the children love hanging whatever ornaments they find at its base. Last week it was felt snowflakes made from a pack of felt snowflakes I found at Michael's. After our break we just might be hanging mittens on it!

watercolor gingerbread men

 

How could I forget our watercolor gingerbread men? The children loved drawing and scribbling with the oil pastels. I love how the liquid watercolor really covered their people, splotches and all! I used our cardboard gingerbread person as a template and fancy-pants watercolor paper. I traced the outline with an oil pastel and then cut out the gingerbread person once the paint dried. We looked at the pictures in Gingerbread baby and talked about our facial features as we painted. Here are two of our people. Aren't they fun?

on sorting and set ups...

I teach threes in a literature based school. We focus on one book for the week, pulling out theme and curriculum ideas from the book. No matter the theme, I will always have one or two sorting activities out along with fine motor fun, our sticky easel, maybe a felt board, a story basket, the mystery bag, a sensory bin, play dough, and art stuffs. Repeating these projects and actions using different materials is a great way for children to learn and stretch their growing minds and fine motor skills. The success and anticipation of knowing how to use the materials builds their confidence and autonomy while allowing for creative play when they engage with the materials in ways of their own choosing. Each time they succeed or stretch those thought processes connections are made in the brain. It's really cool! So whether or not the children put the correct amount of pom-poms on the corresponding gingerbread person there is still development happening. If the children color sort the poms (like one did in the picture) while another simply throws them all in the air, that's okay, the brain is still working and growing and the child is learning about the world around them.

 

The pretty set ups in my classroom are to engage and invite the children in and create a pleasing environment for myself and their parents. The set up is the photo-sell of a classroom but the real magic happens when the children arrive and create new ways of playing and manipulating their environment. Those photos don't really show the magic but it is there in super leaps and bounds. It is the main reason I work with children, that magical moment of learning that happens when nothing seems to be happening at all.

These gingerbread people were picked up from the dollar section at Target. I'm not a big foam fan but thought these could last a few years. There are numbered dots on one side with the number written on the other. One of my children immediately ripped a leg off of poor number six. After we discussed what was suitable for tearing, we figured out a way to repair the leg and then grabbed some tin foil and construction paper  to create a tearing station. For the sorting pieces you could use pom-poms, stickers, punched pieces, small counters, beans, or even wrapped candies though with a room of three-year olds you may find one hiding out in the gingerbread house with their cheeks full of peppermints...ahem.

sorting gingerbread people

 When we go with a theme for the week, we GO with a theme. Our week of gingerbread touched on all areas of our curriculum. We painted, we mixed, we did experiments, we read stories, we told stories, we played out the story, we sang songs, and we sorted. I picked up these fantastic gingerbread people from etsy seller How We Learn at Home. I didn't have a plan but loved them so I put them out on the tray. I then rediscovered a color carton made by my co-teacher and loved how they matched so I put it out as well. I walked away and began setting up other areas...

When I made my way back around the room with camera in hand, I found this! I love it when they do this. I thought for sure the people would end up all over the place but there they remained nestled in their colors, occasionally dumped and resorted, or put to bed as one of the children kept saying.

gingerbread houses and people

The children got an opportunity to explore a recipe. I wrote out a recipe card using drawings and explained the different tools we would be using. Mixing cups, measuring spoons, and ingredients were discussed. Our goal was to make puffy paint and so we did!

Each child got a cardboard cutout of a house and a gingerbread person and go to squeezing their designs. The challenge in this project was to NOT squeeze to much as the paint was pretty sloopy and too much paint would prevent our house and people from being "baked" in our microwave.

 

We used this recipe now pinned to pinterest and the children added a dash of cinnamon and spice as well. Once they were ready we popped 'em in the microwave for 30 seconds to cook/puff the paint.

 

 

Once their houses and people were dry (the next day) we got our our squeezy glue bottles and added candy accoutrements.

 

Good enough to eat! Which did happen when a younger sibling spied upon a becandied house. We later discovered it minus a skittle or two.