Author: nonnativemommy

Thanksgiving story bracelet

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The Thanksgiving story bracelet project has been sitting around for few years now. I totally fogot about this cute and memorable storytime activity. As I was reorganising my autumn activity box I came across with this well-prepared but overlooked task. I was more than happy to introduced it to the girls before this year’s Thanksgiving.

What you need:

  • a printed copy of the story
  • 8 coloured beads (white, blue, green, black, brown, red, yellow, orange)
  • neutral colour of pipecleaner ( we used white, but elastic fishing line could be good)

How you make it:

Opening the story

I started to read the story and when a colour was mentioned they threaded that colour of bead onto their pipecleaner. (At first we used the elastic fishing line but it didn’t work out for us.)

As the story went on more and more beads got onto the pipecleaner. The kids had to pay attention to the story as the colours represented certain ideas, happenings in the Thanksgiving story.

I didn’t make the girls retell the story, but with older kids you can use the bracelet for reciting the happenings of the first Thanksgiving.

A fun and creative activity that my girls really enjoyed and they also learned a lot about the background of this important US tradition.

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Corn craft

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Little L. wanted to do some craft out of the blue. As Thanksgiving is coming I came up with the idea of a corn craft. It’s popular food on the Thanksgiving table in the US.

While we were making our corn project, we were talking about Thanksgiving. Families and friends come together and thank for all the happiness, and blessings in their lives with a big feast.

Other foods they serve are turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, carrots, corn and cranberry sauce among many others.

So after having drawn the corn and its leaves, we glued the corn’s inside and sprinkled it with dry corn kernels. Like every year, I explained that corn kerners are not the seeds of the plant, but inside the kernel you can find the seed.

While we were adding the corn, E. also joined us. I spelt out C-O-R-N as I was writing it on the top of my page and Little L also made a C on hers.

E. decided to write der Mais on the top of her page (she does enjoy her German studies at school).

While having fun with the corn craft, in the background the Thanksgiving playlist was going.

And here are our final final art works:

Pencil shaving tree

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While sharpening a pencil. some pretty shavings fall off. We started to collect them to do something with them and the time has arrived to use them in an autumn atr project.

The kids collect branches and twings wherever we go, what’s more, our garden is full of them after a storm or stronger wind. So all you need is:

  • pencil shavings
  • twings and small branches
  • glue
  • paper (cardboard is the best if you want o display the final product)

Arrange your twigs as a tree on your sheet of paper and then glue them on. You might want to wait until the glue drys but you can start gluing on the pencil shavings as if they were the leaves on the tree.

I made a tree beforehand to show it to the kids. Little L got interested, but E. didn’t. So a few days later we made Little L’s tree too.

My tree was made at the beginning of autumn, but hers was made when the trees were losing their leaves. You can see some leaves are falling down, there are quite a lot on the ground and the banches are getting bare.

Haunted Castle

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There was a craze online about haunted castles made out of toilet paper tubes right before Halloween. I got carried away with the idea and I planned and prepared to do it with the kids. Well, Mommy plans it and the kids think differently.

At the beginning E. and L. were interested and helped me paint the base green (a piece of cardboard box) and the tubes black. (We used a big paper towel tube and 6 toilet paper tubes, but you can make it bigger if you use more). Between the ground floor and the 1st floor towers I cut some black cardboard piece (It came with some socks and thank goodness I save everything ’cause it’ll be good for something)

The weather was kind to us and we could sit outside to do the messy work.

Then we needed to wait until the paint dried, so we went to have lunch and after that the girls got crazy. Therefore I needed to finish most of the castle by myself.

I drew a big door in the middle at the bottom, some windows, some bricks and a climbing rose. I cut the door and a window open so we could place led tealight in them but I’d found only pumpkin-shaped tealights which couldn’t fit in the window only through the door.

I used a hot gluegun to stick all the parts together.

Anyways, finally I added the rooftop. As I had no black cardboard the kids (who joined me towards the end) chose orange. I cut out a circle and formed a cone out of it. Then the kids placed the little fun details around and into the castle: black cats, bats, ghosts, pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns to make it even spookier.

The castle served as a great place to role-play some spooky stories with the props. Mainly Little L enjoyed and played with it in English adding more characters like skeletons and spiders.

I suppose I’ll save it for next year so we can have some more spoky fun with it.

Happy Halloween!

Leaf sihlouette crayon craft

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The colours of autumn are magnificent and I wanted to bring them inside the house. Little L rather stayed outside with Daddy but E. and I sat down to create some beautiful autumn trees with a special technique.

First I folded and cut out leaf shapes, then E. added colours onto the edges with crayons.

After having drawn a trunk and some bare branches we placed the leaf temples on the sheet randomly and smudged the colours onto the paper with our fingertips. (Advice: use a different finger -or thumb- with every colour or you’ll mix them.)

It’s not an easy task and the crayon colour is not so vivid after the smudging. However, the result is pretty.

We were talking about what special colours could be seen on leaves after the chlorophyll dispaears from them. So on E’s tree there are some pink, purple and blue ones too.

We clearly had some fun time just the two of us, which happens very rarely nowadays, so this art project was special mum-and-daughter time.