Category: almost 6

Thanksgiving Turkey Craft

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Big Life Journal is a site I regularly follow and also signed up for ttheir newsletters. It promotes mindfulness and growth mindset for kids and teens but there are a great deal of wonderful advice for parents to parent more consciously and more positively.

I found this cute turkey printable in my inbox the other day and immediately printed the black and white version. (Little L. is into colouring now.) Unfortunately, I cannot link the printable as it’s available only for those who are signed up for the newsletter. In the picture below your can see what parts it has.

So we started with the colouring, checking a real turkey picture for the body but then the girls just used their imagination and their favourite autumn colours to make the feathers. On the feathers we wrote what we love having in our lives, what we are grateful for. (In the meantime we talked about the body parts of a turkey, and colours, special colours like maroon.)

Then came the cutting and sticking together. It took quite a while because of the colouring, but there is a coloured version of it too – we do not have a colour printer, unfortunately.) Here are the final results:

While putting our turkeys together we chatted/thought a lot about what we are thankful for, what lovely things and great people are in our lives. For a long time we haven’t had any fun, creative, holiday-related activities in English with the girls, just everyday conversations. However, now it was a great time to spend together in English in a productive way.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Mother’s Day suncatcher

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I really like suncatchers and they are easy to make even for the smallest hands. Here is what we made for the Grandmas this year.

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What you need:

  • contact paper (self-adhesive cover for school books)
  • tissue paper (“selyempapír”) of any colours
  • other decorative elements that are as flat as a sheet of paper (We used hearts and flowers)
  • coloured paper

How to do it:

First, I cut a heart frame out of yellow coloured paper ( I used a template for the heart but you can try to draw a symmetrical heart with this technique). I also cut a piece of contact paper peeled of its back and stuck the heart frame on the sticky side. After that I cut along the outer line of the heart.

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I prepared a lot of decorative elements on a tray for the girls to choose from. It could have been more varied but time was scarce.

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They decorated their hearts as they wanted to. Even my two-year old could make a really nice present for the Grandmas.

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Try it next mother’s day and let me see your decorated hearts in the comment section or on Nonnative Mommy’s facebook page . (This idea is also a great Valentine’s Day present by the way 🙂 )

 

Pompom run

Published on by nonnativemommyLeave a comment

I had to cook. Little L. wanted to play with me. Challenge accepted.

I took out some kitchen roll tubes and toilet paper tubes, which I’d been storing for a loooong time so we can play with them some day, and made a very quick, ugly but functional pompom run.

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I cooked and she played in the kitchen, sometimes I joined in too. Everybody was happy.

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I wasn’t considering how great it is from language point of view. While she was making the pompoms run she was identifying their colours.

-T his one is yellow. And this is red. Look, mommy the black one is spiky.

Then she compared their sizes:

– This is small. Look, Mommy a big pompom.

In the afternoon my big girl (almost 6) came home and started playing with it using a pair of tongs. She added some more pieces of tube to the pompom run to boot. (It was difficult for her to cut the hard cardboard.)

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DSC01548She was playing with it for half an hour.

It’s still on the fridge and I keep the pompom close by. They can play with it whenever they want to. And they often want to.

The best is it took 5 minutes to make it. Of course, you can spend more time on it, painting the tubes, decorating it with stickers together with the kids, making more interesting and more exciting ways, use it for addition, etc.

But simple is beautiful 😉