Crafty Mommy workshop 2. – winter edition

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The winter workshop took place in the middle of November, before Thanksgiving, so that we could cover some Thanksgiving crafts apart from Christmassy and winter activities.

The workshop aimed to help mums with winter fun ideas, whose kids are about 2-3 years old, but 4-5 year-old children would find them enjoyable too.

There were 4 major topics that we covered (and this time we managed to cover them all)

  1. Thanksgiving
  2. Santa/ St. Nicholas
  3. Christmas
  4. Winter
I’m not writing about the details only the ideas I shared. if you have any questions about the activities please do not hesitate to contact me either in the comment section or via email: nonnativemommy@gmail.com
This time I got some photos from the mums taking part in the workshop. Thanks!
 

Thanksgiving activities:

  • Cheerio corn

Santa:

  • Santa’s hat out of popsicle sticks

 

I made this free printable so just click and print it. Colour it with your child if you wish and glue a cotton ball on Santa’s beard every day until Christmas. As we celebrate on Christmas Eve there are only 23 places to stick the cotton balls on.

Christmas activities:

(I can’t find what we made so I have no picture of it. Here is a photo of the original source I’d found the idea at and you can go and have a look at it if you click on the link above)

  • Paper plate Christmas door wreath

Originally I planned it with pompoms but we prepared it with pasta. I would have gone for a red base but E.’s choice was orange.

  • Pine cone ornament
I prepared this colour matching activity that you can download on the link above. You just need some coloured buttons, pom poms or M&Ms to place on the printed buttons of the Gingerbread men. A simple colour matching task.
The last figure is left empty to draw coloured buttons of your child’s choice or use it as a play dough mat if you want to take further on this activity.
 
Other winter crafts
  •  Cotton pad snowmanpict00023_jpg
  • Decorating mittens
    (We did mot finally make this activity but here is the link where you can see the details) UPDATE: We made the mittens (among other activities) after reading the lovely book The Mitten by Jan Brett
  • Popsicle snowflakeddf2e-pict0206

 

 



Mummy lantern

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This Halloween was quiet. E. wasn’t so excited about it this year and Baby Sis is too little to understand it at all. The party we wanted to throw had to be cancelled as some families got ill some other went away for the long weekend.

Therefore a calm and peaceful (not at all frightening) family fun took place on the 31st.

E. and Daddy went to buy a pumpkin in the morning and after decorating our living room with some Halloween decor …

… Daddy carved the pumpkin. (We made it lit up with led tea light inside as last year due to the flame the pumpkin got cooked on the inside and rotted away quite quickly. Not to mention the fact that led tea lights are more baby-friendly). E. drew the eyes and the nose of this year’s jack-o-lantern.

Then came a little crafting. Mummy lanterns. (The original idea came from last year’s Halloween party at our Helen Doron school).

At first I wanted to make only 2 mummies, but E. had something different on mind. She wanted a mummy family.

What you need:

  • 4 baby food jars (2 little and 2 bigger)
  • 4 (led) tea lights
  • gauze rolls (cheap at the chemist’s)
  • 4 pairs of googly eyes
  • glue
  • cello tape

How to make them:

  1. Wash the label off the jars
  2. Fix the end of the gauze on the jar with a little cello tape
  3. Wrap the gauze around the jar (make one or two layers only or the tea light won’t be seen through)
  4. Fix the gauze with cello tape when finished with the wrapping
  5. Glue the eyes on
  6. Add the tea lights
Mummy family with pet spider 💀👻

Of course, we didn’t miss out on a Halloween party altogether as in our Helen Doron school a spooky-crafty fun Halloween was organised for the kids on 29th and we were invited.

The party was just as fantastic as the last year’s. Here come the pictures:

E. dressed as a (pretty) ghost
Baby Pumpkin with her gourd

Healthy snacks were served: Jack-o-tangerine, Frankenstein fruit mix and ghost popcorn

Dark and scary room with some English activities was on again:

Crafty part: painting a gourd with glow-in-the-dark paint (we missed that as we were a little late) and Halloween card (see bellow)

Plus a bit of colouring

 

This Halloween was much more quiet and relaxed as in the previous years. But to be honest, life’s hard enough with two small kids, and without the hassle of a home party (preparation, decoration, snack making, throwing the party itself, then the cleaning up) it was pleasant and peaceful for me too.

Crafty Mommy Workshop – Autumn

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After a lot of thinking and preparation I managed to hold my very first Crafty Mommy Workshop with Autumn crafts and activities.

Quite a few moms have asked me about the activities we’ve been doing with E. since she was small, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a craft session for mommies (instead of telling everyone separately).

The workshop was in Hungarian as English-speaking moms didn’t sign up 😞. The main idea was that moms could learn some easy to make activities and at home they can work them out with their kids.

I collected autumn activities around 5 major topics:

  • Conkers
  • Leaves and trees
  • Halloween
  • St. Martin’s Day (Márton nap)
  • Thanksgiving

I dedicated 1 hour to go through the activities, however, they proved to be too many as we couldn’t cover the last 2 topics. Still, I hope the 2 moms who turned up (other 2 cancelled 😞) will benefit from what they heard at the workshop.

The original ideas of these activities are either from other blogger moms or mine. I mainly came up with  the conker games but here I’d also like to pay tribute to the pages I read and “steal” ideas from:

 

Leaves and tree activities:

  1. Paint and stamp with the leaves
  2. Paint around the leaf

  3. Laminated leaf rubbing (or just place leaves under a white sheet of paper and rub it with autumn colour crayons)

     

  4. Leaf lacing
    Although I didn’t print the free printable leaves, just used our laminated leave that I’d punched on the sides. Shoelaces are pretty good for threading, but if your child has any difficulties with the small ending you can add some sellotape to make the end firmer.

  5. Make leaf faces and  people out of (laminated) leaves

  6. Leaf shred pictures autumn images and animals too
  7. Count the leaves with free printable
  8. Stamping leaves on a tree with toilet paper roll
  9. Popsicle stick tree
    KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
  10. Make a hedgehog/squirrel with leaves

What else to do with leaves:

  • collect them
  • group them by their size, colour
  • make them stand in a line from the biggest to the smallest
  • paint them, colour them, trace them
  • press them
  • make a crown out of fresh autumn leaves

The participants got a nice pack of goodies to work with at home, like 10 laminated leaves, a punched leaf with a shoelace for the lacing, some magnets so they can stick the leaf faces/people on the fridge, popsicle sticks, squirrel/hedgehog templates and the counting leaves free printable.

The third topic we could cover was Halloween. Here are the crafts I showed to the moms:

  1. Cotton ball ghost
  2. Baby food jar mummies (I’ll soon write a post on this in detail)
  3. Jack-o-lantern faces with shapes
  4. Pumpkin emotions
  5. Toilet paper spiders, monsters with googly eyes 
  6. Skeleton out of cotton buds

In the mommy package there were some toilet paper tubes, googly eyes, black pipe cleaners, cotton balls, baby food jar, a roll of gauze, black cardboard, orange construction paper and, of course, two printables: the black shapes for making Jack-o-lantern faces and the pumpkin faces showing different emotions.

The other topics were postponed and due to the lack of time we agreed to have a similar session with winter and Christmas activities. We had a wonderful time together and I’ve been planning our next session excitedly.

Treetop painting with corks

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After playing outside and observing the autumn leaves I prepared an easy, colourful painting activity for E.

 

While doing it with our Canadian nanny, V., we were revising the autumn colours and talked about why leaves change colours in the autumn.

So after snack time when our nanny, V. arrived they sat down together to start painting.
(I didn’t prepare much for this activity. I just put out the paint – orange, yellow, red, and brown -. a palette and two sheets of paper with a bare tree drawn on them. I forgot to take a “before” photo. 😒)

The painting could start. E. squirted the paints on the palette, which is a great activity to strengthen the muscles in her hands).

Each colour had its own cork.

They made dots on the branches.

Autumn leaves are falling down.

Using both sides of the cork is rather messy…

 

End results…

Can you guess which one is E.’s  painting? Just after having finished, E. said something about the wind and tons of leaves and was smudging brown paint all over her tree top. Well… no comment 😜

Popsicle tree

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Since autumn arrived we have been collecting leaves, talking about why leaves change colours and why they fall down. We’ve been hugging trees, examining their bark, trying to climb up on them, just to mention a few tree related activities. Outside.

When the weather got really rainy I thought I would bring the tree activities inside. That was when I introduced the popsicle tree activity to E.

What you need:

  • 20-30-40 popsicle sticks (wooden spatulas can be bought at the chemists for 500 HUF – less than 2 euros – but in hobby stores they can be found too)
  • collected leaves (or felt leaves)
  • conkers, acorns or any other nuts
  • felt animals like hedgehog, any kind of bird, squirrel etc.
How we played:
I gave E. the bag which I collected all the goodies in and I showed her how to build a tree. I just started and she took the lead.
While doing it we were talking about the different parts of the tree (tree top, branches, leaves, trunk, bark, roots). Also we mentioned what we can see in the tree top in different seasons. (green leaves in the spring, fruits in the summer, bare branches and yellow leaves in the autumn, nothing in the winter).
She placed the leaves very accurately.
Then some conkers and a squirrel…

After a while I couldn’t hold Baby Sis back and she came to “destroy” E.’s tree. There was some screaming and “don’t touch it” but not much playing together. E. gave L. a conker to play with but I had take it away from L. as it was too small (and I wanted to avoid ER at all cost) E. tried to give Baby Sis a laminated leaf but she wasn’t interested. Baby Sis wanted the popsicle sticks, which meant the end of the tree.

“Noooooooo”
After a while E. gave up  (got a little offended) and turned away from us to build a house instead out of the popsicle sticks.

 

E. was so uninterested at the end that only Baby Sis helped me pack away. At least we practised “put it in” with her.

As you can see life and activities with 2 kids are quite a challenge. I keep trying but success is still far away…

Anyways, I’m thinking of adding some brown yarn or thin ribbons to create the roots. We’ll try again next year when Baby Sis might not want to “destroy” but rather want to build.