Christmas on Tuesday

Merry Christmas!!!

Continuing with our theme of paper decorations we made some quick and inexpensive Christmas decorations for our table and outdoor area.

I bought a large roll of brown recycled paper, from the supermarket, which we used to make these decorations for our outdoor area. These made lovely displays, hanging at different heights from our umbrella.

My kids and I cut out flying reindeer using different types of beautiful wrapping paper. We then tied bows around their necks, glued twigs for antlers and displayed them in various jars filled with red tulle. These took us a while to make but were well worth it.

Reindeer noses as take-home goody bags. My son drew the faces which are soo cute!

We covered wooden pegs with tape  for the goody bags and to attach out gift tags to the presents.

Tuesday @ Home

With the teaching year over, I can now concentrate on doing Christmas cooking and activities with my own children. So far, we spent Sunday wrapping hampers for families less fortunate than our own and had a cast of 20 family members to do the annual Christmas Cooking! Every year as a family,we discuss our Christmas theme for decorating the tree, the house and the Christmas table for our lunch. This year I had a brilliant idea of black and white spots, which got the thumbs down instantly. After numerous discussions we came up with red and white paper decorations. See what you think...

We started making red flowers for the wreath but changed to white doilies instead. We all made flowers out of different sized doilies and were as creative as we could be. (It didn't matter what they looked like)

Not a great photo, but we put battery operated lights through the cardboard so they shone through the flowers.

Some of our Christmas cooking:

Having fun decorating and eating the ginger bread creations.

I can't believe next Tuesday is Christmas, enjoy your week!

The Last Tuesday @ School

The presents are wrapped!

After weeks of productive crafting the children have made presents for their parents, cards (which are soo cute) and even wrapped them in beautiful hand-made paper.

Santa's washing has been counted and hung out to dry

The children loved doing Santa's washing, which included the fine motor skill of pegging and numerous maths skills like counting, identifying numbers and matching colours and patterns. Not to mention, promoting some very creative and imaginative play.

Christmas jewellery being created to wear on the 'Big Day' 

Green and red trees, patty cases and straws were the precious jewels used to create individual pieces of Christmas jewellery.

Only one Tuesday till Christmas left! 

Happy Tuesday

2 Tuesdays till Christmas

Wow, what a Tuesday!

Making and decorating Christmas trees on the light table. This could be adapted and used on any table by making cardboard trees and using buttons, pom-poms or stickers. I encouraged the children to count, use colour names and make patterns.

At 8 o'clock on Monday night I asked my husband to nip to the garage and shape two old bits of wood into Mary and Joseph. I really wanted a large nativity set that we could put in the block area. After an hour of sweating he came up with two lovely shapes that I then had to paint. Due to the time constraints these are no works of art but the kids love them!

An interesting arrangement of materials on the playdough table. I got the children to think about what they could make with the materials below, look at what they came up with. 

Some very interesting reindeer!

See you next Tuesday...

3 Tuesdays till Christmas

I love Christmas time. I love the carols, the cooking and the decorating. I even love the shopping up to a point. Christmas in the classroom is a very happy and joyous time as well. This week the children all wanted to explore the Christmas sensory tray, although I had to explain that the green cones were trees and not party hats waiting for decorations.I did have a laugh when another child turned the tree over, filled it with pebbles and called "Cheers" to his friend.

Mirrors, pebbles, rice, cotton wool, Christmas shapes, little Christmas bears, Santa and Rudolph.

Rudolph made from a gum-nut, a bead and some twig antlers. Very cute!

Clay decorations:

Each child was given a ball of clay to roll out and then they chose buttons, cotton reels, shells or lace etc to make prints in their clay. They chose a Christmas cutter and cut out their decoration.

Some of the finished products - Before being fired in the kiln.

After being fired the children either painted with clear varnish or glitter varnish.

A beautiful Christmas ornament for the family to keep and cherish.

The light table:

I was given these green money boxes which I transformed into a Christmas counting and fine motor activity. The children enjoyed filling the money boxes with Christmas coins.

Enjoy your Tuesday...

4 Tuesdays till Christmas

There were squeals of delight as the children walked through the door and saw the first display of Christmas lights in the classroom. I know it is early but as we break up in only a few weeks we needed to start out Christmas activities.


The scent of the cinnamon playdough filled the classroom with a delicious fragrance. The children used the cinnamon playdough to create gingerbread men and decorated them with an assortment of buttons and eyes. These were displayed proudly on beautiful doilies and plates.

On the light table this week the children made antlers for Rudolph and the other eight reindeer and counted out peg legs to go on every one. This was a lot of counting!

I love Comet's antlers

We made some Christmas wrapping paper by printing lovely yellow stars on large sheets of paper.

I hope you visit next Tuesday to see loads more Christmas activities...

Happy Tuesday

Traffic on Tuesday

The playdough table was a favourite spot with everyone today. I made some roads out of black rubbish bags and stuck them to the table. I used white tape to mark the centre lines and added cardboard tubes with recycled green material to make trees and lots of coloured bottle tops to use as wheels. Beautiful purple playdough was then used to create a variety of vehicles. The children used wooden pegs and markers to make people to drive in our cars and buses. They loved this activity and created soo many different play situations. The only problem they had was working out how to physically move the playdough buses filled with passengers along the road.

Before the children arrived.

Some lovely passengers!

A bus in the woods.

The trees that were no longer needed at the playdough table became princesses in the block area.

Week 2 of our beans and sprouts. We are sending them home now so that they can continue growing them at home.