Paper Chains

To be honest, these weren't really part of my plans for the '12 Days of Christmas Art and Crafts' that we're doing, but when I was in Ryman's yesterday they had kits for 49p which is cheaper than getting the paper and cutting it out yourself, so I thought we'd give it a go.  (To be honest, I can't believe they make kits, but hey ho!)  In some respects, I should have gone with my original plan - Riley could not have cared less!  With a whole lot of help and encouragement he managed to string 5 or 6 loops together, then tutted at me and wandered off.

Freya on the other hand loved them.  Obviously she's not at the stage where she was making them herself, but I gave her 3 looped together to play with and she was fascinated! 

She fiddled for ages, wearing them as bracelets and just working out how they looped together.  So it wasn't quite the disaster it could have been.  I'll have to store the rest of the strips for next year and let Freya go at it again then!

Simple Play-doh

Nothing fancy - just your basic squishing!

Autumn Leaf Stained Glass

We're in arty-crafty no man's land!!  Halloween and Bonfire Night are well and truly over, and I'm not about to start on Christmassy projects with the kids yet (though I'm already working on a few myself!), so today we returned to the Autumn theme we were using before Halloween and did an autumn leaf tissue paper stained glass window.  It was simple enough - I cut some leaf shapes out of autumnal coloured tissue paper and Riley stuck them to some sticky-backed plastic that I had masking taped to our patio doors.  We only did a small one as I wasn't sure how Riley's concentration was going last.

Freya was more than happy to just run around scrunching up tiny bits of tisssue paper, bless her!  I'm quite pleased with the final result though - he's really got the hang of overlapping the bits and not leaving too many gaps.  Its just a shame its such a miserable day here - there's no sun to shine through it.

Paper Plate Pumpkins

Its hardly groundbreaking, but it was a simple Halloween project we could do while Freya was asleep this morning.  We actually did it in two stages - we painted the backs of some paper plates bright orange yesterday, so today was making faces out of black paper shapes. 

He got a bit carried away with one so it has extra bits on it, and another looks like a wierd earless cat(!), but he had fun and thats what counts.  I try to let it be about process as much as possible, but he likes to have a finished product he can relate to, so some gentle steering is required every now and then!  (You can tell which one I 'steered' on!!!)  The final touch was to stick a green paper stalk to the back of each of them and then we hung them up on our living room door.  A lovely decoration for Halloween!