Christmas and Advent Decorations

Thanksgiving is over, we've eaten most of the leftovers that were in the fridge and it's back to school for the kiddos.   I don't know why but for some reason they thought that the month of December meant no school til after Christmas.  They were in for a bit of a rude awakening this week when I declared it was time for school.. LOL

 However, instead of our normal studies, I figured I would do some lessons that are holiday based.  Taking advantage of a few of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales going on, I picked up a number of units to mix and match for this month without breaking the bank too much :)

One thing we're going to start next week is the "Christmas Comes to America" Unit study from Homeschool Legacy.  I wanted to start it this week but unfortunately, the library didn't have ANY of the books I was hoping to find so instead I'm going to see if I can find some alternatives that will work this weekend..  If not, I'll just hang on to the unit and actually buy the books to use next Christmas, as I'm sure as soon as I blink it will be right around the corner again.  lol

So, since I couldn't start the unit I wanted, I've been throwing together some videos and handouts for them.

Our Elf on the Shelf, Jack, came back the day after Thanksgiving so he's been hanging around doing his thing.. Today we woke up and he had a suggestion for us.. Seems that Jack felt there wasn't enough snowflakes in our Christmas repertoire and so he had the materials and instructions ready for us to add more Christmas to our decorations.

This really proved to be a great project as all three kids worked together to make their giant snowflakes (which, btw, is a project out of The Old Schoolhouse's publication Homespun Holidays which is currently free to download and has lots of great ideas and recipes for Fall and Winter).  To my surprise, Garrett was the best out of all three of them as he quickly caught on to the technique necessary to make them and had his completed before both girls were even halfway done..   Each kid completed their snowflakes and after using them as hats, we decided they will be hung up over our entryway.  Hopefully this meets Jack's snowflake quota ;)

We had a second craft on our agenda for the week.  Since this is week one of Advent, we decided to make an advent wreath.   After looking at a few various crafts online, I pulled together the best of what I saw and designed our own using cutouts of both kids hands as the greenery and toilet paper tubes covered in construction paper for the candles.  A bit of glue and some glitter (which I believe is the spawn of all things evil) and we were all pretty pleased with how they came out :)   I am debating if I'll add some additional "trim" to the greenery but for now, it works.

If your curious as to how to make them here's what we did.

I used 6 green, 2 brown, 2 purple and 2 pink pieces of construction paper as well as white glue and red and gold glitter.

Stacking the green and brown paper, I traced the kids hands and cut out the stack.  This gave me roughly 16 hands.

The hands were then stacked  and stapled together to make the greenery for the base.

I then used white glue to attach purple and pink construction paper to four toilet paper tubes. Hot glue could also be used but the white glue worked fine for me.

These I glued to the "greenery" base with a bead of white glue along the bottom of the tube (which, surprisingly, holds very well).  The wicks were yellow printer paper cut in the shape of flames.   A bead of white glue along the bottom and top (as well as some extra to look like drips) with gold glitter to finish it off and voila, Advent candles. :)

We have a many other Christmas/Holiday crafts planned for this season.   I'm one of those who searches Pinterest and pins so many different things in the hopes that we can get around do it and I'm hoping to knock some of those holiday crafts off the list..