Our Winter Wall

Our "fall wall" (Instagram) was a hit in our house this year, so on the first day of winter, December 21, I started decorating for our "winter wall." I'm hoping to make it a seasonal tradition as it is a nice focal point in the house, a place to display seasonal artwork and it provides us with learning opportunities.

Here is what we currently have on our wall:

Winter Banner
I loved the fall banner that I found online but finding a similar winter one was a bit tricky. There were many holiday ones and "let it snow" ones (we barely get snow in our parts so that one wasn't really appealing). So, with my limited design skills I made my own banner which came out better than I had expected. I was going to run some yarn across it so that it actually looked like a hanging banner, but, well, we'll see lol. Sometimes it's a major accomplishment just to get something up.

You can download  the Winter Banner here

Winter Words
Just like for our fall wall, I found a freebie winter wall words printable (from the same person) at Teachers Pay Teachers.

These are just a few of the words we have displayed.  There are 40 winter words in this resources. I loved the winter clothes words and she does have some holiday words as well, which obviously we omitted for our use.

Winter Crafts
So we've started a few simple winter crafts. There's our hot cocoa Popsicle stick craft:

Popsicle sticks are my number one go to for crafts this year as I got a box of 1000 of them last year and umm, you can see how much we still have.

(I had gotten a box of jumbo ones as well and we went through that one really quick but I guess I had these out of sight otherwise I'm sure these would be gone too).

The inspiration for this hot cocoa mug craft came from the Glued to My Crafts blog where you can find instructions but it's pretty explanatory looking at the picture I think.

Then there's our Popsicle stick snowflake:

This was another easy one. We painted the sticks and then glued them together and added glitter.

So, those are our winter crafts so far. I've collected some more winter craft ideas on my Winter Craft Pinterest board:

Happy Winter!

Art Resources

We don't generally do a lot of art in our homeschool, but I'm trying to incorporate it more as my daughter loves it and I want to expose my son who's more partial to computers and robotics (and really not much else these days) to it. These are some resources that we've used or that I've found along the way.

Seasonal Art/Crafts

• Fall Crafts/Art
• Winter
• Spring
• Summer

Color 

• ColorTheory/Color Wheel 

Art Prompts 

• Art Prompts - when you need quick ideas for art, try art prompts

Playdough, Clay, Goo, Etc. 

• Homemade Playdough

Fall Crafts: Paper Strip Pumpkin II

I seem to be drawn to paper strip crafts. They are really very easy though and maybe that's why. This is the second paper strip pumpkin we've done this fall, the first one is here.  

I got the idea for this craft from the Hostess with the Mostess blog.

What you need:

• Orange construction paper (in addition to it I used Astro Brights orange paper)
• Scissors
• Paper clips or staples
• Green construction paper (for leaves)
• Brown construction paper (for stem)

What you do

Essentially you just cut the orange paper into strips and attach them with a paper clip or staple. The strips are of different lengths and you match up the ends. Then, add leaves and a stem. At the Hostess with the Mostess blog, she explains the number of strips and lengths so I'll leave that to her.  For my leaves, I used this template below and printed it out on green Astro Brights paper.

You can find this leaf and other leaf templates from my Pinterest Pin here.

I ended up using staples and paper clips to keep my strips together and I punched a hole in the top so that I could hang them up. Other than that, I pretty much followed her simple directions. 

I made three and am making a little banner/mobile with maybe leaves and pine cones to add in, in sha Allah.

Fall Crafts: Glass Bowl Luminary

We normally do construction paper and glue type of crafts so I was a little uneasy about trying something different. But, I'm so glad we did.  Although my preschooler lost interest very quickly, my 8 year old enjoyed this craft.

We got the idea from Where Imagination Grows Mason Jar Luminaries.

What you need:

• Mason jars (or as we used, a  bowl resembling a fish bowl from the dollar store. )

• Tissue paper (fall colors such as orange, yellow, red, and green)
• Brown construction paper (optional)
• Scissors
• Mod Podge (we used a homemade substitute of school glue and water)
• Sponge brush (we didn't have one so we used a wide paint brush, this is to spread on the "mod podge"
• Glitter, optional
• Candle

What you do:

1. Make your Mod Podge (unless you are using commercial mod podge). I'm frugal and wanted to give the homemade recipe a try. I read that the homemade version moreso works with paper crafts (I tried it on leaves and it wasn't strong enough so I agree). To make the mod podge, you need an equal amount of glue (again we used school glue) and water. I used about 1/4 cup of each. Next, mix them (shake them up together in a jar with a lid.)

Our homemade mod podge:

2. Tear up pieces of the tissue paper into small pieces. I liked to make them about the size of my thumb pad or thereabouts. My toddler joined us on this part but she got tired of it quickly.

3. Take your bowl and working in small sections at a time (so the mod podge doesn't dry), apply the mod podge with a sponge brush or paint brush. Then, place bits of tissue paper onto the mod podge. Continue in this fashion with the mod podge and then tissue pieces until you have covered the whole bowl or jar.

4. The blog where I got the idea from, used brown construction paper to make trees. We did this, but the trees aren't the most visible as hers were.

5. After the whole bowl or jar is covered with the tissue paper, apply a final coating of the mod podge over the tissue paper with your sponge brush or paint brush. You can also sprinkle it with glitter. (As we were working on this craft, I wasn't too sure how it would turn out. We had finished and my daughter picked up the glitter that we had used on the Popsicle Stick Apple Core Craft and started "throwing" it over the tissue paper (and boy did she have fun with that) and then it ended up looking much more awesome.)

6. Let dry.

7. Place a candle inside the bowl/jar and light it and you are done.  The candle I bought was very tall so only the top portion of our luminary was lit.  I then used a tea candle we had on hand and it lit up nicely.

Fall Crafts: Popsicle Stick Apple Core Craft

Here's another quick and easy fall craft that we worked on this weekend.

This idea came from the Glued To My Crafts Blog.  My 8 year old and I worked on this this afternoon. You can see the original directions at the blog above and below I explain what we ended up doing.

What you need:

• 3 popsicle sticks per apple core
• red or green paper (you can use construction paper, we used Astro Brights paper which is thinner than construction paper)
• brown construction paper
• glue
• scissors
• glitter (optional)
• black or brown marker

What you do:

1. Glue the three popsicle sticks together side by side. (We just used Elmer's school glue)

2. When the glue has dried and the sticks stick together, cut out the top and bottom of the core (red or green). I traced half way around a soup can to get a semi circle and that was too big so I cut off lengthwise some from the bottom of the semi circle and that worked out nicely. Glue the apple top and bottom to the sticks.

3. Cut out a leaf from the green paper and a stem from the brown construction paper and glue behind the apple top piece.

4. Draw apple seeds, if desired, on the popsicle sticks.

5. Optional (which my daughter loved), put glue on the apple top and bottom and add glitter.

Fall Crafts: Paper Strip Pumpkin

This easy craft kicked off our fall craftiness. I like it because it uses the similar idea (paper strips) of our Ramadan paper lanterns.

I got the idea from DLTK and used their template for the leaves. I bought green "pipe cleaners"  (or as they were called at Walmart "fuzzy sticks") for the vines.

What you need:

• Orange construction paper (to be cut up into strips)
• Scissors
• Green construction paper for the leaves (or you could print out on green paper or paint the leaves)
• Fuzzy sticks (for the vines, optional)
• Paper fasteners (as I grew up calling them, brads)

You can catch the instructions at DLTK but all we (read I) did was cut the orange construction paper into strips (cutting lengthwise) and then punched holes in each end of all the strips and insert a paper fastener at each end. Then, I spread out the strips to form a sphere. I added the leaves and the vines to the top paper fastener (curling the fuzzy sticks with a pencil).

Also, I would take their advisement and cut out more than 12 strips to get a fuller pumpkin. On our first try, we only used 12 and had so much space in between the strips. I cut up more strips so that we had about 23 or so and it was much fuller.

This was our first craft of the evening (yes we started pretty late in the day, the craft bug just hit me) and we went on to make 2 more crafts that evening, the Pom Pom Apple Tree and Button Indian corn. I pretty much made the pumpkin on my own but when the kids saw it they got motivated and we cranked out the other two fun projects.

Fall Crafts - Pom Pom Apple Tree

This is another quick and easy craft that my kids enjoyed, especially my toddler. I got the idea from CraftOnSea.co.uk

What you need:

• pom poms
• colored paper and/or felt
• glue
• scissors

The post on CraftOnSea used felt for the tree bark but we went for all construction paper in this one. The kids had fun gluing on the pom poms. My 11 year old snarkily pointed out that you wouldn't have two different types of apples on a tree, but we stuck with red and green to make it more colorful.

I drew the tree and bark free style but you can google and find tree templates to print and use.

We're on a roll with fall crafts (having made 3 in 1 day, so stay tuned for more, in sha Allah. We hope to make many of the ones I've collected on pinterest:

Fall Crafts: Indian Corn Button Craft

We really got into the craft mood this week (we did three fall crafts in one evening! Quite a feat since I am "craftily" challenged) This Indian corn button craft was one of them.

I found the idea at The Pinterested Parent - Button Indian Corn Craft. This was a really neat craft for my 3 and 8 year old girls.  It was super easy and quick to make. At first, I was putting the glue on the corn and having the girls put the buttons on. The next thing I knew, my 3 year old was putting drops of glue and buttons on by herself.

I showed them pictures on google of what Indian corn was and my 11 year old passed by and started asking questions about Indian corn -- did it grown naturally like that? Can you eat it? Well, I had no clue so I googled a came across a few helpful articles:

• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Indian Corn
• Indian Corn: A Fall Favorite

The directions for the craft can be found at The Pinterested Parent - Button Indian Corn Craft. You can really just look at it and make it on your own though. On her instructions she says to cut a corn and husk out of construction paper, but since drawing is not my area of expertise, I had to look for a corn template because my freehand is kind of pitiful. I found a corn and husk template here.

If you are looking for an easy craft and you've got extra buttons around, this is a fun one to try. You just need:

• buttons of different colors
• green construction paper
• yellow construction paper
• glue
• scissors

If you are looking for more fall crafts, check out my Fall Crafts Pinterest Board:

Learning About Colors with a Color Wheel

My eight year old daughter informed me yesterday that she was in the mood for art so could I get the art supplies down. She got distracted and never got around to it, but as we hadn't done any lessons from the art portion of our curriculum, I decided that it was time.

Our next lessons were on color and the project was to make a color wheel. Our curriculum is part of a total curriculum and the art part (really like the rest of the curriculum) is not super meaty so I went off to google some resources which you can see below.

The curriculum is really for my 3rd grader but I decided to include my 6th grader. Of course he was like "bah humbug" when I mentioned it to him (he's not really into art) and I was a little doubtful but after we watched the video below and broke out the paint, he came around and he enjoyed it immensely!

We used paper plates and tempura paints. We learned about the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors so we mixed colors to get these so we needed 12 sections on our paper plates.

We also learned about warm (red, yellow, orange) and cool (blue, green, purple)  colors. And finally, we learned a little bit about tint (adding white to a color) and shading (adding black to a color).

Here is one of our final products:

Below are some of the resources that I really liked and got ideas from.

Lessons

• Teaching the Color Wheel - a homeschool mom shares the activities that she did with her kids. She provides terminology and definitions; pictures of their projects and a few links (including one to a template)
• Mini Lesson on Primary and Secondary Colors from KidZone (for the youngest ones; includes a template)
• Color Mixing and Color Wheel from Enchanted Learning
• Create Your Own Color Wheel

Color Wheel Templates

• MrPrintables.com Color Wheel Templates - Several color wheel templates including a cute one that looks like a flower with petals.
• Color Wheel Template form Making-Greeting-Cards.com

For more ideas and inspiration, check out my Color Wheel Pinterest board!

Art Prompts

If you don't have a structured art program but still want to get a little "arty," or just want a quick activity for the kids to do, consider giving them art prompts.

I've collected several art prompts resources on my Pinterest board,  including 30 day challenges.


Some ideas for using prompts:

• Number the prompts and have your kids draw a number each day from a jar and have them draw the corresponding prompt.
• Put the prompt ideas on a calendar and have your child look on the art calendar for that day and draw that prompt.
• Have your child keep an art journal and respond to the journal prompts in a sketchbook. Have them date each entry. Kids love to look back at their old drawings and see how old they were when they drew them.

If you want to get a little more creative with drawing, the Artful Parent has some neat drawing ideas such as "Simon Says Draw" or "Follow the Leader Drawing." These are fun ideas that you can join in on with your kids.

Homemade Playdough Fun!

We made homemade playdough last weekend and as you can imagine, it was a hit, alhamdulillah.
I've made playdough throughout the years, but I think I was always stingy on the food coloring because I always got bland pastel colors: pinks, blues, light greens.

Well, this time we got vibrant, fun colors (although the picture doesn't do them justice as they were all more vibrant in real life than they appear here.)

I followed the recipe/instructions in this video, which was really well put together and easy to follow:

I was especially glad to see this one as many playdough recipes call for cream of tartar, which I don't ever have on hand or buy. And, it also was a no cook recipe, yippee!!

Here are a few of our masterpieces:

By the second day it looked like this (or was this the first day??):

Then by the end of the week it had morphed into a green-gray mass, but they still got lots of play from it.

Someone forgot to put it back in its airtight zipper bag last night, so we said goodbye to it this morning and resolved to make some more soon, in shaa Allah.