Holiday Baking and Crafts

December 13, 2012

We are having so much with our Christmas themed work!

I think homeschooling around Christmas time is my favorite. We get to include so many wonderful crafts and baking projects together as school and it really helps with our holiday spirit!

Reading and Crafts:

Today we read A New Improved Santa. It's an adorable book about Santa, who's feeling old and out of date so he tried to find a new look and improve his image. It was hilarious!

I then printed out this plain man template and cut one out of manila paper for each boy to decorate and give Santa a new look; spiky hair, a goatee instead of a beard, a silly hat, etc. Whatever they wanted. I offered to pull out all my scrapbooking scrap paper, glue, markers, yarn, pom poms, whatever and I set them working.

Ian gave Santa a Mohawk, mustache, a fire/flame tank top with matching pants, brown sandals and black studded gloves.

Alec choose to cut out a bright yellow tank top and bedazzle it for Santa, a purple spiky hat, orange shorts, & gloves.

Evan chose to give Santa a bald head, blue sneakers, multicolored pants, a beard, and some wings. Ian chose to make a "new ride" for his Santa; a flying carpet for his that matched.

We made adorable Christmas trees out of construction paper.

I found this idea on Pinterest and followed the link until I found the template. Once I printed it out I cut a bunch of green trees out of green construction paper. I used a few of my hole punches and made holes in the trees. The boys then glued small pieces of tissue paper to the back and once we hung them in the windows the light shines through and it looks like the tree is all decorated. They're adorable but not easy to photograph.

Self Guided Science:

The boys watched a few episodes of Mighty Machines they checked out from the library.

Alec isn't interested in machines so he ended up playing quietly in the playroom with a bunch of characters and animals. He informed me that the ears on his elephant are in the shape of Africa so it's an African elephant because elephants from Asia have ears that are the shape of Asia. Apparently he learned that a long time ago watching Animal Atlas (and I'm now thinking I must find him more of those movies!).

Holiday Baking:

We also did TONS of Holiday baking for one of our family parties this weekend. First up was the boys favorite; painted sugar cookies.

This is a family tradition I can remember doing every year since I was a kid. These are so easy to make:

Take your favorite sugar cookie recipe and roll out the dough, cut out Christmas (or fun) shapes with cookies cutters.
Once the cookies are on the cookie sheets the kids use paint brushes (new or cleaned with soap and water!), to "paint" on their designed using colored evaporated milk. We just mix evaporated milk with food coloring.
We typically use several colors and a different brush for each color.
When they are done painting they can put some sprinkles on and then bake cookies according to directions.

We made mini cupcakes that we'll decorate like trees once they're cooled off.

We made peanut butter/ Reese's cup blossoms (our version of the Pb kiss cookies).

The boys help read the directions, find measuring utensils, measure, pour, stir, etc. Lots of reading comprehension, following directions, life skills and math happening in our kitchen this morning.

Our peanut butter cup blossoms

Fun Science Together:

The afternoon was long and cold. I mixed up a batch of "fluffy stuff."

We used two cans of shaving cream and two boxes of cornstarch, hoping to make it a bit more wet and sticky and so we would have enough for all three boys. It is a really weird texture and they had fun playing with it.

It is very messy!!

I promise they were dressed, but since I'm lucky enough to have all boys I had them strip off their tops to try and keep them clean while playing. We do have traces of cornstarch everywhere (including on my keyboard!) but they had loads of fun.

Alec realized while you could try and form shapes like snowballs, they quickly broke apart. He mounded it up to make a mountain. The kids kneaded and mixed and ultimately ended up with really fluffy "snow."

My two truck boys started plowing and piling and moving it all around. After a bit Evan and Ian wanted to add a bit of water so we had a form of goup/ shaving cream mixture. I'm sure science is involved there and other learning of some kind but all we cared about for today was all the fun. And boy! Was it ever!