Making a New Years Hat & Learning About the Calendar

My mom was encouraging me to take our toddler to the Children's Museum, because they have a "noon" celebration for kids to learn about New Years, and even though we weren't up for going out, she did give me the idea that I could do a project at home, and what would be better than a New Years hat he could wear all day?!

Before getting started, we talked about what a year is. I don't expect a toddler to be able to understand everything about a calendar, but make it a practice to include him in everything I can in life, and New Years is a big part of life and is about ending a year and starting a new one, so that's what we talked about. We also talked about it being a celebration and saying "Happy New Year," which he caught on to really fast, especially coming off the tail feathers of saying "Happy Halloween" and "Merry Christmas." He thought it was great to have another exciting saying!

To make a top hat, you can look up instructions on the Internet. You can look up how to make almost anything on the Internet. Here are the instructions I referenced: http://childrensart.info/paper-top-hats/. You basically cut out the pieces and let your toddler decorate them; the options are endless.

We had some numbers and letters that my brother and sister-in-law got him for Christmas, that we used as a learning opportunity by asking our toddler to find the  numbers 2-0-1-4 and the letters of his name in the pile of letters, which you can see made it on to the hat. 

My mother-in-law did this activity with my little one, and we both cut our shapes he could glue on the hat. Again, you get to be very involved in doing crafts with toddlers, so have fun! We also used glitter paint, and I added some of the tensile embellishment myself to the top.

The only challenge we ran into is that he was so excited to put a hat on, that he kept putting the pieces of it on, before I had constructed it, so in the end, I raced to finished some of the parts and put it together so that he could enjoy wearing it as soon as possible. There are worse problems!



Happy New Year!

Making Christmas Tree Holiday Cards & Learning Colors While Using Fine Motor Skills

This was such a fun and easy holiday project to do with toddlers. You have to cut out the triangle, rectangle, and star for the tree and use a hole puncher to make different colored dots for the Christmas tree lights, but toddlers are pretty entertained by watching you if you talk through everything you're doing and using, not to mention taking the time to talk about the shapes and colors involved.

Placing the shapes on the card and talking about what glue is to make them stick in place is definately part of the experience. After doing one, I let my toddler use the glue stick himself, which he loved. 

You can use so many things to decorate the tree. I was trying to keep this simple, so we used glitter pens ($1 from the dollar tree) and then had fun spreading the glitter and dots around (small motor skills), and we also talked to more about colors. 

We ended up making 12 of these for Christmas cards, and you should have seen his face when we put our real Christmas tree up and decorated it. He pointed to one of the Christmas cards and then the Christmas tree in astonishment saying "Christmas tree Christmas tree," as if the cards gave him an introduction to what the Christmas tree was all about. 

Happy Holidays!