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Family Fun: Christmas Activities and Stuff

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Christmas Activities – Decorating the Tree

For Christmas this year, we recycled our tree from the previous year. Aristotle had a lot of fun hanging up the baubles, but I had to assist with the lights. Hercules pitched in with the singing and even hung up a few baubles himself – mostly all on the same branch so we had to discreetly re-position them. We also have our own Christmas train – we recycled Aristotle’s old Thomas trains. Aristotle used the Motor Road and Rail so the train could chug around the Christmas tree on its own. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough workable tracks (Hercules broke them) so we had to use the wooden railway tracks instead.

Christmas Activities – Home-made Fire Place

Inspired by all our abstract art fun earlier this year, I decided to paint a fireplace. I think it has a better effect compared to last year’s felt fireplace. The brightly coloured bricks to the right where the Christmas stockings are hung up over were made from rectangular pieces of felt stuck onto a large piece of cardboard. Why the combination and not just a felt fireplace or a fully painted one? Well, I kinda had both ideas at the same time and I couldn’t decide which way to do it. Since it didn’t make sense to have two fireplaces, this was the end result.

Christmas Fireplace

See: Painting the Fireplace…

Christmas Activities – Stockings for the Fireplace

Daiso were selling plain Christmas stockings for RM5, so I decided to get them instead of making my own stockings since they look nicer than my homemade ones anyway. Since they are plain stockings, the boys could still decorate them like they did last year – or rather, like Aristotle and I did last year. Aristotle couldn’t wait to get started on his stocking so this was what we did over the weekend… Inspired by the Foodimals from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Aristotle decorated his stocking with a picture of Barry. Hercules still hasn’t gotten into the swing of stocking decorating so I guess I’ll be working on his stocking again this year…

Related: Make your own Christmas Stockings

Christmas Activities - Christmas Stocking

Christmas Activities – Advent Calendar

Aristotle wanted an Advent Calendar so I thought we could make our own. While searching for templates, I found this fantastic post with 30 DIY Christmas Advent Calendars. I’m not sure I’d have the patience to work on something quite as elaborate as some of those designs, though. Since the main feature of an advent calendar that Aristotle is after anyway is the chocolate so I’m sure it shouldn’t be too hard to make something he’ll like…

Update: Check out our own home-made Advent Calendar…

Christmas Activities - advent calendar

If you want to borrow our template, you can download it here – Christmas Advent Calendar. The pocket envelopes are quite small so they will only fit a small toy or piece of chocolate each. If you’re feeling creative, check out 28 Profoundly DIY Christmas Advent Calendars for inspiration.

Christmas Shopping

As I mentioned in my previous post, Christmas should be less about the presents and more about presence but if you’re shopping for presents, why not get one of these educational toys perfect for holiday giving instead. Otherwise, I don’t think you could go wrong with these…

Practical, educational, but still fun. Yes, ever year I grow more and more like my mother – I cannot help but look for the practicalities when making gift choices.

Other Christmas Activities for Kids

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Good Old Fashioned Games

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Aristotle’s school is doing a theme on toys – specifically: old-fashioned toys. You know… the kind we used to play when we were kids. So we’ve been playing a few “new” oldies ourselves…

We’ve moved off Dinosaur Chess and onto a real chessboard:

chess

We chose a magnetic set so we could take it along with us, or “pause the game” without having to worry about the pieces falling over when we have to move the board around the house. Aristotle’s been playing against Daddy as part of their “father and son bonding” sessions now that Aristotle is growing up and reaching the second phase of his life where he looks to Daddy to emulate (Biddulph in “Raising Boys“).

The boys have been having a bit of fun with the magnetic letters on the fridge, so I was inspired to dig out the Scrabble set. It was a tad ambitious, so we cycled back a step to Scrabble Slam! to practice with our four letters words first.

Scrabble Slam

Aristotle’s giving it a good go. Hercules is only interested in spelling his own name and “Mummy”. Occasionally, he might be interested to spell the titles of the other members of the family, too.

Aristotle’s really taken to his card games, so we’re going to give Clue: Suspect a go. It’s the card deck version of the board game Cluedo which I really enjoyed playing as a child. I thought it was interesting to see that quite a number of board games from my childhood have turned into card games. We have Battleship, Monopoly, Sorry! Revenge, Pictionary, and loads more. Of course there are also the golden oldies, like Top Trumps, Uno (which comes in many different themes to delight any young fan), Old Maid, Go Fish!, and who could forget Snap!? Most of these games can be played with a regular deck of cards – that’s what we did. In our version of Uno, 10’s were “change the suit”, 7’s were “reverse”, Aces were “skip”, and 2’s were “pick up 2”.

Recently, Aristotle’s aunt bought him a new board game called Snake Lake and it reminded me that Aristotle’s getting into that fun age where he’s old enough to understand how to play a lot of the board games now. Of course, Hercules is still our limiting factor because he’ll want to “play”, too, and that usually means we can’t play.

Since we’re on to “old fashioned” games… Another one we still play is “hide and seek”. Now tell me a child who doesn’t love “hide and seek”? Of course, Hercules still hasn’t quite mastered the art of hiding well because he gives himself away every time! Sometimes, we make it interesting by hiding a special object and give “hotter”/”colder” clues. If we’re feeling really creative, we make a map and play the treasure hunt game.

Another game I’d like to dig up from my childhood and introduce to the boys is Twister. Now there’s an idea for a party game…

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Books: Family Fun – Search and Find Activity Books

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Some time back, my cousin gave us these lovely Search and Find activity books published by Hinkler:

Search and Find

Picture Find

When we first got them, Hercules was a little too young to appreciate them so I put them away. I recently dug them out so that Aristotle, Hercules and I could work on it together. The books are designed so that the whole family can work on it together because the items to look for are both in picture format (so younger children who may not be able to read can still participate) and word format. A sample page looks like this:

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There are several ways to play this activity – you can search for the items together or you can work individually. The pages tear out easily and are printed on one side only. Whenever Hercules gets bored and wants to start scribbling, I give him a bunch of pencils and he starts drawing on the back of the puzzles we’ve completed. This lets Aristotle and I continue searching in peace.

It’s a fun activity that everyone (young and old) can engage in. Even my MIL and FIL got into the action when we brought this book over. My FIL started bragging that he was the “best” finder because he managed to find three items that had eluded Aristotle and my MIL and he did it all with just a glance. Aside from being fun, it helps children develop memory power, concentration and observation skills, and reading vocabulary.

Hercules was reading out the words in the left column as he searched for the images that went with them. This is a great way to encourage early readers to sound out words since we are generally advised not to test them. When you give them an activity that makes reading relevant, your child will demonstrate his reading ability without any prompting required.

And did I mention it was fun?

Other titles in this series:

More Search and Find books:

Character Look & Find books:

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Apps: Splash Money by Study Pad

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Study Pad (creators of Splash Math) has a new app – Splash Money. We’re always on the lookout for fun games and activities to teach children about money because we believe financial education for children is important. One of the first steps to learning about managing money is learning about how to count coins and bills. That’s where Splash Money helps…

What is Splash Money?

Splash Money

Splash Money is an iPad app designed to teach children about money from the basic identification of coins & bills to making change. To make the learning process easier, more fun and engaging, Splash Money comes with:

  • Interactive and engaging lessons
  • Practice questions with explanation for incorrect answers
  • Fun rewards and incentives for kids to play while learning
  • Natural voice reading of lessons and questions to help with reading
  • Weekly email reports to track progress

Splash Money is also aligned to Common Core Curriculum to help teachers and home-schoolers prepare children for tests. Splash Money lessons cover the following topics:

  1. Identify Coins – Penny, Nickel, Dime
  2. Value of Coins
  3. Counting Coins
  4. Quarter and Half Dollar
  5. Money in Dollars
  6. Making Amounts
  7. Add/Subtract Money
  8. Making Change

Target age group: children from 4 to 9 years old.

Splash Money 1

Splash Money 2

Splash Money 3

Splash Money 4

Splash Money 5

Our only gripe about Splash Money (which is the same as with just about every other programs/games teaching children about money) is that the money denoted are in USD. Aside from the notes and coin being unfamiliar, knowledge of some of the values of the coins are not required because we do not have such representations here.

If Splash Money sounds great to you, make sure you get a copy of the app today because Splash Money has a special launch discount of 80% for a limited time only – you can buy the app for $0.99. Hurry before they increase the price!

 

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Christmas Fun for 2012

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Generally, I don’t really approve of the whole commercialisation of special occasions and I try not to get drawn into it. I’m completely unromantic about Valentine’s day (no flowers please! But if you must, a box of chocolates won’t go astray…) and my reaction to Christmas is sort of the same.

When he was quite little, Aristotle asked me about Santa Claus and I admitted that he wasn’t real. Yes, what a way to let down a kid, but I figured a child like Aristotle would want the truth so I gave it to him. When he asked me about the tooth fairy, I told him the same thing: the tooth fairy is not real. Then one day, he told me, “I think I should just keep my tooth under my pillow just in case the tooth fairy is real.” Well, if he wants to believe in the magic, then perhaps I should let him. After all, cynical as I am about the commercialisation of festivals, I am still susceptible to the magic of Christmas. When I bought our fake pine tree to decorate (I cannot justify buying a live tree that won’t make it past the New Year), I couldn’t escape the giddy feeling of childish delight I felt when I walked out of the shop, nor the eagerness I felt to decorate it. I blame the years of brainwashing by TV programs featuring Christmas trees and holly and presents and stockings by the fireplace…

Last year, all we did was decorate a gingerbread house for Christmas. This year, we’ve done the whole shebang…

Photo 12-12-12 1 04 32

We got the tree and decorated it as a family. Okay, okay – I put it up and decorated most of it but Aristotle did help me hang up the ornaments. Hercules helped by pulling off all the ornaments we had already hung up. His look of awe when we got the lights on was worth all the nonsense he got up to before hand, though. Clearly, he takes after my crow-like fascination with bright colours and shiny things. Hubby found it extremely amusing to watch me play with my Christmas lights the day I bought them. Since I promised to wait for the kids to decorate the tree, the best I could do was plug them in, turn them on and watch the lights blinking according to the different settings programmed.

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I made stockings for the boys and we decorated them. Well, I did Hercules’ for him because I figured he’d probably be more interested in dipping his fingers into the glue pot and smearing them all over the table than in actually sticking bits of shinies to his stocking. As it turns out, he finds it more fun to pull the sequins off the stockings – but only his brother’s, much to Aristotle’s annoyance.

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I would have left it at the tree and Christmas stocking but Aristotle insisted that we needed a fireplace to hang our stockings over. So this was my effort at making an artificial fire – bits of orange, red, and yellow felt crumpled and tied together into a “fire” bundle and placed over rolled-up logs of felt in various shades of brown. The kitchen counter made a nice frame for our fire place, so I used that as the backdrop with two sheets of black foam to create the “opening” of my fireplace.

Photo 12-12-12 1 04 12

Yes, I know, it is a fire hazard – our tree is too close to the open flames of our fireplace. I’ve already had Hercules fall into the fire and exclaim, “Ow! Fire hot!” Well, at least he knows it’s supposed to be a fire…

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