This Idea Came From: I have to give credit to our little cousin Kendall, 6yrs old. She is a big time artist in our family, always brings hand made crafts as Christmas presents to her aunts,uncles, and cousins. I always loved getting those little cut outs and window hangy-doodads. It meant a lot to me then but even more so now to see how much the little artist making the present gets excited.
Our Experience: As a rule I like to use recycled items in crafts so this is a bit new to us. WOW. It was nice to have the entire project contained in a sealed plastic dome with visual suggestion attached. Easy peasy! Basically, I cut an old fashion grocery bag "paper please" and laid it flat. I lined all the plaster ornaments in a line opened the paint up, gave her water, a brush and carte blanche. This was a nice craft for a three and three quarter year old. She got the concept pretty fast and did her thing for around 20 minutes. (Angels Singing)
We let them dry, she turned them over and wrote her name on each one. This handed me a bit of a laugh. You can't have a name much shorter than 4 letters.. but a child starting out with writing her own name has planing and foresight of size verses space issues. It was difficult for her to get E-M-M-A on the backs. so she wrote the E, most importantly, and all the other letters surrounded and squished where eva they would fit. It was pretty cute. Next we threaded colorful raffia through the tiny hole so the recipients could hang them on their Christmas trees. (Beware branches will be dragging on your floor after application.) She wrapped them in tissue paper and put them in little Christmas gift bags and put them under the tree. She felt very proud and happy that she has something to give on Christmas. This also reminded her that she needed to go through her toys to give back to Santa for the Toy Reconstitution Program. This is a marvelous program that has children choose the toys from their stash that they are no longer interested in and leave them for Santa to make new again for the next little boy or girl.(Cough, cough.. Good Will)
The Lesson: She experimented a few times and painted over and over the ornaments until she was satisfied. I like that she figures things out on her own... We figured out black is not necessarily the best color to start with... especially if you are painting a snowman! Lesson learned!
So she dipped them in water and rubbed off the paint.. good happenings. She looked at me and said this snowman is dirty! I said yeah.. he just cleaned a chimney. She laughed and decided it was good.
