Make a Marshmallow Math Placemat to Count On For Christmas!

If you don't have access to a laminating machine, you may purchase alternative kinds of materials from many hobby stores and office supply outlets. These stores do sell individual sheets and/or packs of transparent adhesive covers for this kind of project. Just describe to them what you need to make with the craft project. Contact paper can also be used to waterproof children's placemats.

      How about assembling a cute little Christmas placemat for your early learner for the holidays? Parents or teachers can pre-cut the shapes from fun printed papers in advance. Then your young children can assemble and paste the large mug of Christmas cocoa onto a festive sheet of paper before laminating the entire mat. I also added a few Christmas stickers to my cocoa mugs. 

       Count how many marshmallows can fit inside your cocoa cup, or how high you can stack them before they fall! Try rolling dice to count out equivalent numbers of marshmallows too. Be careful, marshmallow math is not always so very reliable; the props often disappear the moment a parent's back is turned!

Above is a template, mug for hot chocolate or cocoa, that I have designed for this counting placemat project.

Make More Christmas Placemats with The Kids:

• My "Time for Tea Version" for those of you who simply prefer tea or who live in England
• Free Printable Child's Chalkboard Placemat
• Holiday Table Setting Placemats
• Christmas Craft: Christmas Placemat
• Artful Place Mats
• Recycled Christmas Placemats

 

Wicked marshmallow experiment!

Color a Nostalgic Portrait of Santa Claus for a Christmas Calendar

      Above is a photo of the Nostalgic Santa Calendar in progress. I used a black, felt tip, permanent ink marker to hand letter my calendar numbers. It is traditional to depict only the twenty-five days until December 25th on a calendar such as this. Use white glue and cotton balls to cover each day as it passes. Children will enjoy giving Santa a snowy, white beard by the time he comes to fill their stockings with treats and candy!

      Layer colored pencils in order to create depth in Santa's portrait. On the left, I first chose to emphasize the wrinkles in Santa's face with a dark brown. Then I selected a bright red to draw attention to his rosy cheeks and nose. Then I colored his entire face with a flesh toned pencil. These three color selections will help your colored drawings to look three dimensional. As you improve, you will add many more color combinations to your skin tones. But, these three should suffice for young students.

      Again, as you can see I have selected a lavender and then a ruby red to layer beneath the red of Santa's hat before coloring the entire hat with a fire engine red. You can try multiple color combinations to see how different the portrait will look if you'd like.

      Above is an example of layering color compliments. I chose to green and red for the holly. After cutting out the holly leaves, I pasted a thin strip of foam to the backside of each leaf in order to add extra dimension to the calendar. Glue on a red pom pom or two for the berries.

      Above is a free coloring page of Santa for little one to use when assembling their December count down to Christmas calendar.

Craft Count Down to Christmas Calendars:

• Elf Christmas Countdown Calendar Craft
• Santa's Christmas Countdown
• Christmas Countdown Calendar Craft {with Mini-Stockings}

Sculpt a Snow Scene With Clay

A young student chooses to sculpt something unpretentious.

      Children don't need much to inspire their imaginations. Give them a bit of clay and read to them a story or two about winter. Before you know it, they are creating their own little vignettes from whatever materials are made available to them. 

      In school, art teachers often let young students draw after they have completed their art assignments. We call this 'a free draw.' This little clay vignette on the left was made during a student's free time. He used a few simple stamping tools and bright glazes to enhance his beloved  characters, a snowman and a penguin. 

      Children are not inhibited about embracing the simpler activities in life, activities like building snowmen or reading stories about ice skating penguins. They suffer from no need to craft "high art." Although this does not mean that children shouldn't be taught about fine art, it does mean that teachers should feel free to also let young students live out their childlike fantasies in the making of art. This kind of latitude will indeed inspire them to create more sophisticated work later in life.

       Not every art project needs an elaborate agenda, alternate the way that you look at art making as much as the way you use art materials. Choose to give young people a chance to interpret ideas and/or develop alternative solutions for some of the ideas you suggest to them. And if they just want to sculpt a snowman, then by all means, let them make one without feeling guilty! After all, they are only children once.

• Play Dough Snowmen
• Gone Snow Mobile-ing!
• Faux Snow Day
• snowman art

"This is the wonderful penguin story, narrated by David Attenborough in Bringing Up Baby from BBC Natural World. The film is edited by Mark Fletcher and the music is composed by Jennie Muskett"

Festive Popcorn Treats

How to Make a popcorn-cranberry garland for your Christmas Tree.

      Every boy and girl likes popcorn, and the bigger the boy or girl, the more they like it. So, for the Christmas festival, it can be used in many ways. A writer in a household paper, a clipping from which is in my scrap books, tells us: First, wash and polish some fine red apples; oranges may be used, also, if preferred. Cut off a slice from one end, and scoop out the pulp, leaving the skins whole. Pick out the very nicest and tenderest grains of popped corn and dip in either a thin syrup or melted butter. Fit a soft white wax or parchment paper inside the apple or orange, and fill this with the corn. Replace the top, and cover with a cluster of the corn grains, stuck together with syrup; a few green leaves, natural or artificial, should be added; or, if the oranges are used, use orange leaves. Put one of these filled shells at each plate.

      Another way to use popped corn is to make a caramel syrup, using brown sugar; cook until the caramel point; The syrup should cook two minutes before the corn is added. Have the pre-cooked popcorn broken up, and stir into the caramel, pour out on a greased cookie sheet and cook eight more minutes in an oven. When the mixture is cool enough to handle, make into squares or balls and wrap in waxed paper. They may be packed in "gift" boxes, or otherwise disposed of and given out.

More video about popcorn:

• The Muppets performing Popcorn
• How to make salt & vinegar popcorn
• How to Make and Wrap Halloween Popcorn Balls
• Chocolate-Popcorn recipe
• Pink Elephant Popcorn
• Avocado Balsamic Popcorn Recipe
• Sweet and Savory Popcorn
• Peanut Butter Chocolate Popcorn
• Red, white and blue kettle corn
• Savoury popcorn, one spicy and the other cheesy
• How to make popcorn while camping

Assembled A Disney Castle Jewelry Box

      I just put together this little Christmas gift/jewelry box for my cousin. My younger daughter will fill it with Disney stickers and candy jewels for her Christmas stocking. She will be nine years old this Christmas and we will certainly enjoy watching her excitement during the gift opening. I still need to add a layer of Modge Podge to the surface of my castle candy container, but once I do, it will be more difficult to photograph.

      I painted the inside of the box with several layers of darker purple paint. The key to painting a little box like this one is, to do so slowly and let it dry thoroughly after every coat of paint. This will help to prevent the box from warping. As I painted this one, I also had to add some white glue to the seams and clamp these while drying. Although it is a delicate process, the results are worth the time and patience I put into it.

      I could not resist the Disney Castle sticker! Our little princess will surely delight in the unique packaging this Christmas, for she is very artistically inclined herself. You can purchase very detailed stickers like the one I used from any craft store. I bought both the sticker and box from a Hobby Lobby store.

      Once my daughter packs the box, I will post another photo of the finished result just below.

I assembled this unique, one-of-a-kind jewelry box for my niece this Christmas. My younger daughter will stuff it with candy rings and candy necklaces before packing it into Emma's stocking.

More Edible Jewelry Crafts:

• Edible Jewelry Craft Party
• Assemble a Candy Treasure Chest from Wafer Cookies
• My treasure chest candy wrapper from Art Education Daily

The Life and Work of Robert L. May and "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer"

      May grew up in an affluent, secular Jewish home in New Rochelle, New York. He had a brother and two sisters. One of the sisters, Evelyn May, is the grandmother of the well-known economist Steven D. Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame. Another sister, Margaret, married (Jewish) songwriter Johnny Marks in 1947. May graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1926. Both of his parents were hard hit by the Great Depression (1929) and lost their wealth. Sometime in the 1930s, he moved to Chicago and took a job as a low-paid in-house advertising copywriter for Montgomery Ward. 

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a fictional
male reindeer with a glowing red nose,
 popularly known as "Santa's 9th Reindeer."
Whenever depicted, he is the lead reindeer
pulling Santa's sleigh on Christmas Eve.
The luminosity of his nose is so great
that it illuminates the team's path through
 inclement winter weather.

      In early 1939, May’s boss at Montgomery Ward asked him to write a “cheery” Christmas book for shoppers and suggested that an animal be the star of the book. Montgomery Ward had been buying and giving away coloring books for Christmas every year and it was decided that creating their own book would save money and be a nice good-will gesture.

      Because May’s (Jewish) wife, Evelyn, had contracted cancer in 1937 and was quite ill as he started on the book in early 1939, many people believe that her fragile health inspired May to base the character of Rudolph upon her. However, we do know that  May "drew on memories of his own painfully shy childhood when creating his Rudolph stories." He decided on making a deer the central character of the book because his then 4-year-old daughter, Barbara, loved the deer in the Chicago zoo. He ran verses and chapters of the Rudolph poem by Barbara to make sure they entertained children. The final version of the poem was first read to Barbara and his wife’s parents.

      Evelyn May died in July, 1939. His boss offered to take him off the book assignment in light of his wife’s death. May refused and completed the poem in August, 1939. The Rudolph poem booklet was first distributed during the 1939 holiday season. Shoppers loved the poem and 2.4 million copies were distributed. War time restrictions on paper use prevented a re-issue until 1946. In that year, another 3.6 million copies were distributed to Montgomery Ward shoppers.

      In 1946, May received an offer from a company that wanted to do a spoken-word record of the poem. May could not give his approval (and be compensated) because Montgomery Ward held the rights to the poem. In late 1946 or early 1947, Sewell Avery, the company’s president, gave the copyright rights to the poem to May, free and clear. The spoken-word version of the poem was a big sales success.

      In 1947, Harry Elbaum, the head of a small New York publishing company, took a chance and put out an updated print edition of the Rudolph (poem) book. Other publishers had passed on the book, believing that the distribution of millions of free copies had ruined the market. The book was a best seller.

       In 1948, May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, wrote (words and music) an adaptation of Rudolph. Though the song was turned down by such popular vocalists as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore, it was recorded by the singing cowboy Gene Autry. "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was released in 1949 and became a phenomenal success, selling more records than any other Christmas song, with the exception of "White Christmas".

      In 1941, May married another Ward employee, Virginia, and had five children with her. She was a devout Catholic, and Robert May was converted to Catholicism during the marriage. He is buried in Saint Joseph Cemetery in River Grove, Illinois.

      May wrote two sequels to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The first is mostly in prose (except that Rudolph speaks in anapaestic tetrameter), written in 1947 but only published posthumously as Rudolph's Second Christmas (1992), and subsequently with the title Rudolph to the Rescue (2006). The second sequel is entirely in anapaestic tetrameter like the original: Rudolph Shines Again (1954). May also published four other children's books: Benny the Bunny Liked Beans (1940), Winking Willie (1948), The Fighting Tenderfoot (1954), and Sam the Scared-est Scarecrow (1972).

• Shining a Light on the Largely Untold Story of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer 
• The copywriter who wrote Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
• Do You Know The Real History of 'Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer'?
• Rudolph's Second Christmas and Rudolph to the Rescue and Rudolph Shines Again

Three Classic Christmas Books Every Child Should Own

      Here are three of my family's favorite Christmas books. Every single one of them is a classic and beautifully illustrated too! These titles have withstood the test of time; they were read over and over until both of my girls had every page and picture memorized.

      These are not listed in any specific order, my girls would never make the mistake of favoring one over the other. Indeed, they would have had us read all three every December night if they could have persuaded their father or myself to do so.

"Mr Willouby's Christmas Tree"

   1. "Mr Willouby's Christmas Tree" by Robert Barry, 1963, McGraw-Hill Book Company. As you can plainly see, our copy is worn and has faded over the years. This book was ardently loved by six children from two separate families and it was also my favorite Christmas story as a child. I rescued it from one of my Mother's garage sales years ago. 

      One day she emptied our childhood closets and sold our books for 25 cents a piece! I grabbed as many of the books as I could carry while her back was turned and hid them under my bed upstairs.  

      Many years later, I read this book often to my own children during the fall and winter months of their childhood. It was a popular story book among those with small hands. The lower half of the book is literally worn with handling and the binding on the old favorite is bent and broken. The condition of a book, as everybody knows, is ultimately the sign of true love among children.

"The Steadfast Tin Soldier"

    2. "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" by Hans Christian Andersen, 1991, Michael Di Capua Books.  This is a very old Christmas tale and has been published by dozens of companies over the years but the very finest version of it is illustrated by Fred Marcellino. It has also been retold by Seidler so that it's length and poignancy is age appropriate for children under ten years old. Although Hans Christian Andersen's tales are moralistic, his messages can be lost on modern day children. This Christmas tale, however, has been rewritten and illustrated in such a way as to convey it's original depth and brevity and I wouldn't bother with the purchase of any alternative myself.

"One Wintry Night"

   3. "One Wintry Night" by Ruth Bell Graham. The book is published by Baker Books and lavishly illustrated by Richard Jesse Watson. It is the retelling of  Jesus' birth within the prophetic context illustrated in scripture.  Their are eleven chapters in the book and I recommend that it be read aloud over eleven days. The book is very thorough and age appropriate for children younger than twelve. It is not written in a condescending manner or illustrated as a trendy juvenile picture book. There was great thought given to it's production and it should be considered an American Christmas Classic. The illustrations are magnificent and the story-telling style of Ruth Bell Graham is straight forward and easy to understand. After reading this story aloud, your children will, without a doubt, understand the true meaning given to Christmas by all of Christendom.

      Now that my children have grown, their books have been divided between them, but the Christmas selection has still remained in tact at my home until it can be duplicated. They did not have the heart to divide the collection up, to choose one book over the other. So it is up to me to find the spare cash to acquire more copies of each selection for future grandchildren.