Christmas Sensory Tub

Well Christmas has been and gone but I have had this sitting in my draft posts for weeks so I thought I might as well publish it!

Our run up to Christmas was busy, with the building work for the extension going full steam ahead & daddy away for a little while to see family in South America, our 'Advent Activity Calender' was becoming a bit neglected (the chocolate ones, not so much). As a list-making obsessive type it was getting me down that I wasn't able to do some of the nice activities I had planned.

Then Aunty Anna arrived a few days before Christmas to spend the holidays with us and brought with her a whirlwind of festive creative energy! She arrived bearing gifts of homemade christmas spice and peppermint playdoughs (make christmas playdough -check), brought a stable made from a cardboard box (make stable for nativity scene -check), made 3D snowmen Christmas tree decorations with Poppet (make christmas tree decorations -check), made a complete set of nativity figures from toilet roll tubes with Poppet, made spiced  biscuits, wrapped presents and generally just became our little house Elf.

Uncle Pete, who also spent Christmas with us, also deserves a mention for his impressive parsnip peeling. 

This was our first Christmas in our own family home and it was exciting to start to cement the family traditions that will make Christmas special for us in the years to come. Drawing from the lovely Christmas memories we have each brought with us from our respective families and inventing some new ones of our own!

So, back to the post -this was (as the title suggests) a tub filled with interesting Christmassy things for the girls to explore with all their senses. Except taste, preferably, but Little didn't get that memo. We used a drawer from our Trofast storage system as a tub.

I filled it with cinnamon scented red rice, gold pine cones, dried orange slices, cinnamon quills, baubles (top removed) ribbons, a bell, green pompoms, lengths of beads, a plastic pot filled with peppermint oil-soaked cotton wool and measuring scoops.

They loved exploring everything; I did not love hoovering up red rice all the time. Or fishing it out of Little's mouth. I really need to reclaim my Tuff-Spot as that would have contained the rice better; it was used in the building works and is all grubby now.

Little liked carefully dropping the lengths of beads into the pot. Very serious. Poppet liked filling up various containers with the rice using the scoops. She filled the baubles up with rice and then shook them to make a sound. And I often found the nativity figures in the tub too.

Poppet: 2yrs 11 mos

Little: 1yr 2mos

Paper Christmas Wreath for Toddlers

Ever since we made a wreath for our front door Poppet has enjoyed spotting them when we are out and about, and she was very happy when she opened our picture Advent calendar and found a picture of a wreath one day! 

We decided to make a paper one that the girls' could have indoors. It was really easy and combined two of Poppet's loves - cutting things up with scissors and glueing!

I cut a circle out of the middle of a paper plate to form the base of our wreath, but you could also just cut a circle from an old cereal box.

I got out our red and green foam shapes and we roughly tried to cut them into leaf and berry shapes (really roughly!). Poppet is still getting used to using scissors; it takes her a lot of effort to open and close them so she is so pleased with herself whenever she does actually manage to cut the smallest bit off. I also added red pompoms, and lots of green tissue paper that we ripped up into small pieces.

Then Poppet just had to glue on green bits until the plate was covered. After a while she was asking me to help her because she had glue all over her fingertips and the tissue paper was sticking to her rather than the plate which was making her frustrated. Together we managed to glue all the green bits on, (using lots and lots of glue). Poor Little wanted to help so badly, she found some tissue on the floor and reached up to stick it on to the plate. But only this morning I found her eating Sudocreme out the pot so she just can't be trusted around art materials yet!

Can you spot Little desperately trying to join in?!

Poppet then stuck all of the 'berries' on, and it really looked like quite an effective wreath. We left it to dry and then I stuck it to her bedroom door. However when Poppet saw it she demanded that I move it to the window so that "Santa can see it". And so it begins!

Poppet: 2 yrs 11 mos

Little 1yr 2mos

DIY Wreath

Assorted shrubbery from Grandad

This was my first ever attempt at making a wreath for Christmas and I am so pleased with how well it turned out! It cost me exactly nothing to make; everything was either lying around our house or garden (well most of it was from Nana and Grandad's garden!) and hopefully will make our home look nice and Christmassy when I eventually figure out how to hang it on the front door. 

Grandad arrived bearing gifts of conifer, holly and some shrub with red berries, and he had also knocked up a wreath base using some insulation tubing - I have still to turn this into a wreath but plan to do so shortly as I have loads of greenery still to use.

Our two wreath bases: insulation tubing on left and coat hanger & hanging basket liner on right

Poppet had already seen a picture of a wreath in a Christmas story book we had been reading her and asked "What's that?" so she had a rough idea of what they looked like but she liked seeing one appear before her eyes! I started off by bending a wire coat hanger into a circle with Poppet's help, leaving the hook intact so we could use it to hang the wreath up when it was finished. I had an old hanging basket liner that I tore roughly into three pieces and then wrapped around the coat hanger, securing it on by wrapping twine round it.

Together we then attached bits of conifer all the way round the wreath, just by pushing the end under a bit of the twine. We kept doing this until we had quite a good layer of conifer built up, Poppet was really good at this bit!

I was surprised at how long she was able to concentrate on it, I didn't need to try and keep her interested she just wanted to help.

After the conifer we had a search around the garden to see what other greenery we could turn up, and came back with some rosemary sprigs that we tucked into the wreath as well. Poppet kept coming back with little sprigs of weeds saying 'Here's some thyme!' (a herb she knows well because she has some in her garden) but I managed to avoid having to put any weeds into the wreath!

Wreath in progress

I then started adding pieces of holly and red berries and this is where the swearing started as I kept spiking myself on the holly. Understandably Poppet was from this point onwards reluctant to help attach the greenery and preferred to have a more background role just observing "Watch the spiky bit mum!"

I had sprayed our pine cones gold and scented them with cinnamon oil so Poppet loved taking them out the bag and sniffing them. We tied a few pine cones to the wreath as a finishing touch and declared it "all done!"