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photo credit: chrissatchwell
The Christmas season is a time when we rummage the malls for new stuff or our house for some old recyclable things that we can still use. Besides receiving gifts, kids enjoy setting up and helping in the Christmas tree decoration.
Putting little Santa heads under the tree is one cute way of decorating the tree this Yuletide season.
Supplies:
- Styrofoam balls (You can buy Styrofoam balls of different sizes)
- Red felt paper
- Wiggly eyes
- Black and red (or pink) marker
- Cotton
- Scissors
- Super Glue
- Triangle pattern (the bigger the Styrofoam balls, the larger the triangle shape)
Steps:
- Depending on the size of the Styrofoam ball, choose the right pattern size. Trace the triangle on the felt paper and cut it out.
- Fold the triangle from side to side to form a cone. Put a fluff of cotton on top of the cone.
- Glue the Santa hat on the Styrofoam ball. Put some fluffs of cotton around the base of the Santa hat.
- Glue the wiggly eyes on the ball to form part of the face.
- Using the marker, draw a smiling mouth on the Santa ball.
- Put some fluffs of cotton around the mouth to form Santa’s beard.
- Put some pink marks on the cheeks of the Santa ball.
- Make as many Santa balls as you want. Arrange them carefully under your Christmas tree.
The Santa Styrofoam Balls are very easy to make. You can even create a family of Santa balls to represent each member of the family – from grandma to the little baby. You can also adorn the balls with accessories to give it a personal touch.
This is a project that you can gear towards 3-7 year olds. The older they are the more detailed you can get. My son loves space and planets and asks LOTS of questions about it!! We recently took a trip to the Museum of Natural History in NY (which is amazing by the way!). We go every year and one of his favorite things to do is when we go in the planatarium! They have an incredible show there called “Cosmic Collisions” it talks about how sometimes Collisions in the universe can help to something good and shows how our moon was formed in one month!! Can you believe that one month!! There is so much information that they tell you during this amazing show. But anyway, I digress!! Since we had gone recently and my son loves it, and they are studying it in Kindergarten, we decided to read up a little more on space and planets. The Planets in our Solar System tells a lot of great information in terms a 6 year old can understand. Then we created a planet. My son had the choice of either creating his own planet and figuring out things about it, or making an actual planet. As you might have guessed he created his own planet!! He has quite an imagination, so I am not sure I could tell you all about it, but the basics were that there were living things on it like fish, it has 2 moons and there were meteors in the sky. It also had water on it (although I guess that is obvious since there are fish, LOL). The idea is to tell them things about a planet that they should know and let them make it up.
Here are some questions to think about before creating the planet:
- Can life exist there?
- How far from the sun is it?
- Is it cold? hot?
- How can you get there?
- What does it look like?
- Is there water?
- Does it have a moon (s)?
- What is the Planets name?
Supplies:
Steps: (this really depends on how your child imagines the planet to look)
- Draw on Styrofoam ball with marker, make water and what ever else you like on it
- Use Pipe cleaners to make rings or whatever your child has in mind!
- Attach Moon (if there is one ) with Toothpicks and attach smaller styrofoam balls as moons
- Put Wooden Dowels in bottom of planet-push in a bit to make it sturdy-I used three
- Put other end of dowels into flat piece of styrofoam
Now you have your very own planet- My son’s is called Timer!
