Christmas is almost here, and we want to stay as ‘green’ as possible this holiday season!  Whether we’re making crafts in the classroom or at home, it is important to try and use as many recycled materials as possible.  Luckily, there are a good variety of crafts you can make with empty paper tubes.  Some of our holiday favorites include:

Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer
Festive Napkin Rings
Hanukkah Decorative Candle
Paper Christmas Tree
Cute Little Penguin

We also like making glitter flower ornaments for the holidays. Just take an empty toilet paper tube and flatten it out.  Cut it into even strips and punch holes into the lower portion of each tube. Then, take half of a pipe cleaner and poke it through each of the holes and connect the flower petals.  Once all of the petals are strung together, secure the pipe cleaner to form the flower shape.  The children can paint on the glue and then use glitter to decorate the ornament. These ornaments look great with as few as 5 petals, but you can also use as many as 10 petals like we did here.

While making this craft, the children wanted to use all of the different colors of glitter including red, green and silver.  They had a great time making sure there was glitter everywhere! These inexpensive ornaments are going to shine brightly on our Christmas tree, and we made them with supplies we already had in our craft bin. What more could you ask for?

Children are always told to eat fruits and vegetables, but, we thought it would be fun to paint with them instead!

Painting with the pumpkins wasn’t the initial plan. However, when our miniature pumpkins started to get some soft spots, re-purposing them to make art made perfect sense. So, instead of immediately tossing them out, we cut off the soft spots and used them for an art lesson.

You can make paintings with any types of fruits or vegetables. For this particular craft, we cut our pumpkin in half, scooped out the seeds, dipped it into orange paint, and made prints on a piece of yellow paper.

This is a great craft for children of all ages including toddlers. Toddlers can use their senses to feel the texture of the fruit, breathe in the scent, and admire the colors. Older children may also enjoy learning some interesting facts about pumpkins, such as:

• A pumpkin is really a squash.
• The “pumpkin capital” of the world is Morton, Illinois.
• Native Americans flattened strips of pumpkins, and dried them to make natural mats.
• In early colonial times, pumpkins were used as an ingredient for the crust of pies, not the filling.

No matter what age you are, making prints with fruits and vegetable can be a lot of fun. You never know… it might even ‘squash’ any misconceptions your child has about a certain food so that they broaden their palette at the dinner table.

Halloween is almost here and there is no better way to decorate than a smiling, orange jack-o-lantern.  We came up with a cute craft that can be made with a few household items and the results were even better than we expected!

Here’s what you need:

-Plain White Coffee Filters
-White School Glue
-Orange Food Coloring
-Water Balloons (filled with air instead of water)
-Green Pipe Cleaners
-Cooking Spray
-Black Marker

Here’s how to make paper mâché pumpkins:

First, we cut the coffee filters into strips.  It doesn’t matter if the strips are all uniform.  They can be different shapes and sizes.  This is a great way for the children to work on their fine motor skills.

Then, we poured some white school glue into a bowl and added a few drops of orange food coloring.  The children loved this part, because they got to watch the plain white glue transform into a vivid orange color as they slowly mixed in the food coloring.  Once we had our desired shade of orange, it was time to blow up our balloons.

It doesn’t matter what color balloon you use, because you will eventually pop the balloon and discard it.  The very small balloons that we used worked well because they were a manageable size for the child to work with.  We sprayed our balloons lightly with cooking spray and then wiped off the excess, so that it would be easier for the balloon to release itself from the paper mâché once it was dry.

The children dipped the coffee filter strips into the orange glue and then layed it across the balloon.  The goal is to have the entire balloon covered in orange strips.  Be sure to be generous with your layers so that you have a nice sturdy pumpkin.

Once the pumpkin is covered, set it to dry on a paper plate or white paper.  When it finally dries, you can pop the balloon and the children can decorate their new pumpkin with markers to make little jack-o-lanterns.  We also accented our pumpkin with green pipe cleaner as a finishing touch!

This was one of the best projects we’ve done so far!  And, the children are so proud of their little jack-o-lanterns.  This happy pumpkin is a Halloween treat!

Supplementing traditional Montessori classroom materials with handmade activities for special holidays is easier than you may think!  With a little creativity and some basic supplies, it’s easy to make seasonal, budget-friendly Montessori inspired materials for your classroom.  Here are a few autumn-themed activities for preschool age children that we wanted to share:

Pumpkin Matching

This activity gives the child an opportunity to match up the pumpkins based on their facial expressions. Matching activities can help children develop their motor skills as well as build a foundation for problem solving and thinking ‘outside the box’.

Corn Transfer

Here we made a basic transferring activity with corn.  This gives children an opportunity to focus and concentrate while transferring the corn from the small bowl into the larger bowl.  This activity would be especially beautiful with colorful Indian corn that is common during this time of year.

Pumpkin Counting

For our Pumpkin Counting activity, we made ten pumpkins out of construction paper and then numbered them 1 – 10.  The child chooses the same number of foam pumpkins from the basket to match up with the number on the pumpkin.

Those are a few of our favorite autumn-themed Montessori inspired activities.  Now, head on over to Living Montessori Now for more pumpkins, spiders and ghosts in their Montessori inspired Halloween activity link up!

Maria Montessori believed that character education was just as important as academic education.  Teaching children to take care of themselves, each other and the world around them helps to develop the whole child.

Here’s an idea for a fun activity that gives children a chance to learn two important lessons:

• Even though people may sometimes disagree, everyone in the group is important.
• When someone is absent, he will be missed.

For this activity, all of the children should stand together in a circle. Then, go around the circle and say each person by name. If someone is missing from the circle, can anyone name them. Tell the children they will play a game in which someone is missing from the group and they will try to guess who is missing.

Have everyone in the circle close their eyes. Choose someone to be the missing person. Then, everyone in the circle open their eyes. Ask if anyone can name who is missing. If no one can identify the missing person have him come back. Do this several times.

Dr. Maria Montessori once said, “Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit.”  Every day, as our children work on building their character, growing in the community, and embracing responsibility, you can see her words come alive!

It’s always nice to pair a craft with a current lesson that the children are learning. Recently, while working on a geography lesson about the universe, we decided to make a colorful comet.  This simple craft allows children to express themselves creatively, while working on their hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.

Here’s what you need:

Scraper
White Art Paper
Large Flat Tray (to lay paper on)
Nancy bottles (small squeezable bottle for the paint)
BioColor® Paint

First, squeeze a dime size dot of any color paint  in the top left-hand corner of the paper.  Then, trace around the original dot with a different color of paint.  Continue this with two more colors for a total of four.  Then, starting at the edge of the paper, use the scraper to drag the color across the page toward the lower right-hand side. Your comet is complete!

As you can see in the photographs above, the BioColor paint stains the paper, at first, and then stays separate as you slide the scraper across the page.  The children were really amazed at their creations.  Just like bright stars shining in the sky, you could see their eyes light up as they watched their one-of-a-kind comet appear!