Christmas Crafts

With daily task lists as long as my arm around this time of year I have always found it helpful to have a collection of activities and crafts that the children can do by themselves. I put through occasional orders with Baker Ross, an online shop dedicated to selling art and craft products, particularly for children. They have great deals on their powder paint and air dry clay if you buy in bulk, and they last ages. So with Christmas preparations gearing up and presents needing to be bought, cakes being baked and cards to be wrote, house to be decorated and carol service performances to be rehearsed, I wanted some crafts to help occupy the children (and stop them from trying to make my Christmas cards for my Clever Little Scraps business). Here are some of my favourites:

Nativity lanterns that we will put battery candles in. They come in packs of 4, Mary with Jesus, Angels, Wise men and shepherds.

Mr Social has been taking some interest in the sewing and knitting that I do, so these cross stitch decorations seemed like a good introduction. My 7 and 6 year old have done these with little supervision whereas my independent 2 year old had to be coaxed into doing an alternative craft.

Cross stitch was a little hard for Mr Smiley (2) to handle but these wooden colouring decorations were perfect. He recognised the characters and happily sat colouring them in. He is an excellent colourer which we discovered recently and is able to stay within the lines remarkably well for his age.

Dotty Art nativity pictures I'm sure will be a hit. These are still in our to do pile, but having done some before I know this will be an independent craft. What kid doesn't like stickers!

In a bid to also kill two birds with one stone as the saying goes I have got these Christmas cards for the children to colour for special family members like their grandparents.

Another decoration craft, but one which I can class as Maths - recurring patterns, addition, multiplication, area...all done with pipe cleaners and beads.

Putting these alongside baking sessions involving gingerbread, peppermint creams, snowmen cupcakes and Christmas wreath pastries, we will be having a fun filled month.

What invention changed the world the most?

A tough question was posed in our history lesson recently. What invention changed the world the most? I wonder how you would answer this question.

My first thoughts landed on the wheel. Transportation, water wheels, motors and engines have all benefited from this simple design. Or what about communication technology? Telephones, televisions, radio, telegraph, internet all make pretty impressive inventions and are used daily by the young and the old, and communication is now instant. Or maybe the lightbulb? and not just the lightbulb but the infrastructure that is needed and used now to provide electricity for power. Mr Social thought the automobile was the greatest invention whereas Mr Cheeky was backing R2-D2.

Our history programme however put forward a very good argument for why the printing press is the invention that changed the world the most. Over in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg, used his skills as a goldsmith to create the first ever moveable printing press. Previously books, literature, instructions were all either wrote, carved, or sewn by hand. His invention brought books to the masses. Information could be recorded and passed on. A person's works and achievements could be recorded for other people to learn from and add to.

Here is a list of resources that you can use to discover more about Gutenberg's printing press.

• An informative video
• A short biography
• A lesson plan with stamps and ink
• Some online activities...the be a printer for the day was quite fun

We decided to do some potato printing. I gave the children some potatoes that had been sliced in half and showed them how to carve their image on to the potato and had them cut around it. We stuck to fairly simple shapes and with some ready made paint and brushes they were good to go. Here are a few snaps from their printing endeavours.

As a side note we are quite a creative family and this activity is great for when you don't have suitable wrapping paper available. Stamp some fun images on some brown paper for your own personalised wrapping paper. Also for some more intricate potato designs you can use a metal cookie cutter hammered into the potato to create the shape for printing.

Dinosaur Day at the Museum

This fascinating building is amongst the campus of the University of Liverpool. As a student I would often pass by it and not give it a second glance. Indeed, a number of my friends would often have lectures or take exams in the lecture theatres contained within. To the people of Liverpool they would often refer to this building as the red brick building. It is a hidden gem of the city as when I tell people that I have visited the Victoria Gallery & Museum I watch the blank look on their faces as they try and figure out where we have been. The VGM as some may call it now is a fascinating place and is located within this red brick building. We frequent the museum often and the staff are very welcoming and I have found them to be great with the children.

Every month they host a family Saturday where they will have a film showing in one of their lecture theatres in the morning and then after lunch they will have a craft related activity. Up until recently my boys favourite family Saturday was the showing of Charlotte's Web followed by a real petting zoo outside in the building's grounds...a personal favourite of mine too! But my budding engineers have a new favourite. Bring on dinosaur day!

The film was The Good Dinosaur (follow the link for some colouring pages). After lunch we got creative with some cardboard and created a 3d dinosaur.

But the best was yet to come...LEGO robotics! The LEGO mindstorm units were used to build these robots that were controlled using a handheld tablet. The app itself had a good interface and was simple to use even for my 2 1/2 year old. You could set the robots to respond immediately or you could pretend the robots were on the moon and a 3 second touch delay was set which made navigating them around the box became quite tricky.

The robots could be programmed to follow a path like this one below so basic coding skills could be learned through this fun play session.

One of the robots was even made to look like a dinosaur. Pretty cool!

I did come home and research the LEGO mindstorms range however at these prices as a one income family we have quite a bit of saving to do.

December family Saturday is Roald Dahl and his fabulous BFG and a teaching session with Roald Dahl's physician, Dr Tom Solomon. We are counting down the days.