Elfie reads a story, Christmas cards, Wreath ornaments and Homeschool money activity

This morning Elfie wasn't hiding at all...this morning Elfie was being a good elf and reading a story to some of the girls toys.

Aaylas was quite amazed...

Today's first Countdown to Christmas activity was to make Christmas Tree Toast. The girls painted their bread with a milk and food colouring mixture, added some cheese strips to be garlands and of course some sprinkles for the decorations. Next it would be best to pop them in a toaster oven. We don't have a toaster oven so I laid the toaster on it's side and carefully inserted the decorated bread slices...NOT something I recommend you try. Every crumb in the bottom of the toaster burned and it smelled horrible!

Next we made some Christmas cards for friends by making potatoe print snowmen.

 When the paint was dry we just used Sharpies to draw on the facial features and the arms. then we added the Merry Christmas scarf which was a roll of Christmas tape I got at Target. I think they turned out quite cute. Can you tell Sierra is a Duck Dynasty fan??? She thought it was quite funny to give her snowmen beards like everyone on Duck Dynasty.

We also made some wreath ornaments which I just LOVE how they turned out and they were so simple! All you need is various coloured pipe cleaners, wood rings (mine were a set of 7 curtain rod rings I got at the thrift store for $1), some pompoms and leaves to decorate, glue gun and string or ribbon to hang.

The girls could both do this almost completely by themselves. They both needed a little help starting each pipecleaner but other then that (and help with the glue gun) they both did it themselves.

It's simple... take a pipecleaner or two if you want to mix the colors together and wrap them around the ring. Here Aayla is doing a red and a green pipecleaner together to make a striped wreath (red and white look like candy canes).

Here are our finished wreaths. I wish I had more hoops as these were super easy, super fun and I think they look amazing!

 We hung ours up with our garlands along the living room window (my garlands I got on Clearance at Canadian Tire last year for under $3 each).

And here's a longer pic of the garland with the hanging wreaths at night as I just realized I hadn't taken a full length pic. The girls made the coffee filter suncatchers this week as well. Another super simple but cute activity.

To make a bauble sun catcher you just colour a coffee filter with washable markers, spray it with water or paint over the markings with a water paintbrush if you do not have a spray bottle. Set aside to dry. While it is drying cut out a construction paper circle which is big enough to glue the coffee filter to the back of it once dried. Add a tin foil piece to be the bauble attachment and a pipecleaner bent to be the hanger and Voila another simple, cheap and effective Christmas decoration.

Above Aayla is colouring a coffee filter...but that is the only pic I took of this activity :(

Later this week the girls will be doing a little bit of Christmas shopping so as one of our homeschool activities today we set up a mini store with a few toys and left over Halloween candy. Both girls learned about the cost of items, how much each coin is worth, what makes up a dollar, tallying bills, counting payments, making change...and had so much fun doing it. I can see us doing this activity again in the near future.

They also learned that sometimes people try to pay you less on purpose so it's important to double check payments received or else your business will loose money, your profits will go down and your business will fail. They learned about how a business is run by buying merchandise wholesale and selling it above that to make a profit...to me they learned more important life skills with this activity then any "real school" day could ever provide. I love it when our homeschool days are full of such creativity and so many great learning opportunities.