Kenna's Felt Forest: December- What's on the Tray, week 1

Here are some Winter/Christmas activities we have on our shelves this week. We are having a good time doing our themed tray work and also completing a special Christmas craft each day. (Kenna finds a note describing our daily craft in our advent calendar each morning! She thinks Santa is leaving the notes- so exciting!) I'll post some of our more exciting crafts later this week.

Spooning glittery pom poms into an artist palette. I was encouraging a red/green pattern, or big/small, but my kid has a mind of her own.

This tray has a sweet red box with a toggle lock on it- Kenna loves to open and close it!

Tonging red and silver gift bows. I provided a pair of tongs, the bows, and a two sided sorter. Kenna chose not to use the tongs the first couple days, but then she started using them avidly. She likes squishing the bows with the tongs before sorting them.

Cute wintry box to store the bows. Thank you, Dollar Tree!

Reaching in to grab some bows.

Taking a break to build a fort and crawl around. We threw around a bean bag and used words "under, over, in, out and through." It was fun! The fort is actually Quinn's blanket, handmade by Grammie. I need to start a post documenting all of the amazing handmade quilts and blankets we have been given by my mom and Bill's mom. They are works of art!

December Texture Tub- snowy cotton balls, reindeer, presents, christmas lights, candy canes and a tree. The snowman suitcase has a nifty latch, and provides Kenna an outlet for her favorite activity- stuffing stuff in containers.

I also threw in some jingle bells, a santa figurine, and some glitter at Kenna's request. She likes playing with the cotton balls- stacking them, smooshing them, and pulling them apart. I may switch out the cotton balls for something else like polyfil beads or white pompoms in a week or so, when I get tired of picking fuzz from between the baby's fingers.

Stringing popcorn. Yes, I let Kenna have a real needle and thread. (She's 34 months old.) We have done some "sewing" with a real needle before, and she can handle it. She is very careful, and I remain very alert to prevent her from losing focus and hurting herself. This round, she got about 10 pieces of popcorn strung before she lost interest. She was really proud of herself and thoroughly enjoyed hanging that tiny strand on our tree. (She also really liked cooking popcorn on the stove. We watched and waited for the first kernel to pop, poured in 1/2 cup, and listened while the kernels merrily clinked against the metal lid. It was fun and kind of magical for her to see the white fluffy popcorn pour out of a pan that started out full of yellow kernels! We read a picture book called Countdown to Christmas, and the girl in the story strings popcorn and cranberries- so now I have been instructed to find "cwanbewies" to string.

This tray is ~~stolen~~ inspired byThe Adventures of Bear. By the way, all of her trays and activities are awesome. Her tray used pompoms, but I was using our pom poms somewhere else, so we tweezed jingle bells instead. These shapes come from a truck shape sorter that we have had for years.We used them to do some stamping a few months ago, so they look a bit icky now- but it's just white paint. And I would have set out all red shapes, but I have NO clue where they are. I could swear I had every piece just last week...

Christmas tree stamping with a giant ink pad. I provided about 8 small sheets of paper and we'll see how long that lasts Miss Stamps-a-Lot. (she's highly interested in stamping right now. She chooses stamping several times a day, and works on it for long periods of time. This is a great time to nurture her sensitive period and do more stamping! I have letter stamps, number stamps, coin and bill stamps, shape stamps, and more! Bring on the inkpads!)

Decorate a Christmas tree cone. This tray was linked up on LivingMontessoriNow, from Blissfully Domestic. Her trees are lovely. Can't guarantee ours will be as nice, but they will be as much fun!

I made a cone shape out of cardstock, and set out a tray which includes:
green cardstock
a 1 inch hole punch
a bowl with some already punched circles, in various shades of green.
Glue to afix the circles to the cone.

My hope is that Kenna will use the punch to cut circles, but also that she will take time to glue the circles. I'd like to see it completely covered so that we can use it on our Nature table.
I will update at the end of next week and share a pic of our Christmas tree. I plan to leave the tray out for Kenna to do in spurts- she doesn't have the attention span to cover a whole tree in one sitting.
UPDATE 12/21/11:
Kenna loved this. She loved using the punch, and she loved gluing on the circles. We did just use one cone for two weeks. There are a lot more punched circles loose than glued on- she really liked the punch. Kenna discovered that she could make moons and half-circles with the punch- Exciting.