To wrap up 2023, School-age 3 at RisingOaks Early Learning | John Sweeney celebrated the upcoming new year with a bang, taking part in many fun and festive activities! As we developed the plans for our winter celebration, we thought of what things we look forward to most during the holidays. We narrowed our ideas down to the following: creating winter scenes, making homemade ornaments, building gingerbread houses, and making our very own snow!
We decided to spread out the planned activities across the remaining time together in December. All of our chosen activities were hands-on, helping develop and show our teamwork skills and critical thinking abilities.
To open our first week of December, we created winter scenes! We used paper and a variety of paints to create a background. We then added trees to the scene, which we sized, drew, and cut before adding them to our designs. We then cut plastic straws to match tree size, allowing our trees to become 3D on the page. When the children finished, they had their own artistic image of what winter looks like to them!
During the second week, we made homemade ornaments using air-dry clay. To make them, we used clay, rollers, and cookie cutters. We used spatial awareness and explored how size, shape, and texture can be combined in our work. Once the ornaments dried, we then painted them to add colour and design, showing off our holiday spirit.
We concluded our final week together with two final fun activities! For our first activity, after we observing the lack of December snow, we decided to make our own. To create our snow, we had to follow the instructions of a snow recipe. To make sure the whole class could participate, everyone had their own job during the snow-making process. We shared roles in measuring, mixing, and texture-testing to check when our snow was ready. For our second activity, we constructed sweet and colorful gingerbread houses! We divided ourselves into two groups and decorated our houses in teams. While building, we had to figure out how to paste the houses together so they wouldn’t fall apart. To make this easier, just like we did while making snow, we assigned different roles to every member of our teams. The roles were divided into frosting, constructing, and decorating. By working together, not only were our houses fabulous looking in the end, but delicious, too!
Having now wrapped up our holiday festivities, we are now filled with happy memories and new experiences. We are now experts at Christmas crafting and have not only developed a lot of teamwork skills, but critical thinking skills as well. We have also gained a better understanding of what the winter season and holidays mean to us. Using what we’ve learned together, we will continue to celebrate more holidays and may even seek to invite our families to take part in our activities in the future. We look forward to seeing what new discoveries and explorations we’ll make in 2024, and we hope you’ll join us as we continue to grow throughout the new year!
