For a craft activity at our next home education group we are making felt snowmen.
If you would like to make your own with your child, here's how...
Place your background piece of felt into your embroidery hoop. If possible, buy the decorative hoops that have a handle so that your embroidery can be hung afterwards.
Cut out your snowman shape using white felt.
Sew the snowman on to the background felt using a running stitch like this - - - - - - - - -
If necessary, stick it down first with a piece of double sided tape to stop it moving around when the child is sewing it. Be prepared to re-thread the needle about 20 times!
Cut out and sew on any accessories you want your snowman to wear e.g. hat and scarf.
Sew on buttons. We used a piece of orange pipe cleaner for the carrot nose. You can buy stick on felt buttons from the Pound shop to make it a bit easier for little ones.
Add the snowman's arms. We used a brown Sharpie pen to draw them on, but you could cut them out of felt and sew on or even sew on little twigs.
Trim the excess felt neatly off from around the ring and there you have your own embroidered snowman. A perfect Christmas gift!
We started the week with a lovely walk in the country, collecting colourful autumnal leaves to bring home to identify, and armfuls of apples that we made into apple pies.
At home, we printed trees from our handprints and then decorated them with finger paints to represent the colours in spring, summer, autumn and winter.
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I used these prints to make bright covers for the children's topic books.
We made prints with the leaves we found on our walk,
measured and identified them. We revised the names and order of days of the week, months and seasons of the year.
As we hadn't done any sewing in a while, the children enthusiastically worked together on an autumnal tree, taking turns to sew on buttons to represent the leaves.
Miriam, age 3, enjoyed wrapping some yarn around these cut out leaf shapes.
We investigated some of the products that come from trees and the children were particularly interested to find out that rubber and maple syrup does! They decided what their favourite season was and had to give reason for their choice. Winter was the clear winner!
In our daily Bible time we have been singing the Harvest hymn We Plough the Fields and Scatter.
"All good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above, Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord For all His love."
This week our theme has been the country of Wales!
We located Wales on a map of the United Kingdom and coloured in its flag.
We then watched a video on the heritage of Wales.
The national flower of Wales is the daffodil, which also happens to be one of my favourites, so we decided to decorate our kitchen windows by painting them on
and the children made some daffodil sun catchers.
We also sewed some daffodils with ribbon hoops to hang in our kitchen.
We found out about Mary Jones and her desire to have a Bible of her own.
In history, the subject this week was the Welsh Revival.
Our family has enjoyed singing some Welsh hymns; Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah, Calon Lân and Here is Love Vast as the Ocean. To reflect the theme of the Welsh revival and God's love, our memory verse for the week has been John 3:16.
I have really enjoyed my first full year of blogging. It is lovely to be able to look back at what the children have achieved over the year and all the different places we have visited.
Here is our year in blog posts!
We welcomed our fifth child, baby Elisabeth into our family just before Christmas last year.
What a year! Not every day has been blog worthy; we have had our ups and downs and challenges along the way, but God has been good and we are very blessed.
Looking forward to 2014.
"It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him." Lamentation 3:22-24
