The big reveal!

Here it is! The masterpiece we've been working on the last few days! The boys and I made a hand print flower on a canvas for Mike for Fathers day and since then I have been wanting to do another one - I had BIG plans to make a hand print turkey for Thankgiving but it didn't happen (there's always time next year though).......it worked out perfectly to do the project at Christmas! I have made little cut out hand print trees with my Kindergarten class in the past but I wanted something more permanent so I went to Michaels,got my supplies and we were off :-)

I didn't get too many pictures as I was painting little hands and positioning them but Channing's hands are at the bottom of the tree and Sully's are at the top (it was MUCH easier doing Sully's hand prints!).

The following day (after the hand prints dried), I cut out a star shape from a paper plate and placed it on the tree. I covered the star "space" with glue and then Channing poured the gold bead on. We just tilted the canvas to get the excess beads off and then I carefully took the paper plate shape off.

The next step was to trim the tree with lights........I used Channings fingerprints for this and then I chose one hand print from each of the boys to highlight with glitter glue so I could write their name in it.
The last step was gluing on the "jewels"..........Channing loved this part - I put a glue drop on the tree and Channing dropped the jewels on.
I love the way it turned out and I know that we will have it hanging up for MANY years to come :-)

After out Art work was complete, we read "Sssh" by Julie Sykes. A cute little story about how loud Santa is due to the fact that he's so jolly and how the reindeer and other animals at people's homes have to remind him to be quiet so he doesn't wake the children. Channing loves this book - it's been a favorite since last Christmas and we've read it many times before :-)

After we read the book, we made this craft. I picked this up from Michaels the other day for a dollar or two but you could easily make it yourself if you have some foam laying around.

We also played memory with these little Christmas tree containers I found. I put some Christmas erasers inside and we had to find the matching pair.....it was great fine motor practice too because those little lids were pretty hard to get off. Channing loved this and played with it on and off all afternoon. We didn't get much else done today as we were out running errands - tomorrow is going to be another full day with lots going on so we'll see what we end up doing.....I'm still waiting to do our gingerbread day!

If you haven't already entered "The Gingerbread Pirates" book give away, you can do so here. Don't forget to check out my Christmas and Gingerbread units too.

I am going to link this to: