Christmas Crafts!

Where was Pinterest when I was doing daycare?!?!  There are so many awesome ideas for fun projects, and we've been working our way through the Christmas ones.

Our first craft project would have been a success, if some of us had a little more self control.

 This was the concept:

Cute, right?  They had a blast gluing the marshmallows!

Sometimes I'm just in awe of their adorableness!

After the marshmallows were glued, I set them on the counter to dry.  Now, before I state what obviously went wrong, let me tell you that I let them eat marshmallows while they were doing the project.  We talked about how the ones with glue were icky, but how they could have all the clean marshmallows they wanted.  They were not deprived of any sugary goodness...and yet...still....Liliana felt the need to climb onto the counter and eat the glued on marshmallows off of the paper.  That girl.  I tell ya.  So with that project down the drain, we moved onto less tempting artwork.

Hand print wreaths:

And hand print reindeer:

I'm a sucker for hand print projects!  They're just so cute and make me smile every time I see them!!!  And I love looking back and seeing how their tiny hands have grown.  It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the Johnson house!

Off topic mild rant about craft projects with kids:  So there are those in the child development field who think that it's never ever okay to tell a kid how to do their art.  It's their art.  If they want to have an orange wreath and put it in the shape of a triangle, by all means, that's their option.  I agree with that to a point.  My kids have plenty of free play time to create whatever they would like to, in any fashion they would like to, without any input from me whatsoever.  But, in this world, there are times we need to conform.  There are times we HAVE to follow directions and do things a certain way and kids need to learn how to do that too.  In my opinion, I think it's perfectly okay to have outcome based projects occasionally, as long as you have plenty of process focused projects too.