My Christmas Crafts

It's been a month I know but thought I would share some of our Christmas crafts.  First was our advent calender I got it from the Family Fun.  I then found a free printable for the days of the week here (thanks to MK for sharing this find).  I then printed out the Christmas story cute it up into 24 strips and put one strip and 3 Hershey Kisses (one for each big kid)  into each cone. FYI the tiny trees will not hold 3 kisses so I just stashed them away and when we opened that day up we pulled out their portion. Our kids LOVED this and looked forward to every day.  They were wonderful about keeping up with the day and what was going on.  I think I would probably do this again next year. The only thing I would do different is have a piece of foam board out for us to put the strips of paper on so that we could glue them on after we read them and then we could refer back as we progress through the story/month. 

Next we made two little trees for the mantel. They were just cardboard trees we picked up @ Michael's for like a dollar.  I then let the Josiah and Elaina paint one and then put Korinna in charge of glitter.  I think they turned out super cute and I might even try to add another next year.

Next we made a wreath for the Kitchen.  I have dreams that when I build my "dream house" I am going to have a candy theme in my kitchen along with a tree full of Smore's ornaments.  Do you ever do that "when I build my dream house"? My parents always played (still do) that game.  It was something that they just loved to pretend, dream, wish, plan.  Whatever you want to call it, so I do it because...it's just what I know. I found this on tater tots and jello and forgive me for not linking it but I just got tired of trying to find it. But I know it is from there. We took two bags of large marshmallows, one bag of gumdrops, a box of toothpicks, and a round foam wreath form and this was our  finished product.

I then took the left over gumdrops and put them in the sconces next to the window.  I loved this wreath.  FYI it did not hold the kids attention very long and I wish I would have put a HUGE red ribbon and red bow.  Anybody got any ideas on how to store this wreath?

On a serious note I wanted to share something with you guys from my homeschool meeting last Thursday night.  When we started our meeting we were given a post it note, we were then instructed to write down 5 things that we wanted to teach our children before we die.  We were also instructed that we had to be specific so we couldn't put "Christ" we had to put what we would want them to know about Christ. After filling out our sticky notes we were asked, "How many of you taught your children that today." WOW! I was amazed and humbled.  I will admit that I tried to teach one of the 5 things but not everyday.  We were then challenged to put those in our lesson plan.  Whether you homeschool or not I challenge you to go get you a sticky note and write down what you want to teach your children before you die and then DO IT!