November Crafts

I'm all about keeping it simple when it comes to crafts, as you might already know if you read my October Crafts post. We kept it super simple this month!!

The first craft we did was a store-bought kit. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I spend $3 on a sticker kit. Want to know why? Because my 3 year old is obsessed with stickers! And she's able to peel the backs off all by herself and this makes her pretty excited. And I'm happy she's gaining fine motor skills.

Sticker Turkey

All the pieces to the kit (and A's excited fingers in the corner!)

I let Autumn get the pieces out of the box and had to leave the room for a minute to grab something. I told her to leave the pieces on the table until I got back so they didn't get lost. When I came back, of course, she was playing with them. She looked up and said, "I'm not losing them. I'm norcka-nizing them." I asked her what "norcka-nizing" meant and she said, "You know (with a shrug of the shoulders) "just norcka-nize." Since you may not speak my 3 year olds language, she was laying each and every piece out in perfect organization. So proud!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      And our finished Turkey is pretty cute!! 

Turkey!

Our Thankful Tree

I found the thankful tree craft idea from Gabby at Mama Gab. Her tree looked so cute and simple I just couldn't pass up this fun craft.

Step 1. Find printable leaf patterns. You can find them through Gabby at the above link but I just did a Google search and found these two patterns. I printed 2 of each on regular printer paper. I chose red, orange, and yellow markers and let the girls color as much as they wanted.

Step 2. Use a glue stick to glue the back of the printer paper and attached to more durable card stock (or construction paper). I also used red, yellow, and orange paper for this.

Added tip from Gabby: There was some left over paper so I cut out some leaves by hand on the card stock so that we had a few extra leaves.

Step 3. Cut out each leaf. Autumn was extremely excited to get to practice cutting as she hasn't done it very much yet except for with play-doh. I learned that it was pretty challenging to teach a young child how to hold scissors correctly and effectively cut but she did really well after a few practices.

Step 4. Hole punch each leaf and tie thread to hang. I used some thread I had in my craft bin.

The only things left to do are find a container and sticks. I just used a glass flower base from our cabinet. I found some orange and green ribbon to tie around the vase to make it more decorative. Then, one day while we were outside playing we just found some sticks in our yard to use.




We worked on the craft for about 20 or so minutes a day for 5 days. The 3 year old loses interest pretty quickly so we decided for short time frames for multiple days. It also gave Autumn something to look forward to each evening (and I was able to get her out of day care a little quicker this way!).

Each evening we talk about what we are thankful for that day. Autumn regularly says Mommy, Daddy, and her sister (because that is usually what she starts her prayer with each night) so it's been a lot of fun to talk about other things of which she is thankful.

I do believe her favorite part is actually hanging the leaves on the tree though! I wonder what she's going to do in a week or two when she learns about Christmas ornaments!?

Our Thankful Tree