Unplug your kids - curly

This week's Unplug your Kids project theme was "curly". Wombat and I borrowed an idea I had seen on My Montessori Journey for Christmas Tree Spirals and made it our own.

We didn't have any green plates, but we did have a paper plate that Wombat had covered during our painting fun a few days ago.

(We had been painting our salt dough christmas ornaments using a mix of flour, water, glitter and watercolour paint. I buy my Stockmar Watercolour paint from Spiral Garden. How appropriate! LOL!)

This is what we started with. *Note - when drawing the spiral on the back of the plate, don't run the lines too close together! I made that mistake with the second plate - the one where you can see the spiral - and it just didn't work out as nice. Also, note that the top side of the plate - the side you put food on - will be the underside of the spiral. I hadn't realised this, but as you will see, it worked out for the best...

Don't you love the Cars collection watching the work? The wooden tea box is our crayon storage.

After cutting along the spiral lines, turn the plate over and glue small pompoms or other decorations along the outside. Wombat found that he didn't quite have the cutting skills needed to follow the spiral lines, and that the pompoms needed patience to get them to stick properly, so at about this point he wandered off to fill his various trucks up with baby pompoms... I finished the sticky bits, and then looked around for something to hang it with.

Earlier in the day, Wombat had gotten into a big box full of packing peanuts. In an attempt to prevent them being spread all over the floor (yeah, right...) I handed Wombat a big blunt darning needle and some wool, showing him how to thread them. He hadn't been particularly interested in that activity either, but I did have a short strand lying around afterwards. I added a few more packing peanuts, poked a hole in the centre of the plate and voila! A very curly spiral Christmas bell (hanging here in front of my home made nativity scene)!



Lest you think I was disappointed in Wombat's lack of interest, I wasn't - because as an unexpected benefit I found that Munchkin LOVED it. He sat underneath and watched it spinning in absolute fascination. Even Wombat stopped loading his trucks to watch for a while. It does make a great mobile...


And it turned out that the painted surface being on the inside of the bell was a good idea too! The pompoms provided enough interest on the top surface, and here is a Munchkin-eye-view of the painted surface underneath.

Thanks to Unplug Your Kids and My Montessori Journey for the inspiration. If you are not familiar with these blogs, check them out! HEAPS of great activities and ideas for kids. Most are a little too advanced for Wombat, but I am reading and learning lots!