Bring in the New Year with a bang and make crafts with your kids. There’s no better way than to spend time with your children than by making crafts with them and they’ll be sure to remember those special times with their own mementos.
On New Year’s Eve, start the day out by making party hats to use for the evening’s celebrations. Make a tall cylinder-shaped party hat with these items: 2 sheets of 8 x 11 sized papers, tape, and any decorative items you have available. Lay the two sheets of paper side-by-side, short sides together and tape them. Have your child color and decorate the papers with “Happy New Years” or whatever words or pictures they choose. Use crayons, markers, glitter and glue to create their designs. Once the paper has dried, fold them around into a cylinder and tape them again, using the child’s head as reference for sizing and tape placement. Even though it’s an open top cylinder, children will still love this craft. Children usually don’t wear hats for very long, but if they’ve made it themselves, they will wear it longer and most of the time even after the holiday!
On New Year’s Day, start the day by making a calendar of the month with your child. Open Microsoft Office Word and make a new document. Choose a calendar template for January. Print it out and let your child color it. Review the days of the week, the number of days and the holidays during the month. Mark special days by letting your child draw pictures in the corresponding squares for each holiday.
January 3rd is when the earth is at perihelion, or its nearest point in its orbit to the sun. Teach your child about perihelion and aphelion and visit NASA’s science website to educate them further about space (http://science.nasa.gov) and find activities that will help them learn and have fun at the same time. Build a solar system mobile from foam spheres and use clothes hangers to hang them.
On January 4th, celebrate Trivia Day by making your own family trivia game. Use index cards and any board game to play. On each index card, write a question about one of your family members on one side and the answer on the other. It doesn’t matter which board game you decide to use because instead of rolling dice to move, each player has to answer a question from the cards correctly. Once the cards are made, you can re-use them all year long and add more to them.
January 5th is National Bird Day. Visit http://www.nationalbirdday.com for information and activities about the day, free posters, and fun activities.
January 6th is Bean Day. Buy a bag of mixed beans or several bags of different types of beans and lead your child through making a mosaic. Show your child different images of mosaics before starting this project so they will have an idea of what mosaic means. When you’re ready to start, take a sheet of construction paper and let your child draw a picture with a black marker. For example, say your child has drawn a house, a tree, and a sun. Glue white beans on the house, dark beans on the tree, and light beans on the sun. If your child is older and has drawn a more complex work, let them use the beans to create artistic effects with light and shadow.
On January 8th, celebrate National Hobby Month by picking a new craft or hobby you and your child have not tried and see if the two of you like it. You can also incorporate this new hobby or craft into your New Year’s resolutions, by attempting to become better at it by this time next year. Whether it’s painting using a new medium you haven’t tried such as acrylics, water colors or oil; or if you would like to try drawing with charcoal, just try it! You’ll never know what you like to do or what your child is good at unless you introduce something new to them.
January 17th is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. in which you and your child can spend time learning about Dr. King’s dreams and making dreams of your own. Ask your child about his or her own dreams and how they would like to see the world become. Record this by writing down your child’s thoughts with the date, record their voice on an audio recorder, or videotape them. This activity makes a wonderful surprise for them when they are older.
A great January craft project is to make a time capsule to open next year. The time capsule doesn’t have to look like something from a science fiction movie. Use a shoe box or anything that you have lying around the house. Fill your time capsule with today’s newspaper, a recent photo of your family, and anything else you won’t need over the next year, but would like to preserve. After everything is in the capsule, decorate it and tape it. Do not open for one year.
Make a collage with your child of activities you two would like to do over the next year. Clip photos from family magazines or travel brochures and tape or glue them onto a sheet of paper or poster board. Hang it somewhere in daily sight so that the two of you will remember to do those activities together.
References:
NASA Science http://science.nasa.gov
National Bird Day http://www.nationalbirdday.com
