This weekend we’re decorating the house for Christmas. Since we’re going away right after Christmas, we’ve planned for snow and decorations for the month before Christmas. Luckily for us, even in our mild climate the weather seems to be complying. We’ve had snow all week. What do we plan during advent? We live up on a mountain, and although I am not fond of driving to skiing sites, we can go tobogganing, skiing, and snowman-building right outside the front door. We do a lot of this. We also go for walks in the forest near our home. We play a … Continue reading →

Around here, food is ragingly popular as a Christmas gift. We bake, and we bake a lot. Preschoolers love helping with that, and food gifts are very easy for a preschooler to make. They’re popular gifts, too. In the summer, preschoolers enjoy the goopy delights of making freezer jam. Get some frozen summer berries and add freezer jam pectin and sugar according to taste and according to the recipe, and you have delicious, super simple freezer jam. If you freeze berries in the summer, you can make small batches of freezer jam all year round. Full of beans? Collect beans, … Continue reading →

Kids and scissors are a lovely combination. Cutting little bits or giant swathes of paper is a popular art activity around our house. Chop, chop! This weekend, I plan to make some snowflakes to decorate our winter scene. I like the idea of making snowflake templates. For me, these are useful so that I make some snowflakes that look like snowflakes. For my daughter, this is an exercise in learning how to move scissors carefully along a line. She also loves to do free-form cutting, so we will do a lot of that. If you’re folding a paper snowflake, choose … Continue reading →

If your child is like mine, he or she probably has a lot of tiny figures – Lego, Playmobil, and an assortment of little wooden and tiny plastic toys. These little toys are actors in various imaginary creations like boats, buses, trucks, fire stations, and tree houses. In her quest for more of these little figures, my daughter also has an enabler in the house: her father. I think that he lives vicariously through her, buying horses and even an airplane. Did I mention that airplanes are really, really hard to store and tend to tip when you walk on … Continue reading →