The Tomie dePaola book we chose for this month’s Virtual Book Club for Kids, Country Angel Christmas, got us into the Christmas spirit a little early this year!
The kids loved the story and asked me read it to them multiple times this weekend. It is a beautifully illustrated tale of the year the country angels planned the Christmas celebration. The older angels were busy making preparations, but there seemed to be nothing left for the three littlest angels to do. That is until their secret project with St. Nicholas saves the entire celebration!
After reading we discussed who the characters were and how they felt throughout the story. It is easy for kids to identify with the angels who feel left out and they were able to make a lot of text to self connections. We also looked at the situation from the point of view of the older angels and discussed how they weren’t intending to be mean to the little angels.
Then we made our own angel characters!
We began by mixing glue, water, and silver glitter together to make a “paint” for the angel wings.
The kids painted the sparkly glue mixture all over white coffee filters.
While the coffee filters were drying (and drying and drying) they used markers to draw the angel’s bodies on wooden clothespins. The girls also added twine hair.
Once the coffee filters were dry we stuck them in tothe clothespins. We twisted pipe cleaner halos and stuck them inside as well. The kids had lots of fun playing with their angels and decided they wanted to turn them into ornaments for their bedroom Christmas trees.
I taped, but plan to hot glue, wire ornament hooks to the back of the clothespins and they hung them on their trees.
(Don’t worry nothing else is decorated for Christmas yet! We bought the youngest her tree the other day and everyone wanted me to set theirs up too. We’ll wait on the rest until after Thanksgiving.)
Since all of the supplies were out we kept going! We made many more angel ornaments to give away at Christmas!
We had tons of fun with this month’s author! Go check out the blog hop for all the cool activities bloggers have done with Tomie dePaola books!
Disclosure: When we went to make our craft this morning I realized we were out of clothespins! Luckily, I remembered that CraftProjectIdeas.com had sent me a bunch of fun craft supplies in the mail including clothespins and they worked perfectly! CraftProjectIdeas.com gave me the clothespins for free (thank you!), but did not in any other way sponsor this post and all opinions are my own.
Linking to :
