Busy Activities For Littles

How is your holiday season moving along? Our is getting there, little by little. Since large windows of time are a rarity, I'm trying to find small chunks during the day to wrap a present or do a little bit of sewing. As we continue to settle into this house, the kids are getting better at occupying themselves here and there again. But it never hurts to have an activity (or three) in my back pocket- to get a little extra time to finish a seam or address a few more holiday cards. And these activities aren't just busy activities! The products have been fun to incorporate into our home, and can easily help with gift-giving too. 

The best part of these projects is they use a lot of materials we already have on hand. If you don't want to over the river and through the woods for more art materials, I'll share modifications that you can easily find around the house.  

You can never go wrong with pipe-cleaners and beads! I bought these alphabet beads, but you could always craft salt dough letter beads or modpodge little cut out letters from a magazine onto beads you already have. You can also make these without letter beads like Billy did, but I wanted the spelling practice for Isia. Since she beaded left to right it was great reinforcement of letter order, and patterning practice too (three sets of two beads). I helped her with the first one for Billy, but she did the others by herself. We'll be using ours for napkin rings, but these also make great bracelets (when larger, ha!), cute ornaments, or fun gift tags. 

While we have a whole woods of pinecones, these cinnamon-scented ones came from the store. I would love to make our own next year- they just smell so good. I wasn't sure how well glitter glue would work, but they turned out beautifully. It's hard to capture on camera how they just glow. Easy enough for our littlest hands to do by himself, we just decorated one side of the pine-cones. Not only did this help with drying (no sticky side lying on the newspaper), but it made sense since we'll be stringing them on a garland soon. If only one side will show, why paint both? You could also easily do this with white glue and glitter- especially that fine, extra-sparkly craft glitter I've been secretly pining after. One of these days (wink).

For this last activity I covered their table with butcher block paper and a lot of quickly drawn circles. I filled in a couple to get them started, then they had fun turning the rest into faces too. Of course these circles don't have to be faces, they'd be fun to fill with patterns or pictures or anything else. And the finished product makes a fun gift paper! 

How do you keep little hands busy in your house?

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