Some ideas we have made so far include: felt, rod and stick puppets, a puppet theater, magic kits, science kits, juggling kits, cookie and soup mix in a jar, jewelry, sock dolls, paper dolls, paper airplane and origami kits, puzzles (we pasted pictures of dolls from magazine ads on different colors of cardboard, laminated them, and cut them out in different shapes and put them in Ziploc bags – these were suitable for age 2 on up.) Currently I am working with my 11-year old grandson making paper dolls, arctic seals and penguins, stress buster frogs and butterflies (don’t ask!) and before the day is done who knows what else we will create! We print gift cards out from the computer, they wrap each gift, and it is really fun to bring each child home with an armful of gifts they have made all by themselves (sometimes with a little or lot of help from Grandma!)
I am including a recipe for Cowboy Cookies that can be layered in either a quart and pint jar or in a 1-1/2 quart jar. Directions are attached to the jar, the lid is decorated with a ribbon and flowers, and a circle of fabric is sandwiched between the lid and the ring.
I hope some of you are able to make a special memory with a child this year by helping them realize the joys of giving and not just receiving. Have a wonderful holiday season!
Wouldn't it be great if the schools would incorporate this kind of activity for children? Teaching them to give and be creative at Christmas time? The schools never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Wouldn’t it be great if the schools would incorporate this kind of activity for children? Teaching them to give and be creative at Christmas time? The schools never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. <<<
What do you want out of today’s schools? An education?
Yes, much could be taught, and would be, if it were not meant to be a brainwashing tool.
If you have the time, set it up through your church, they would welcome it.
Or, do as a couple did for me, I am sorry I don’t recall their names, but do every thing else about them.
Both less than 5’ tall and I was already 5’8”, so it was difficult for a 14 year old to bend over to get her orders...LOL
All 5 of us kids were in homes, even then they did not want teenagers in family homes, so I was in the Boys and Girls Aid Society home for children.
This Couple, contacted the home and made arrangements to take 2 of us out, maybe once a month.
Starlight Light Opera in San Diego is worth the effort to go to in the summer, live on an outdoors stage, wonderful and I have never gotten over my love for anything live on a stage.
Imagine “Starlight Opera”, to a young person, who only 7 years before lived in the San Diego river bottom, in a fruit tramp camp....
They also had a pottery studio at home, and the months that we went to the studio, we would take long walks and look for leaves that we could use for patterns in the wet clay and they then fired them for us and I of course made wall pockets and gave them to mom.
LOL, I still do not know what to put in wall pockets.
Since then, I have taken 5 or 6 semesters of ceramics at the colleges and still work the clay on a pattern basis, hate the machine made pots and never mastered it.
But give me a ball of clay and I will roll, pinch, poke and make something.
And believe me, that was a lot of years ago.
The other girl that went out with us, was a real...she was going to be an opera singer, grew her hair almost past her knees and did not have ‘normal problems’, not a friend type of person and not some one that I kept with.
Ten years later, I was a licensed foster home in California, and they asked me to take a family, LOL, I think it was 4 kids, as they were being removed by the court from the mothers care.
I did, and the first visiting day, the mother showed up, and it was the ‘gonna be an opera singer’ from the home.
I do not recall a single detail about the father. Or if there was one?
I finally asked for the kids to be moved, the older boy, about 9, kept the family torn apart and was ruining the life for my own and a couple other kids that i had...If he saw his younger kids having fun, being kids, he would stop them.
If he saw my kids having fun, he would stop that too.
I am sure he thought that if he was bad, then he would be sent home.......but real life does not work like that and he was ruining the younger kids lives to boot.
At the time I was lucky, my case worker, cared about the kids she controlled.
When I complained that 3 year old Mark, the child of 2 unfit parents, was not right in his actions.
She came on the weekend, as my friend and observed him, so she could see exactly what I was seeing.
If Mark went missing, I would find him standing Gils size 13 Navy dress shoes in my bedroom, lost in a daze.
{My first husband was Navy}
If Gil would allow him to touch his guitar, he would go into the dazed / coma.
And he did nothing else, did not play or take part in anything the other kids were doing.
His parents still had legal custody, so mama would come and get him and take him out for the day, except she didn’t bring him back.
About 2 am, I would get a call from the father, “I took Mark away from that bitch and I am putting him in a taxi, to return him to you”.......and he would arrive alone in a taxi.
My case worker, had him placed in a special home, with people who knew how to handle the type of problems he had.
At 3 years old, he was one step from going into a catatonic coma, if I have the term correct, a not unusual thing for battered children and not something a young mother, untrained in caring for them, can handle.
Several years later, I took my sister in law to the El Centro hospital, she was having twins.
I wound up setting in the nurses station, as the event progressed and there was a 3 year old boy there in a high chair, that all the nurses talked to, a little odd, as it was the middle of the night.
When I started paying attention to the child, a nurse took me out in the hall, explained that they were fighting the child step off into a catatonic coma and that no matter what he did that I must not say the word NO to him.
She would only tell me that he was an abused child, on the brink of being lost.
I spent most of the night with the child, as all El Centro choose that night to give birth, but I will always admire the extra effort those nurses put out for him and pray that they were able to help him.
I figured, that I understood what being a child without a home was like, so I should be a foster parent and was in 3 states.