Pinterest Homeschooling Day 1: Dictionary Pages Paper Snowflakes

 

Every year I have high hopes of spending some quality time with my children during the Christmas holiday, just kicking back and making yummy cookies and craft gifts that we can share with family and friends.

Every year, I disappoint myself when the days tick by with all my high hopes disillusioned.

*-The cookies turn out burnt, too hard, or eaten before I can share them with others.
*-The crafts end up being coloring sheets that I really don't want hanging around my house - My fridge is only so big and I really prefer it to be free of clutter (don't judge if this makes me a bad mom).
*-The other crafts that actually have potential somehow end up being too difficult for my children to turn into anything worthy of sharing.

So.....  This year, I had the grand idea to use Pinterest to guide us through our break with crafts that will hopefully end up blessing other family members and/or providing a base for educational endeavors.

I am determined to spend some time kicking back with my kids. If nothing else, I hope to have some quality conversation and fun around the crafting table (aka: The dining room table).

Of course, I also want them to learn as they're crafting and not just make goofy nonsensical busy work with their hands just to fill the day's hours.  We shall see how successful this turns out to be in the end.

My plans are to complete at least a handful of crafts that I have found on Pinterest and/or that I can share on Pinterest when we are done.

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Welcome to Day 1 of Pinterest Homeschooling during our Christmas break.

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To start our Pinterest journey, I decided to search for crafts that would also be educational.

What I found was a bunch of pins that really amounted to nothing more than printable worksheets.  While, I see a time and place for worksheets; this isn't what I was looking for.  So, I kept searching and conducting various keyword searches until I landed on some fun ideas.

As I searched, I came across some really cute art that uses the pages from books as their base.  Since I cringed at the idea of tearing apart a book, I journeyed off to Goodwill to find an old book I wouldn't feel guilty about destroying to create.

What better book to start with than a dictionary!

I picked up this old dictionary for $1 at my local Goodwill.  And, then I began to search for craft ideas.

I found a few that looked easy enough for us to tackle, but I will save some of them for a possible later post.

This Pinterest homeschooling day will be all about snowflakes, made out of the pages from an old dictionary (which means, the newest word added in 2013: "Selfie" is not yet included as a viable English word).

Here is the tutorial I found that really described how to cut our own snowflakes well:

 

I also found a slideshow presentation from Martha Stewart, here, that is very similar to this tutorial.

At first, I tried the snowflakes before showing the kids how to do it.  Well, mine didn't turn out so well.  Back to the drawing board, I discovered that I was trying to make the flake out of a rectangular page, instead of a square.  In the process of turning it into a square, I was folding it wrong and then jumping ahead of myself.

Once I cut off the excess from the rectangle shaped page and started with a square, it worked great! Even my 7 year old got the hang of it.

Here's how the process and the finished product looked:

  

    

 

         

 

Now, we decide what to do with the results.  We could use them to decorate packages, sew them together to make garland or just decorate the tree as is.

My wheels are still reeling inside my head to figure out how to use them in a creative way.  But, for now, we've accomplished one day of Pinterest Homeschool.

Oh, and if you want some educational facts about snow to accompany your snowflake making project, here's some great sites I ran across:

9 Interesting Facts About Snow (including that snow is not white - It's colorless).
Snowflake Facts (including that snowflakes always have 6 sides).
10 Snow Facts You May Not Know (including what food items people buy most to prepare for a blizzard)
Science Kids information about snow (including a link to how to make a snowflake out of borax).

Also, while you're at it, since you're already tearing apart a dictionary; why not use it to look up the word, "snowflake" before you turn the page into an actual paper snowflake.

As we were tearing and cutting, the girls noticed some of the words on the pages. We even learned a bonus word:  Cold-turkey.

And, of course, if you know anything about my youngest; we couldn't get away without turning some of the snowflakes into elephants:

Discover what other homeschools are using Pinterest for, when it comes to learning: