Advent Candle

Yesterday my son created this beautiful advent candle during his children's church session and the idea was simply too good not to share!

To create the base of the advent candle, a paper plate was provided together with a text "Jesus is Coming" and a ring of 24 candles to encircle the candle.  We glued the centrepiece to the paper plate first and then my son chose from a variety of small decorative materials to be added to his base.  He glued this around the centrepiece. The candle was the last piece to be added which was glued inside the ring of stars.  Each day of advent he will colour in one of the stars until the ring is coloured in and it is Christmas.  A simple and beautiful craft that could be easily put together as a last-minute Advent activity!

What we used:
Paper plate
Small decorative embellishments
A candle
A centrepiece with the words "Jesus is Coming" and 24 stars to encircle the candle (I do not have the printable, but it would be easy to recreate the text with a different wording (if preferred) and instead of using stars to colour in, the child could use star stickers to add to the centrepiece.
Glue

Autumn Play Dough

Today I experimented with a different type of play dough, “bubble dough” made from cornflour and hair conditioner.  Last February we experimented with a variation of bubble dough using cornflour and hand wash in our “Frozen” bubble dough play.  It gave a soft, but crumbly texture compared to regular play dough.  Our bubble dough this time was shiny, soft, a little bit slimy (like bubble gum) and eventually it became crumbly.  As we have been exploring Autumn this month, I decided to dye the dough to reflect the colours of the season. 

I poured the cornflour into a bowl and gradually added the hair conditioner, kneading each part until it was completely mixed together.  Then I added the food colouring.  This part was a little tricky as the hair conditioner was a pink colour, so I had to vary the quantity of food colouring I added to each batch of dough to get the desired colour.

I presented the dough to the boys and together we made Autumn leaves.  Unlike other play dough projects, it didn’t matter if the different colours became mixed up as it made the Autumn leaves look more realistic.

What we used:

1 part hair conditioner

2 parts cornflour

Food colouring