Snowflake Ornament & New Year's Hat Class

Today I taught a class at my local library for grades K-4th (but there were younger kids who came as well).  Its Winter break here, and the library likes to offer things for families to do.  I had two projects set up for the kids to make: a snowflake ornament and a New Year's hat.  The snowflake ornament was based on the retro ornament found in Family Fun magazine.  A snowflake has 6 sides, so I converted Family Fun's ornament to be like a real snowflake.  One snowflake is made using 1.5 toilet paper tubes and 2 to 3 chenille stems.  For the New Year's hat, I found the hat template here and the library printed it out onto card stock paper.  I spent at least an hour (maybe more) die cutting starts, balloons, and party images yesterday.  The library let me use their die cut machine (mine is missing a part) and their supplies so that the kids would have a lot to decorate their hat with.  Its hard to see my sample hat.  My son loved getting the hat after the class.

The yarn and markers are for the hat.  I just love the big boxes of markers.  When I was a preschool teacher, we use to use the empty large marker boxes to sort all kinds of arts and crafts in.

There was a great turn out of kids.  Between 20 and 30 kids came and made crafts.  It was a drop in class, and they came at different times over a 2 hour time period.  Here are some of their snowflakes.  I love how creative kids are.  The pom poms in the center was one girl's  idea, and other kids loved it so much that they did the same.

This group put the pom poms in the center.  The green one is a Celtics snowflake, and the red one is a christmas one.  The other side of the red one has a green pom pom.

The one on the left has snowflakes and snowmen drawn on it.

Here are some of the awesome New Year's hats.

These two girls worked really hard on their hats.

Everyone was so very creative.

Now here is an example of just how creative and "out of the box" kids can be.  This girl started making a snowflake ornament and then saw the other girl's  snowflake with the pom poms inside of the loops.  She said that that other girl's snowflake inspired her to make a crown.  She combined the idea of the snowflake with the New Years hat and made this awesome crown.

I had a lot of fun today, as did the kids.  The parents were so happy to have a place to take the kids and do something fun and creative with them (and free).  It reminded me of when I use to teach preschool (a lot of fond memories).  I hope that I can teach another class like this in the future.

If you have kids, you should check your local library's calendar and see if there are fun craft classes and story times that they offer.  During school vacations, they offer activities for school age children, and during the school year there is a lot going on for the younger kids.  My 3 year old loves going to these activities.