Cinnamon Dough for Ornaments

Cinnamon dough smells heavenly! It makes a great, air-or-oven-drying dough for ornaments, figurines, whatever you like.

You'll need:

1 cup cinnamon
1 cup applesauce
2 Tbsp. white school glue

(Since this requires about 3 containers of cinnamon, get the cheapest you can find.)

Start by mixing your ingredients in a bowl:

This makes a nice dough, just a bit wetter than Play-Doh. Roll it out and cut shapes from cookie cutters. Thicker is better; we found just under half-inch to make for great, substantial ornaments that won't snap too easily. (If they are too thin, they will become brittle when fully dry.)

Use a straw to make a hole in the top of each shape, if you plan to use them as ornaments.

Let air dry for a couple of days, or bake in your oven at 250 degrees for about an hour (keep an eye on them; pointy edges, on such shapes as stars, will cook quickly). Bake just until dry to touch.

When your ornaments are dry, paint them with any acrylic paints.

If you finish a few and get distracted, you can always just paint your own hand, grinning at how proud you are of yourself.

Aren't you clever. ;)

Let them dry for a couple of hours. You can varnish them with any craft varnish. I had some gold glitter glue on hand, so I thinned that out and we just gave them a top coat with that; it acts like a sealant and added SPARKLE!

When they're fully dry, thread some pretty ribbon or embroidery thread through the hole, and you have nice little, delicious-smelling ornaments to give anyone who comes your way.

DESERT THEME

Desert Mural:

Use some of the free, online coloring pages listed below to create your own desert mural for your child to color or paint.

Desert Coloring Pages:
Desert animal information and coloring pages
Desert animal coloring pages from edupics.com (scroll partway down page)
Realistic desert animals and plants to color
Friendly Lizard coloring page
Coloring page: Roadrunner catching a snake (cartoonish)
Rattlensake coloring page (realistic)
"Color" a desert online


Desert Diorama:
You can print out a diorama background, and then all of the plants and animals too, for your kids to assemble! Pretty cool -- and free!


Your Own Indoor Desert:

-- Fill a baking pan with sandbox sand or craft sand. If your child has a large collection of plastic animals (as my daughter does), help her find the desert animals and put them in the pan. Or, buy a couple of desert animals just for the occasion (a splurge, I know, but some kids play with animals a LOT, and then it's worth it). I'm not too strict about who "lives" in the desert after the first few minutes (our desert was soon inhabited, for example, by a Saint Bernard puppy).

Play-Doh Cactuses:

We just kind of thought this up as we were playing, and it was fun! Help your child make cactuses out of green play-doh, and then let her stick in toothpicks for the "spines." Talk about why some plants have spines as a defense mechanism. (Would your child want to eat something with spines? No way! Unless your child is like my infant son, who would probably try to eat that play-doh cactus anyway!)

Sand Art:

Show your child how to drizzle glue on paper, cover with sand, and then lift up the paper and tap the sand off to reveal "sand writing." Nora liked seeing her name written in sand.

PLAY DOUGH RECIPES

No-Cook Play Dough

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup water
Food coloring

Add food coloring to the water and mix the salt, flour, and colored water together, kneading to form a ball. (if too sticky, add a little extra salt and flour.)


Play Dough Recipe 2

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup water
1 Tbsp. cooking oil
2 tsp. cream of tartar
a few drops food coloring

Combine ingredients. Heat and stir until mixture forms a soft ball. Put mixture on wax paper until cool. Knead slightly to eliminate grainy texture. Store in tightly covered container. Recipe can be doubled.

Dino Art Project

STEGOSAURUS ART PROJECT:

Materials: cardstock
stegosaurus template: Stegosaurus Printable Coloring Page
green, yellow, or brown construction paper
paint, markers, or crayons
glue
googly eyes

Use a stegosaurus template (or simply cut out a stegosaurus from a coloring page that you print off the internet). Heavier paper or cardstock always works best. Cut out a dozen or so yellow, green, or brown triangles from construction paper.

Your child can paint or color in the dinosaur, then glue the triangles on as "plates" along its back and tail. Attach googly eyes last of all, for fun. You can punch a hole in the top, put a string through it, and hang it to display it; or just tape it on the wall.

DINOSAUR PLAY-DOH FUN:


You can make dinosaur "eggs" out of Play-Doh for your child to play with, or if you're really artistic, make some dinosaurs themselves (older kids can do this too). My daughter enjoys using her little brother's training fork (we call it a "spork" -- it's like a plastic spoon with grooves, for kids who are just learning to feed themselves) to make "dinosaur tracks" in Play-Doh, and then she asks me to make a bunch of dinosaur eggs, and she loves to arrange them along the tracks. Just one of those quirks.