You gotta love Japan…this is from the official government website (Ministry of the Environment)

Visiting Japan last summer was so much fun, but one of the problems we ran into over and over was trash disposal. There are no single trash cans, but stacks of bins for recycling. Which is wonderful, but it was the one time my sister and I really couldn’t figure out the pictograms. I had several days where I got chastised by old Japanese ladies about trying to put something in the wrong bin, and wandered around all day with trash in my pockets.

Point being they are very environmentally conscious. I really would love to print this out to frame…I have a lot of Christmas bags I’ve made through the years to try to cut down on paper waste, but this is a much easier soltion.

These are too snappy:

• From the Museum of Childhood a paper toy theater. This reminds me of a Puss in Boots Pantomime book I have from the 1880’s. I cannot wait to do this with the girls.

• And from Big Huge Labs -This reminds me about my fav Pocket Mod, but it lets you use your own photos. If only the two sites could merge…I love their site. Lots of ideas for making toys from Flickr. It has anouther feature that will generate a palete from your photos. Here’s the panda from the SanDiego Zoo two years ago:

As I have mentioned I have been trying to find different ways to do math with the girls. The sort of do math at school, but big-sis is pretty quick and sneeky, so she has figured out that she can do everything with her fingers and doesn’t need to memorize anything.

So today as I was downloading Killer Soduku puzzles from the Times Online about Tetsuya Miyamoto. He has developed a new way of motivating kids in math through puzzles (Times Article). Here’s is his official website. You have to love Japan.

I have a thing for old books. The picture above is from Grandfather Stories. It has a great version of the Bremen Town Musicians. When I was little we lived about 35 miles north of Bremen for two years in a town called Osterholz-Scharmbeck…fascinating I know, but it was very cool living so close to a real fairy tale.

My latest favorite are the Harper’s readers from the late 1800’s.

This is from the third reader. The illustrations are amazing, and it is interspersed with science, history, poems, and stories.

Here’s a list of some of the books available in Google Books.  I could spend days on these!

Not the most exciting thing ever-but we are practicing addition. This is a worksheet math puzzle. You do the problems and then fill in the blanks to get an Egyptian joke.

Anything to try to make 9 + 5 more interesting….

So, I made it a whole week with no sick days. I know, incredible. We haven’t done that since Halloween. It has come to and end. Big-sis is sick this time. This does not bode well. She doesn’t get sick nearly as often, but when she does…lets just say two Christmases ago she spent a whole week with a fever of 105.

So we did quiet things today. Made cards and read books. The one above are circles punched out of an old Knit Picks catalog. We’re using them as gift tags. These ones below are the ones the one we’re mailing. We’re hoping to get them mailed out by Wed.

By far the fav around here is the Wise Men. In case you can’t read it it says “They did not wear hats, they wore towels”.

Little-Sis woke up this morning insisting that she needed cards for all her “kids” at preschool. She’s just learned to write her name, so I came up with these. Yes, it’s the same art I used for the Doggie Bookplates. Can’t help I, I love these dogs.

These would work as tiny cards for kids, or as gift tags. They’re all in a PDF and can be printed in color or black and white. Enjoy!

I have to say keeping up the advent calendar this week has been crazy. We’ve had a slew of meeting, ranging from PTA to pre-school pageant. It is like every group or organization we are in had to get in a December meeting this week.

I haven’t even finished attaching all the numbers to the calendar. A project leftover from last year. Things done and undone, right?

I try to balance fun stuff with things that relate to the Christmas story. Tonight the girls got star stickers. We talked about who followed a star, and what they were looking for.

Here are some of the other things we have done. Some of them are cards to follow clues to find something, or cards for an activity.

• Make teacher gifts
• birthday candles
• Make cookies with mom
• straw tied in a present- we talked about how it felt, and what kind of bed it would make for a baby
• write Christmas cards
• Then the old fall-back, M&M’s

I learned this last year at a meeting of my teaching sorority. It is the easiest way to make a homemade fresh wreath that I have ever seen. Even the kids helped a bit.

Materials:

• Artificial Evergreen Wreath (trust me, they’ll never know)

• Lots of cut evergreens.
• (Optional) Dried flowers and seed pods from the garden.

Directions-before making the wreath

• Gather the evergreen cuttings. Start collecting early. Mine is cedar, boxwood and other clippings from the yard. Honestly I have no idea what the variegated stuff is. The cedar we scored down the road. A neighbor was cutting back some shrubs and left it out for trash collection.
• Put the cuttings in a bucket of water until ready to use. Keeps then nice and fresh.

  

Directions-How to make the wreath

• Start by setting up your work area. If working inside put down newspaper.
• Put the wreath form back-side down on your work surface and push apart all the branches. Basically you will be using these branches like pipe cleaners to tie the fresh greens to the form. It is easier to do this if you untangle a bit first.
  
• Cut the fresh evergreen into bundles about 4 to 5 inches long.
  

  

• On mine form there are two rings, one inner and one outer. I started on the outer ring.
• Place the first bundle down and twist two branches around the bundle, about 2 inches from the cut end of the greens.

  

  
  

  

• As you work make sure to lay all the cuttings in one direction, overlapping by about 3 inches. Try to tuck the branches of the artificial wreath behind your cuttings. It fluffs up the wreath, and fills in any gaps, but is otherwise invisible.
• Continue adding bundles until you have gone all the way around the form.

  

• Tuck the cut ends of the last bundle under the end of the first bundle, twist into place.
• For mine I did the outer ring in cedar, then for the inner ring I alternated boxwood and the mystery shrub. I then added dried flowers from the garden-gomphrena, seed heads from garlic chives. You could also use pine cones, seed heads from crepe myrtles, berries, bows, whatever you have on hand.

  

Note: I checked with my garden savvy stepmother-the yellow speckled stuff is Aucuba.

We’re finally getting some chilly weather here. Lots of hope for snow this winter. Last year, after the move back from Florida we got about 3 flakes, so my little flakes really do not remember what snow looks like.

We’re starting to work on our Christmas list. Last spring I made the girls a Family Memory game. I think we might duplicate this for their cousin in Williamsburg. The girls have love this, and it’s been a fun way to remember everyone.

We’re also starting to think about teacher gifts. This is a hard one for me personally. I teach, and the last thing I want is to saddle someone else with a bunch of “apple-crap”. I am also on a public schoolteacher’s budget, and like the idea of hand made.

So we’ve been working on a hot chocolate recipe, and think we’ve hit the final formulation. Little-sis likes to play Top Chef when we do our taste testing which is pretty funny. The plan is to put this in small cellophane bags and put this in a holiday mug.

Hot Chocolate:

• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Put in small jars or gift bags.

For the tag:

Mix 2 teaspoons with 1 cup of hot milk. Stir and enjoy.