I work with a Hobby Club in town and teach jewelry making classes. We brought in the club and had the instructors teach the arts and crafts. I did bead stringing and design. We taught doll making, tie dying, painting T-Shirts, beginning kniting,and also all the traditional arts and crafts for kids. We had many of the adults who really liked that we had something for them. Total there were 20 things they could pick from.
It was my understanding that Santa was not a "religious" figure. In that situation I would have sought a second opinion. If you wanted to put up a Nativity scene I could see the problem. However it sounds as though your situation has improved.
We did our first "Winter Craft Night" last year. Our superintendant was Jewish so we were not allowed to call it Christmas "anything", none of the crafts could reflect anything to do with Christmas or religion i.e. angels, reindeer(they are part of santa, which is part of Christmas). So anyway we ordered alot of stuff from Oriental Trading, served hot cocoa, cider and cookies. It was a fun night but will do things a little different next year, such as the gluing of some of the crafts, we did not want hot glue, burns, and regular did not dry fast enough for some projects. We are going to try those glue dots this year. We did not charge for the event, we had 10 different craft stations set up, so we gave the kids 5 tickets, 1 ticket for each craft except 2 of them which were a little costly, those were 2 tickets.
By the way the following week a students grandparents came in and taught the class about the Jewish holiday and how to play dreadel, which I don't mind but we couldn't even have reindeer or carols during our event!
this year we have a new super so thinking about the Santa breakfast, any suggestions?
Hi Holly, this year we will be having our second family craft night. Kids really seem to love anything with beads and sequins. They also enjoy spin art and that gets messy but it doesn't cost that much for a machine and the paint. We got our machines at a local craft store for like 12.00 each. Try to do crafts for all ages, we did boondoogle for the older kids (my poor husband,,,ha ha ha) and even did simple things for the little kids, stamping, bookmarks, doorknob markers. We did a really cute foam caterpiller on a pencil. If you have a parent with a die cut machine the ideas are endless. One thing we did that was neat was paper mosaic pictures, a mom actually cut tons of one inch paper squares and the kdis made pictures out of them. Have fun with it you can do it for a small amount of money, we spent less than 300.oo and had about 175 kids, alot of that was on sand art supplies which we had. Lots of fun...
"When you stop learning you stop growing."
When we held our craft night, I got tons of ideas from teachers. It also helped me know what not to do because they were already doing it in class. Crayola's website has tons of ideas and some of them of an educational swing if that helps.
The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating-in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life. --Anne Morris
