Here is my second post about the nutcracker story. The nutcracker story is so Christmassy and magical and I don’t want to let it go after just one activity.😌
If you didn’t read my first nutcracker post, I introduced a children book about the nutcracker story.
I recommend this book if you want to introduce the nutcracker story to your children because it has beautiful illustrations and you can listen to the short clips of orchestra music as you read the book!
Last time, I showed how children can make their own nutcrackers with different shapes. This time, we are going to play with the Sugar Plum Fairy.
🧚♀️
Here is my first try.
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When you are a teacher, you have a desire to connect a cool theme to an educational play activity. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s very hard. Here, my cool theme was the silhouette of the Sugar Plum Fairy. I wanted to make a silhouette with a chalk and smudge it to make the Sugar Plum Fairy looking like glowing. Well, the shape of fairy body required too much details and it didn’t seem suitable for young children to trace.
So, I came up with a simpler activity.
Let’s make fairy dust.
These are coloured salt. But we can totally pretend like they are fairy dust, right?!🤩😜 The colours were actually darker than that in the photo.
It’s easy to colour them. You can use food colouring but here I used chalks because it’s less messy and the process is more fun for children.
Materials you need:
- fine table salt
- coloured chalks
- fine grater
- ziplock bags
The whole process can be done by children with a little bit of adult’s assistance and supervision.
- Put some salt in a ziplock bag and put it on the side.
- Pick up a chalk and grate the chalk using the grater.
- Add the grated chalk to the ziplock bag.
- Close the bag.
- Shake the bag well and mix salt and the chalk.
- Repeat this process with chalks with different colours.
The most fun part for children would be the shaking part. 😆 Talk about the process together while you are making!
“Now, I am making my fairy dust.”🪄💫
“Look, the colour is changing! What happened?”
“How did it change the colour from white to pink?”
“How do you want to use your fairy dust?”
“What do you think is gonna happen if we grate a blue chalk?”
“What do you think is gonna happen if we grate two different coloured chalks?”
This is a great opportunity to let your children lead.
Put the coloured salt in different containers.
Draw the Land of Sweets.
Materials you need:
- construction paper (any colour)
- liquid glue in a squeezy bottle
- spoons
- deep baking pan / tray
- Put a construction paper in the deep baking pan or a tray.
- Leave the fairy dust (coloured salt) and a squeezy glue bottle beside the baking pan.
- Talk about the illustrations in the book “The Nutcracker”. Let your children take time to imagine the Land of Sweets.
- Ask your children to draw their imaginative Land of Sweets with glue. – Scribbling is good enough for toddlers!👍
5. Sprinkle the fairy dust (coloured salt) over the paper.
6. Optional: If you are okay with using glitters, you can sprinkle some glitters as well.
7. Wait a few minutes for salt to settle on glue.
8. Gently lift up the construction paper in the baking pan and let the excessive salt fall.
9. Observe the fairy dust (coloured salt) closely.
If you have a magnifying glass, bring it! It really looks amazing! They look like real candies 🤩
I was very pleased about how this activity turned out.
Now, let’s bring our Sugar Plum Fairy 🧚♀️
You can make your own Sugar Plum Fairy with your children or you can download my drawings and cut them out.
You can let your children play with the Sugar Plum Fairy cutout using the fairy dust drawing as a background – retelling story – or glue the Sugar Plum Fairy on the fairy dust drawing. However children want!
This activity is about the fun process – making fairy dust and recreating the imaginative Land of Sweets with the fairy dust.
I found that as the glue dried out more, more salt fell off. It’s not an art piece to keep it for a long time unfortunately. But if we had fun creating it, that’s what matters!😄
I hope you try this magical activity.
Happy quality time!
Missangela👩🏻🦰🎀