An Easy Holiday Craft Activity

We had about half an hour or so to fill this afternoon, so we sat down to "make houses".

I grabbed a pile of junk mail (as there's plenty this time of year), some scrap paper and two glue sticks. I then announced to the girls that we would make a house - room by room. We did a kitchen, bedroom and lounge room. I flipped through the junk mail and we chose various things for the various rooms - cutting and pasting until we felt our rooms were finished. Below are Miss Six's rooms.

You could do this to any theme, depending on what junk mail you have lying around. A supermarket theme for supermarket mail, a person wearing jewellery for a jeweller's mail, a shed or backyard for outdoors shop mail and so forth. It doesn't require any special materials - in fact it helps recycle what you've already got. And it's appropriate for a broad range of ages - older children can work their pages taking into account perspective, relative size and various categories of items, and younger children can just paste whatever however they want - as is seen in Miss Two's efforts below. Although Miss Two has done quite well with her orientation, as Miss Six pointed out - if you fold the sides of Miss Two's lounge room up you actually enable those sitting on the couch to watch the TV. There's no accounting for her choice to include the bold numbers...unless it's some kind of modern art on the lounge room walls???