Snowman Jars

I love jar crafts. You can recycle jars and make beautiful things with them. I got the idea for these from Crafts by Amanda and tweaked it only a little bit. This is the original by Amanda, using paint and delicious marshmallows:

I substituted cotton for marshmallows and other materials for the parts that are painted.

Materials:
Jar
Buttons
Ribbon
Cotton
Mittens cut out from construction paper

And this is the final snowman jar:

I try to insert facts and science whenever I can, and for this program I talked about snowflakes and their formation, made fake sensory snow that the kids could touch, and talked about Wilson Bentley and the major contributions he made to the science of snowflakes and other forms of precipitation through his study, handling, and photography of snowflake crystals. We luckily have his work Snow Crystals here at the library, so I showed the kids some of his photographs from the book. A very inspirational man.

Decorative and Delicious Candy Jar

I love checking out the Target dollar section. It's been a while since I've been able to browse the items, mostly because I've been avoiding stores/buying items because Manuel and I have been looking for a house. Thankfully we finally went through the process and I am so grateful we closed on a home last week, right before Thanksgiving.

Before I go off on a tangent about that, I wanted to keep going with the dollar section at Target. They have such cute things for all seasons, and I've purchased prizes and items to use in craft and science programs at the library, such as kitchen scales and Halloween socks. Sometimes they have really cute jars - all shapes and sizes - to use for crafts, and I bought a beautiful jar (this one was $3) and some holiday candy to fill it up with.

Mostly it's for my family to enjoy and to have as a holiday centerpiece at the table. I also found some peppermint bark bells and some Peanuts holiday crunch bells. Very cute!

It's nice seeing the red, green, and silver candies in the jar. And I wanted to include this awesome Hershey's Kiss Santa Hat in this post, just because it is so clever to have the kiss shaped like a Santa hat, with HO HO HO on the white strip of paper. This one is a little large, which I think makes it even cuter. I love when they make larger than usual kisses.