Creative Family Fun

Your one-stop shop for kids activities and family fun

Terri Thompson

Pony Bead and Salt Dough Ornaments

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I love playing around with salt dough. It’s a great sensory experience, plus you can create and keep your masterpieces.

With this project, we tried two new things. We colored the salt dough before creating and added pony beads to decorate our designs. The resulting pony bead and salt dough ornaments were so pretty!

Use colored salt dough and pony beads to make these pretty salt dough ornaments that can be used for Christmas or year-round decorations.

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate and other affiliate links. Please see my Disclosure Page for more details. The pony beads were provided to us by CraftProjectIdeas.com. All ideas are my own. 

The first step in the process is making your salt dough.

We use a very simple recipe that your kids can make themselves.

Use colored salt dough and pony beads to make these pretty salt dough ornaments that can be used for Christmas or year-round decorations.

Colored Salt Dough

1 c flour
1 c salt
1/2 c water
Several drops of food coloring

Mix the flour and salt together.

Add your food coloring to your water until your have your desired hue. Then, add the water to the flour and salt mixture.

Mix together until combined. Dig in with your fingers to help mix.

Once it’s thoroughly mixed, remove your dough from the bowl and start kneading until it’s pliable and no longer sticky.

You can knead in additional flour, one teaspoon full at a time, if your dough is too sticky. Just be careful and don’t add too much. Your dough can get crumbly very quickly if you add too much!

This makes about 2 cups worth of salt dough, which is enough for several children.

I cut the original recipe in half and made two batches of the half recipe, equivalent to one whole batch. I did two half recipes so each girl could have a different color of dough. Luckily, this recipe cuts in half very easily.

Use colored salt dough and pony beads to make these pretty salt dough ornaments that can be used for Christmas or year-round decorations.

Make your salt dough ornaments

Once your dough is ready to work with (and your kids are through playing with it), grab some cookie cutters and a rolling pin.

Roll the dough out to about a 1/4-inch thick and cut designs with your cookie cutters.

Use a drinking straw to make a hole in the top so that you can string a ribbon through later. I’ve tried several methods for making a hole and have found that a drinking straw works best.

Use colored salt dough and pony beads to make these pretty salt dough ornaments that can be used for Christmas or year-round decorations.

Add your pony beads

Next, get creative with your pony beads.

Squish the beads into the dough, but be careful not to push them all the way through.

Use as many or as few as you like.

We only had a package of white beads, but multi-colored beads would also be pretty.

Use colored salt dough and pony beads to make these pretty salt dough ornaments that can be used for Christmas or year-round decorations.

Harden and dry your ornaments

Once your ornaments are complete, place them on a foil-lined baking sheet.

You can leave them sitting on the baking sheet to dry (which can take a couple of days). So, to speed up the drying process, you can put them in the oven at the lowest setting for awhile. I baked ours for 1 and 1/2 hours at 250 degrees.

After baking, your ornaments may still not be completely dry. I always have to flip our ornaments over after they are done baking and let the bottom side dry. I usually leave them out overnight to finish drying.

Use colored salt dough and pony beads to make these pretty salt dough ornaments that can be used for Christmas or year-round decorations.

Once they are dry, add some ribbon and hang them up! You can string several on one length of ribbon to create a bunting, or you can hang them on a few bare branches to create a decorative tree. Or, make ornaments to hang on your Christmas tree.

These pony bead and salt dough ornaments are so pretty no matter what you do with them. Have fun and get crafting with salt dough!

You may also like on of these kids crafts:

Egg Carton Fairy Houses

Salt Dough Baseballs

Craft Stick Frames: Classic Craft for Kids

Colored Salt Dough Leaf Impressions at The Imagination Tree

Are you looking for more art projects?  

Check out Three to Five: Playful Preschool. Get over 25 activities, 10 printables, and links to even more play-based preschool activities in this fantastic e-book. Purchase it here.

https://www.creativefamilyfun.net/2014/05/three-to-five-playful-preschool.html

Learning to Make Healthy Choices

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*This post is sponsored by Horizon Organics. All opinions and projects are my own.

Do you struggle with making healthy choices about what you eat? I know I do and you can bet my kids do too. That plate of cookies always looks much better than the veggie tray, doesn’t it?
We all try out best to feed our kids well. We give them a healthy breakfast, pack healthy lunches and make sure to always serve vegetables. We can definitely control what we feed out kids. But, as our kids get older, they will be making more and more of these choices of their own. So, not only do we need to feed them well, but we need to teach them to make their own healthy choices.

One way to teach them make healthy choices is to make them aware of what they are eating.

“Did you choose blueberries for a snack? Great! You made an excellent choice! ”

“Since you already had a cookie today, why don’t we have something healthier for a snack. A sliced apple would be a better choice.”

Help them choose healthier options. Talk them through the process. Show them that you notice the good choices they are making.

To make those choices easier, I’ve made a fun printable for you. You can download Today’s Healthy Choice at this link. Print out as many as you like. You kids can use this sheet to record their healthy choices. It may be a choice they made or it may just be an acknowledgment of the healthy food they had for dinner. They don’t even have to record every single healthy thing they ate each day. The point is to get them thinking about the healthy choices they make. And, if they have a place to record it they will start remembering the good choices they make.

At the end of the week, look back together and talk about their healthy choices. Help them pinpoint those times they did well. Show them that it really is easy (and yummy) to choose healthy. If they learn to look at their choices with a discerning eye, they will be better equipped to make those healthy choices again and again.

For 20 years Horizon Organic has been providing healthy organic milk, cheese, and other organic dairy products. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest for tools and ideas to keep your family healthy.

This conversation is sponsored by Horizon Organic. The opinions and text are all mine.

101 Kids Activities That Are the Bestest, Funnest Ever

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*Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for this review. All opinions are my own.

Disclosure: There are Amazon Affiliate and other affiliate links in this article which means, at no additional cost to you, we could receive compensation for our recommendations. You can read our full disclosure policy on our Disclosure Page for more details.

Friends, let me tell you something. My creativity flew out the window as soon as summer started. Kid’s crafts… can’t come up with a good one. Kid’s activities… forget about it. Thank goodness for my friends Holly Homer and Rachel Miller from Kids Activities Blog. Their book, 101 Kids Activities That Are the Bestest, Funnest Ever!, is full of fun ideas. It’s perfect for busy families, families with kids of multiple age groups, bored kids, or just anyone wanting to do something fun. It was a life saver for me and I know it will be for you too.

The girls gravitated to the book as soon as it came in the mail. The leafed through it several time. I finally got out a pad of post-its and asked them to mark anything that sounded interested. They marked a lot. Luckily, the projects in this book are easy and it’s very likely that you’ll have all the supplies you need at home. Thank goodness! I love activities that you can do spur of the moment.

We started with these bouncing balls. They’re a fun combination of a bouncy ball and a yo-yo. We made them early on in the summer and they are still going strong. They were fun to make and once you are done, you can play all sorts of games with them. Fun!

We also started making this DIY Straw Building Set. We veered off a little with the project and worked together to make the longest straw chain ever. It was a great way to spend a rainy afternoon.

With modifications listed for younger kids and older kids, this is the perfect book for any family or any grandparent. Keep it in your toolbox. Don’t worry about ever running out of ideas. 101 Kids Activities That Are the Bestest, Funnest Ever! will come to your rescue!

Beach Ball Poetry

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Summer is winding down, but there’s still time to bridge that gap between school and vacation with a fun writing project. Some of my favorite writing projects don’t include paper at all. With this project, we took a summer toy and turned it into poetry. Beach ball poetry was fun, easy, and didn’t feel like work at all.

You don’t need many supplies for this project, just a beach ball, some permanent markers, and a couple of creative minds. We took our project outdoors to get some inspiration from the world around us. My original plan was to have the girls write a poem about summer on the beach ball. If you’ve been around this blog enough, you’ll notice that often the girls often have ideas of their own. I’ve learned over time to just let go of my ideas and have them run with their own. The project always turns out better than I ever anticipated.

Disclosure: There are Amazon Affiliate and other affiliate links in this article which means, at no additional cost to you, we could receive compensation for our recommendations. You can read our full disclosure policy on our Disclosure Page for more details.

Instead of a poem about summer, the girls wrote poems about the seasons. They chose three seasons only because there wasn’t enough room on the beach ball for all four. They wrote a short poem about each season in the color sections and illustrated their poem on the white sections. My role because the official beach ball holder, spelling helper, and umbrella drawer.

The girls wrote free-form poems. We didn’t worry about rhyming, line length, rhythm, or anything else. They just wrote descriptions of the seasons. They each took turns writing a line. They wrote about swimming, watching flowers grow, and playing in the snow. It was so much fun and so inspiring.

Have you ever written a poem on something other than paper? I’d definitely encourage it! The surface inspires the poem. It’s fun. It’s quirky. And, the creativity just starts flowing when you mix things up.

Find a beach ball and have some writing fun. Your kids will have fun and writing won’t feel like a chore.

The All or Nothing Approach to Parenting

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Have you seen all those articles lately? They’re everywhere. They’re telling you what you’re doing wrong, that you’re ruining your kids, and you should start doing these 5 (or 10) things to fix it. Then, two days later you read another article which completely contradicts the first article. And yes, you’re still ruining your kids. Is your head spinning yet? I know mine is.

How do you make sense of it all? Are they even worth reading? I’ll tell you what I’ve done. I’m still reading them, but I’ve stopped trying to make sense of everything. We’re all so vastly different and come from vastly different places. There is no “one size fits all” way to parent. Certainly there are good practices and bad practices that can apply to all. But, on the other hand, there are many areas where the nuances of a situation can warrant many different approaches.

Case in point: Dear Mom on the iPhone and the many responses to it, such as this one. Talk about uproar. And, I was one of those roaring (privately in my own home, but roaring nonetheless). First you find out that people are actually judging you when you pull out your phone at the park. Then, the line gets drawn in the sand. On one side you’ve got the “never ever look at your phone in the presence of your kids” crowd that accuses all the phone people of ignoring their children and never engaging. On the other side you’ve got the “I’ll pull out my phone whenever I feel like it” crowd who are angry and ready to toss any bit of good advice that comes their way out the window. Honestly, I can’t blame them. Where’s the middle ground? I never saw it in this situation.

Just recently, there was the British nanny letting us know that we were raising a bunch of spoiled, entitled brats and she can tell us how to fix it. Sigh. Yes, this went down the same path. All or nothing with no middle ground.

The good advice is getting lost in the approach. 

Always be present. Never pull out your phone or check your email or talk to a friend, etc.

OR

Let’s go back to the 1970’s. Ignore your kids. Let them run all over the neighbor and drink out of the hose. That’s the only way to raise good citizens of the world.

Do you see the highlighted words? It’s the absolutes. Always, never, only. You slap those words on there and suddenly people are up in arms. Do I pull out my phone at the park? Yes, I do. Do I always pull out my phone? Nope, I don’t and neither do the majority of the parents you see on the phone at the park.

So, why all the controversy? Where’s the good stuff. Where’s the stuff that won’t make me feel like the world’s worst parent? Unfortunately, the good stuff doesn’t always go viral. But, it should. It should get people talking. It should get people thinking. It’s there right in the middle of that all or nothing approach.

Let’s tune out all the fighting. We’ll step back and we won’t engage. If the advice makes you feel crummy or it makes you feel angry, it’s not the advice you need. The good stuff gives you hope. The good stuff makes you stop and think. The good stuff is delivered with kindness. It’s personal and shares the imperfections of life. The good stuff… well, that’s what we all need to hear.

Where’s the good stuff? 

Luckily there is some great advice among all of the controversy. These ladies have it right. They’re real. They’re honest. And, they’re not out to start a fight. When you’re feeling down-trodden thanks to the latest viral bit of parenting advice, read the advice from these ladies instead.