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Saturday, November 29, 2014

Elf on the Shelf Welcome Breakfast: Gingerbread

Our Elf returned and brought a slew of activities to entertain the kids through the weekend.
Gingerbread pancakes were kept simple, but the kids can add eyes, smiles, and buttons with fruit or chocolate chips. I will have to share my new recipe, because they were truly delish! Chocolate  milk turned the milk bottles into little gingerbread people.  Custom gingerbread cookie people resembled each child and were saved for after lunch.
Kraft wrapping paper made perfect placemats with a checklist of activities.  An envelope of gingerbread coloring (and educational) pages was at each place setting.
Thankful ornaments have become a family tradition at the welcome breakfast.  Paper gingerbread ornaments and ceramic gingerbread ornaments were additional craft activities.  Read more
here.
A cardboard playhouse was assembled inside out so that it could be colored to resemble a life size gingerbread house.
The gingerbread house bar included a few types of cereal that work well as "bricks" and "shingles."  Sugar cones were stacked to create Christmas trees of different heights for outside of the gingerbread houses. Of course, standard candy pieces were also included.
The reindeer food bar was a quick easy activity that I always seem to forget to do until Christmas Eve.  This year, we were on top of it!
I have had some readers contact me with issues with Dropbox.  so in an effort to make things easier, we have created a Store where you can pay $5 for ALL of our Elf on the Shelf printable downloads to date, and they will be available to you instantly!  Merry Christmas!  Hopefully that saves you some time in trying to find and download each of the printables. 
Check out our other Elf on the Shelf ideas and printables here!
 

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Gingerbread or Snowman Milk Bottles

In preparation for our Gingerbread-themed Welcome Breakfast for our Elf on the Shelf, I've been crafting a bit.  I painted these Starbucks Frappuccino bottles with Enamel paint and baked them for 30 minutes at 350 as directed to set the paint.  I added another row of white "rick-rack" at the bottom of each of the bottles, too.  When they are filled with chocolate milk, they look even more like Gingerbread people!
They were super easy to make, and I think they'll be an adorable accent to the table next Friday morning.