Teaching Right vs Left with Homemade Wrapping Paper

Last week, once Bug was no longer feeling under the weather, I brought out one of my learning ideas that was hidden as a fun Christmas craft. I love the holidays, so I'm using November as our prep for Christmas. My husband won't let me decorate until December 1st, so doing holiday crafts will appease my holiday spirit.

Since I had kids, I really enjoy incorporating them into our gift giving. It's not so much because it is cheaper (even though it is), but I truly want to create the joy in my boys in creating something for loved ones. Giving something more from their heart than from our wallets. And I know that the grandparents loved the extra little childlike touch. Last year, for wrapping paper, I got Bug to colour white craft paper with markers. This year, I thought it would be fun to add a little bit of learning into it.

I had two unused wooden blocks, but I know you can get paper templates on the internet that would make this that much cheaper. On one of the blocks, I wrote Red on 3 sides, and Green on the other 3 sides. On the other block, I wrote Left on 3 sides, and Right on the remaining. Then I took two pieces of blank paper, and got Bug to write Red and Green on one, and Left and Right on the other. For the red and green paper, we put a corresponding painted brush stroke under each colour name. On the other piece of paper, I traced his left hand under the word Left and obviously his right hand under the word Right. This gave Bug a little bit more practice with his writing, and I wanted to start introducing him to word recognition. This was also a means to help him become more comfortable with correctly determining right vs. left.

Just to keep the blocks paint free, I would roll them and I would compare each one to the corresponding sheet of paper. I would get Bug to recognize what word was displayed on the upward facing side of the block for each. This would be Bug's direction on what hand and what colour to stamp on our $1 roll of craft paper from Dollarama. I didn't wash his hands between the rolls as I thought it would add to the dimension of the hand prints when some of them came out marbled with red and green.

Bug had a lot of fun with this. This will obviously take some time to get enough wrapping paper done (which is why I started this in the beginning of November), so I intend to bring this back many times. Once Bug was tired of the word recognition part, we just finished our strip of wrapping paper by letting him have free run with what hand and colour to use. This is the final product...I love it!

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