I’m lovin’ our LOVE and Compassion fruit this week…or rather, two weeks. I’m not sure what happened, but it’s taken us a while to get through this one! Here are a few more ideas we’ve done or are still up my sleeve:

CRAFTS

Cherry Tree Craft I think this is probably an idea for a George Washington theme in preschool, but I think it’s so cute! Kids love fingerpainting and this one is especially fun. This would also be a great gift to send to your Compassion kids!

GAMES

Hi Ho Cherry-OYou think I’m joking. I’m not. Lydia and I played this the other night and she kept squealing, “CHERRY! LOVE!” I couldn’t get a lesson out of the game but we still had fun and I love that her first thought at seeing a cherry was LOVE!

BOOKS

Who Do You Love?by Margaret Wang. This is one of our favorite books. It’s a touchy-feely book about different bears and the family members that love them!

Who Do You Love?by Mandy Stanley. Every page asks a different animal who it loves. It’s a fun book that ends with “Who do YOU love?” So, we get to talk about the different people we love.

ACTIVITY

Bowl Full of Cherries. You could do this in so many ways! Grab a big bowl of cherries (oh, I wish they were in season right now!) and every time your child shows love to someone (however big or small), let them eat a cherry! You could also do this same idea with cherry stickers on a picture of a bowl. Let your child put a cherry sticker on the picture every time they show love to someone. You could keep it up all week and see your bowl fill to the brim with cherries and love!

RECIPES

Cherry Recipes & Ideas from Wondertime Magazine! There are also some fun cherry facts and even a paint-with-cherries art idea!

COMPASSION

Letter Writing Ideas from the Compassion Blog There are over 600 comments on this post! There are so many great ideas on the type of mailable gifts to send to your sponsored child and great letter-writing tips. Please visit this post to read some for yourself. Here are a few of my favorite ideas:

• glow in the dark peel-&-stick stars
• a scripture in their language (try BibleGateway.com)
• bracelets (remember those friendship bracelts we made as kids? make a matching one for you and your sponsored child!)
• sticker books (my favorite are the Dover Little Activity Books because they have sticker paper dolls of kids from numerous countries!

I hope you’ve had some fun ideas about LOVE but also about showing LOVE to those around you. This Thanksgiving and Christmas season, I encourage you and your kids to take some time out and begin a new relationship with a child from another country. Sponsor a child through Compassion and show them Jesus’ love today!

The leaves are changing and it is really and truly fall! I told you how excited Lydia is about all the leaves falling and I thought it would be cool to share this with our Compassion kids. I’m not sure of the foliage in Burkina Faso, but I know my family in California misses the trees in Georgia, so I thought our Compassion kids would enjoy having an autumn leaf from Georgia!

I was going to do the old wax paper and leaf thing…but honestly, a hot iron with my 3 year old? It just didn’t sound fun. And I didn’t know how long they would last. So, instead we grabbed our favorite leaves and took them to Office Max. They laminated them, we cut them out and tied them with a ribbon. I think it was only $1 per laminating sheet and he got all of them onto two sheets. So $2 is pretty good for a gift!

How pretty are they?! I like them so much I want to decorate our house with them! I can’t wait to send them to our kids and I’m pretty sure we’ll be laminating flowers in the spring!

Please consider sponsoring a child through Compassion! You’ll be introducing God’s LOVE to a special boy or girl this holiday season!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of our LOVE & Compassion activities!

Whenever we send a letter to one of our Compassion kids, I try to get Lydia involved. She usually draws or colors a picture but lately I’ve been feeling kind of bad about that. Imagine being a 7 year old girl in Burkina Faso. And getting so excited to receive a letter (and hopefully gift) from your sponsor, only to discover some scribble scrabble from a 3 year old! Lately I’ve tried to do more crafts that are actually cute–even if a 3 year old did make it.

Since we’re focusing on LOVE and using CHERRIES to help us remember this Fruit of the Spirit, we decided to make CHERRY CARDS. I found a cute cherry coloring sheet online (and I…uh, totally forgot where I found it) and decided that fingerprint stamping would be so fun with this because we can make FINGERPRINT HEARTS!

I busted out the stamp pads (Lydia’s fave!) and showed her how to do it, “Point your finger towards one corner of the paper and press down. Now point to the other top corner and press down. See? You have a heart.”

it looks like a heart, right?

Apparently, she did NOT see because this is how our cherries ended up:

And yet, even without the hearts, they turned out super cute. Especially after I cut them out and attached them to the front of a folded piece of construction paper. We wrote JESUS LOVES ALIZETA and JESUS LOVES DAVID on the inside and Lydia decorated it with stickers.

They were so cute I stuck them right in the envelope and didn’t even take a picture of them. I think Alizeta and David will like them a lot better than the Princess coloring page Lydia was working on a few days ago. Plus, I like the idea of her fingerprints being in their house. It’s a close connection!

More fingerprint art:

Fingerprint Fun (a huge list of animals and objects you can make with your fingerprints!)

I Can Finger Paint an Usborne Playtime Book (I have this one and it has ADORABLE finger painting ideas!)

More flat crafts even your youngest kids can make AND older kids will like:

Sparkly Craft Foam Frame (this was our Christmas gift last year!)

First Name Initials (I just thought of this–how cute to make a fun initial for your kids? We’d have to do D for David and A for Alizeta!)

Felt Finger Puppets (these are African animals, which would be awesome for our kids. This version is a little too hard for Lydia, but we could glue instead of sew and it would be super fun!)

Want to sponsor a child of your own? Visit Compassion right now!