Crafts and Hobbies

Printables are a great way to introduce your preschooler to coloring. The easy-to-fill-in pictures allow for creative exploration with colors while the lines give young children some guidelines of where to color. Find printable pictures of characters from your preschooler's favorite TV shows or books to really enhance the coloring experience. Use printables of things like animals to reinforce recognition skills with young children. You can even take favorite family pictures and upload them to sites like Crayola and make your very own printables.

Coloring really helps aid preschoolers in several key areas of development. One is color recognition, and as mentioned before even item recognition. Use the pictures to help teach little ones the different colors available to them as well as to reinforce what certain characters, animals, etc. look like.

Another key area of development it helps young children explore is self-expression. By being able to take a picture of something like the sun and coloring it whatever colors a child wants, they are able to express their own creativity and uniqueness. Encouraging your child to draw freestyle or even on the printable...

Why do Hummel figurines look so sweet and lovable? It's probably because they were designed with love by Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel, a German nun who loved children. Sister Hummel drew and painted pictures of children, mostly in the 1930s, which were first made into postcards and later discovered by Franz Goebel, who turned Sister Hummel's illustrations into the Hummel figurines we know and love.

Though Sister M. I. Hummel died in the 1940s, her designs have been updated throughout the years for more contemporary Hummel figurines. Most Hummel figurines are children, but the collection also includes saints and angels as well as novelty designs and other items such as Christmas ornaments, plates, display sets and more.

Christmas is a great time to set up a display of these charming Hummel figurines in your home. Start with the M.I. Hummel Bavarian Village Collection. It will bring the Christmas spirit wherever you display it.

Every Christmas display needs a manger scene -- you can keep it small and simple with the basic 9-piece set of Hummel figurines, or go all out with this 23-piece Hummel figurine nativity scene, including Mary, Joseph, the

...