Review: The Lego Christmas Ornaments Book

December 4, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

If you’ve got a Lego fan in your household, making Christmas ornaments out of Lego is a fun engineering challenge. But if you don’t want to have to figure out how to make different shapes on your own, The Lego Christmas Ornament Book by Chris McVeigh is here to help.

The book includes 15 designs for fun ornaments, including:

poinsettia
snowflake
wreath
present
Christmas tree
gingerbread house
barrel ornament
ball ornament
bow
frill
lantern
arcade video game machine
computer
camera
burger

Each design includes an illustrated supply list and step-by-step instructions. In Lego style they don’t include words. I feel like some of these could be made with standard blocks that you already have in your house, but for others you would probably need to buy special pieces to complete them exactly as shown. But that kind of adds to the challenge, if you use these projects to inspired using what you have to create something similar.

I only looked at the first volume, but there’s a second book in this series as well, which includes 16 new projects:

Santa
reindeer
Mr. Snow
Mrs. Snow
gingerbread man
gingerbread house
confetti tree
crinkle
chime
blizzard
pendant
swirl
twist
crane game
’90s computer
fries

It might be fun to do a whole Lego tree with the kids, or present these challenges with the needed Legos as part of an advent calendar.

About the book: 220 pages, hardcover, 15 projects. Published 2016 by No Starch Press. Suggested retail price $19.99.

Looking for more Lego challenges? Here are some Lego building challenges I labeled as being for spring and summer, but you can do any time. I also have a post on building a Lego nightlight, winter themed Lego mats, a snowflake building challenge and some Christmas-themed mosaics. You can even build a Lego chess set and learn how to play. That will keep the kids busy for a while.

[Photo: No Starch Press]

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Make Unpoppable Bubbles You Can Play with Inside

If it’s hot where you live, you might be looking for some fun activities you can do with kids inside the house. And while bubbles are generally a strictly outside the house kid of activity, these special bubbles are ones you can play with inside. It’s both a lot of fun and a science lesson.

These bubbles aren’t blown into the air, you blow them onto a tabletop gently through a straw.

What’s really cool about them is that they will stay on the table top without popping. You can even blow another bubble inside the first bubble, or stack bubbles on top of each other.

Why does this work? It’s thanks to a special ingredient in the bubble solution: sugar.

This particular recipe is from Play Party Game, but I’m sure you can find it other places with similar ingredients as well. But this post has a good explanation for what is normally happening with regular bubble solution made mostly with just soap and water, as well as why the sugar helps to make bubbles stronger and helps them last longer.

You could make this into a full on science experiment for your kids, comparing regular bubbles (this time you’ll want to do it outside or somewhere easy to clean) to the “unbreakable” bubbles, letting them hypothesize about what ingredients might help make bubbles stronger or what the sugar does to the solution.

You can talk about the molecular structure of the bubble being altered by the sugar, which makes it stronger and longer lasting.

They even have an activity kit you can buy to help guide your explorations and that offers extension activities for you to try.

Or you could just play with them. No judgement here; it’s summertime.

Grab the recipe and more of the science behind the bubbles from Play Party Game. And while you’re playing with bubbles you can also check out my giant bubble solution recipe over at Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: Play Party Game]

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