The Salamander Room 🦎 – Five in a Row Christmas Ornament

As you may remember, when we lived in North Carolina a few years ago, we were part of a really great homeschool group, North Carolina Five in a Row (NC FIAR).  Every year the group leader, L.N. organizes a FIAR ornament swap.  She is so sweet to let me participate in the swap even though we don’t live in NC right now. This year (2019) I’m making an ornament to represent the book, The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer & Steve Johnson.

I bought glitter lizards on amazon.com. Aren’t they cute?

I found 80 mm, clear, plastic, fillable, ornaments on amazon.com. The ornaments open like plastic Easter eggs.

S managed to find the perfect faux green leaves at Walmart.  We got two styles of leaves, a wired garland and larger leaves on stems.

I cut the larger leaves off their stems and cut the wired leaf garland into 10-inch pieces.

Then I twisted the wire garland pieces into circles.

Next, the kiddos helped me twist the circles into figure eights (that was my mom’s idea).

Then I hot-glued one of the larger leaves onto the leaf figure eight. The hot glue was E’s idea and my mom’s idea. I didn’t want to buy a hot glue gun. It was only about $6 at Walmart and they were totally right, it worked so much better than tacky glue!

Next, I hot-glued the plastic lizards onto the leaves.  K (age 7) felt that it was important to capture this step in action with a photograph.

Finally, I hot-glued the front of the leaf dwelling lizards into one-half of the ornaments and closed them in with the other half.

For a final touch, I added a light green ribbon for hanging on the Christmas tree with a little dated paper tag attached to it.

Stayed tuned to see what other ornaments we receive from the swap this year…