Ideas Yule Love This Season

For makers and DIYers, December is the best month of the entire year. Whether it's making a gingerbread house, stringing popcorn for the tree, knitting a scarf or decorating your own wrapping paper, it's a busy season (in the best way possible).

If you are in need of some inspiration or just something to do, we put together 24 activities that that will appeal to a variety of interests including citizen science, plant-based cooking, environmentally-friendly crafts, science lectures that date back to 1825, a public domain book that was published in 1900, and a new way to wrap gifts.

We hope that you enjoy the activities and we'd love for you to share the results!

Happy Holidays!

Blend Subjects And Build Skills

After a riveting end-of-year school performance, my nine-year-old son dragged me past the athletic track and koi pond and into a building where the Ambassador of Canada to Japan, Ian Burney, was admiring a display of 3D-printed objects.

Inspired by the French artist Fabrice Hybert’s Prototypes of Working Objects, the art project was a collaboration between my son’s third-grade class and the eighth graders. The younger students conceptualized and illustrated the objects and the older students transposed the designs into CAD software and then 3D printed them.

My son declared that this was his favourite activity of the school year because he got to sketch a brand-new idea with a classmate, hang out with an older student to develop the idea further and then see it being made into a real thing. As you might expect of a French school, art is a natural part of student life at Lycée Français International de Tokyo (LFIT), and they seamlessly take a cross-disciplinary approach that incorporates advances in science, technology and engineering.