All posts by IT Goblin

Harvest Festival Printables

Autumn is upon us (in the northern hemisphere anyway) and so is the time of harvest.  In fact, did you know that the Old English word “haerfest” actually means “autumn”?  That’s not the only interesting link to history either.  In fact, the autumn harvest is a time of year steeped in ancient traditions.

For example, did you know that scarecrows, one of most iconic symbols of harvest time, have been used for over 3,000 years?  Originally, they were as simple as wooden frames dressed in old clothes, but over the centuries they’ve been made in all sorts of different ways across different cultures – whatever has worked to protect ripe crops.

Anyway, and if you’re on the hunt for harvest festival printables for your children to help celebrate, we’ve assembled ours below, starting with these two harvest-themed pictures to colour in:

 

When is Harvest Festival 2023 (UK)?

Well, did you know that here in the UK there isn’t one, single date when everyone celebrates Harvest Festival?  No, indeed!  However, lots of people use the dates recommended by the Church of England, which is typically any Sunday you choose choice during the September/October harvest season.

picture of annual solsticesIn 2024 Sunday, the 6th of October is proving a popular choice.  Other people are celebrating it a bit earlier, on Sunday the 22nd of September.  This is because the autumn equinox takes place around this time, usually between the 21st to the 23rd of September.

If you wanted to be ultra-traditional, you wouldn’t hold your harvest festival after Michaelmas Day on the 29th of September, because that’s when the church decided that the Harvest Festival period should end.  The idea was that all the crops had to be brought in before St Michael’s Mass and that parishes would then gather in their churches to give thanks.  In modern times however, dates are not as strict.

As harvest celebrations  take place over several days, it doesn’t really matter when you have yours.

Picture of a corn dolly twist
Corn Dolly Twist

Also, it’s worth remembering that traditions surrounding bringing in the harvest predate Christianity by a long chalk, in the UK going back to at least Saxon times.

Some of the very old traditions are feasting, dancing and playing games.  Making corn dollies was also popular, which were carefully kept in people’s homes as a tribute to the Spirit of the Corn or Goddess of the Grain, in the hope that he or she would make sure there was a good harvest the following year.  Not all corn dollies were made in the shape of a doll mind you, some were woven to look like bells, crosses, knots, spirals and animals such as hares and horses.  Different parts of the country often had their own corn dolly traditions.

Along with all the harvest festivals, we get to enjoy the magical Harvest Moon at this time of year.  It’s a full moon which was traditionally very important to farmers because its extra light allowed them to work late into the night.  This year in the United Kingdom, the Harvest Moon will shine down upon us on Friday Thursday, the 17th of September.  Why not colour in a harvest moon of your own?

Most of all, the time of harvesting was a chance to come together and have fun, to be thankful for whatever the land had supplied, and to lift people’s spirits and put them in a positive frame of mind, ready to get through the winter.

If you’re having your own Harvest Festival celebration at your home, church or school, you might like our free printable poster:

And after all the harvest festivals of course, we’re in the run up to Halloween

Best of Back-to-School

Goodness, is it that time of year already?  Where did the holidays go? If you’re a parent, guardian, or teacher getting ready for the new school term, we’ve got you covered with the best of our back-to-school printables below.   They’re all free for personal use so whether you’re setting up a classroom or preparing for the new term from home, we hope these resources will add a touch of excitement and fun.

First up are some resources to help children set enjoyable goals:

Our “All About Me” sheets are a great way for children to share information about themselves at the beginning of the school year or term.  For those children who finish filling them in early, they also double up as colouring pages.

Looking to create a positive back-to-school beginning?  These reward certificates might come in handy to encourage good work and behaviour right from the off.

New school terms can sometimes mean a new school, too.  If you have child in this situation who needs rewarding for their courage, perhaps one of our bravery certificates might help:

Of course, a bit of colouring never goes amiss, especially at the end of an exhausting first day!  After all, it takes time to get back into the swing of scholarly things after the holidays.

Whatever you choose to do, we hope the back-to-school period goes well for your family or class and that you manage to generate some enthusiasm and a sense of purpose from the children in your care. It’s not always easy, we know, but the key thing is to create a nurturing environment that supports emotional wellbeing along with learning. Don’t forget to make use of all the fantastic free learning resources you can find online, such as BBC Bitesize, Duolingo, and the Khan Academy.

10 Summer Favourites

With the summer underway, (at least in the northern hemisphere – apologies to those elsewhere!), we thought we’d post a short list of our most popular summer printables.  We hope you find them useful:

1 Summer Party Bags

Summer Party Bags
Summer Party Bags

2 Summer Tooth Fairy Note and Certificates

3 Summer Traveller Pirate Certificate

Free printable pirate certificate - summer traveller
Summer Traveller Pirate Certificate
(Ready to personalise)

4 Summer Garland and Bunting

Printable Fruit Garland

5 Summer Colouring Pages

6 Summer Party Invitations

7 Sporty Summer Certificates

 

 

8 Remember to Pack Your Toothbrush! (Tooth Fairy Note)

Printable note from the Tooth Fairy reminding a child to pack a toothbrush
Remember to Pack Your Toothbrush

9 Summer Paper Baskets and Cones

10 Useful Thank You Notes for Summer

 

BEST FROM THE WEB:

For anyone looking for more lovely summery resources, here are a few of our favourites from around the internet:

Printable Masks – This site has a great collection of masks to keep the kids entertained this summer, or indeed at any other time of year.

Hidden Pictures – This selection of charming pictures with things hidden all over them is great for keeping children busy over the summer.  Like hide-and-seek on the page!  They can also be coloured in for extra fun.

Messages from the Easter Bunny

Hello and welcome to a post where we’ve added together all our best messages from the Easter Bunny.  (If you’re Australian you might want our Easter Bilby resources instead.)  Whether notes, letters or certificates, we bet your little one would love to hear from the most magical rabbit in the world this year.

Along with the little messages and certificates above, one of our favourite Easter resources is this full-length letter from the Easter Bunny.  It’s a lovely thing for a child to find with the eggs on Easter Morning… adds a sprinkle of magic to the this holiday occasion.

Need another one?  There’s at least one more letter from the Easter Bunny available on this page.

Looking for some blank Easter notepaper?  Try these:

 

Letters to Santa and Christmas Lists

Can you feel the Christmas magic yet?  No doubt the kids can and are getting ready to write that all-important letter to Santa and Christmas list!  With this in mind, we thought we’d put together a quick post to highlight all our free letter to Santa and Christmas list templates.  So, if your child is writing his or her Christmas correspondence to that magical man at the North pole this week, perhaps these will come in handy:

 

Need a Reply?

If your child has written a letter and/or Christmas list, or drawn a picture for Santa, you may be looking for a reply.  Obviously, we have to keep it general, but we’ve created the following resources to help you out:

And don’t forget we create a range of longer free letters from Santa too!

Need a Reminder?

A note from Santa asking your child to write his or her Christmas List
Please write Your Christmas List!

If the Christmas clock is ticking and your little one is dragging his or her heels about getting that Christmas List written, this little reminder from Father Christmas may just do the trick. Good luck and have a very merry Christmas – ho, ho, ho! x

Santa Claus or Father Christmas?

Many of our letters to Santa Claus are also available as letters to Father Christmas. This is because we know that people in different families and places call him by different names. In the UK, we find the preference is for “Father Christmas”, in the USA it’s “Santa”.

We’re sorry that we haven’t managed to provide two versions of absolutely every resource – we’ve had a lot to do and have been short on time. However, if there is an alternative version of any of our letters, you’ll be able to see a note and a link underneath it.

You might also like our elf printables!

Our Favourite Fun for Halloween

Not long now until that spooky time of year – so we’ve collected a few of our favourite Halloween printables together below.   Some are popular every year, others are new additions.  Whatever you’re doing on the 31st of October, we hope you have a frighteningly good time!

No Trick or Treat Posters

Trick or treating is great fun but it’s fine not to want to take part. You don’t need to give your reasons to opt out but one of the best ways to let trick or treaters know it’s not for you is to put a light-hearted notice up in your window. Here are a few which might help you out.

If you’re looking for some simple paper decorations to hang around the house, you might also like our Halloween ghosts:

 

 

 

 

 

Oooo! And before you go, you might like to create some decorative jars full of spooky potion ingredients.  If so, why not make use of our Witch’s Pantry Potion Labels.  It’s a great way to get your house looking just like a witch’s hovel!

Fairyland Newspaper: Summer Issue

Hello dear visitors!  By popular demand, we’ve made a summer issue of our Fairyland newspaper, the Midnight Messenger, available for you to print for your child.

Summer Issue of a magical newspaper, the Midnight Messenger, lying on a table scattered with daisies.
The Midnight Messenger – Fairyland’s Newspaper! (Summer Issue)

We recommend printing it out and leaving under your child’s pillow sometime in the summer holidays as a magical surprise.

In this issue you can find out what’s been happening at Christmas House, where the Easter Bunny has been on holiday and what the Tooth Fairy’s been up to as of late.  As always, our thanks to Leone Betts for all her hard work putting it together and for allowing us to make it free on this site.

Are you looking for the previous issue? It’s here.

What is the Midnight Messenger?

The Midnight Messenger is the newspaper which gets delivered all around the magical world – read by everyone from Santa and his elves to the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and every other magical personality you can think of. And this summer, your child can read it too!

We’ve uploaded it as a PDF.  Just click here or on the picture below to download or view it.  It’s completely free.  We hope it makes you and your little ones smile.

Download the summer issue of the Midnight Messenger!

P. S.

If you enjoy this resource, please consider telling others. Our site survives because of people like you using it. Thanks x

More About the Midnight Messenger:

For those of you after more information about our Fairyland newspaper, it was first created in 2003 by L A Betts.  It was early days for our site and as we didn’t have many visitors back then, after a couple of years we retired it.  However, it carried on being delivered every month to magical folk of course, and has often mentioned in our other creations, such as the Father Christmas letters.

The Midnight Messenger is normally in black and white, but special issues like the one for Easter, are in colour.  It regularly features news from well-known parts of the magical world, like Father Christmas’s house in the North Pole, and features many familiar characters such as Jack Frost, the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy.  But it also features new characters your child won’t have heard of, such as the Worrying Witch, the Fortune-Telling Toad and all sorts of goblins, fairies and elves.

It’s always hard to know what people want more of, but if we sense the Midnight Messenger is popular, we’ll consider adding further issues to our site.

Fairyland Newspaper: Easter Issue

A picture of the Easter issue of The Midnight Messenger, a fairyland newspaper from Rooftop Post
The Midnight Messenger – Fairyland’s Newspaper!

Hello lovely visitors!  For a bit of extra fun we’ve published an Easter Issue of our newspaper form Fairyland, The Midnight Messenger, and made it free for you to download.  It can be read by your children at any time in the run up to Easter.

The Midnight Messenger is the newspaper which gets delivered all around the magical world – read by everyone from Santa and his elves to the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and every other magical personality you can think of.  And this month, your child can read it too!

We’ve uploaded it as a PDF.  Just click here or on the picture below to download or view it.  It’s completely free.  We hope it makes you and your little ones smile.

P. S.

If you enjoy this resource, please consider telling others.  Our site survives because of people like you using it.  Thanks x

Note from the Easter Bunny to go with this issue
This is a handwritten note from the Easter Bunny which has been written to go with out fairy newspaper, The Midnight Messenger. The idea is that you print out both before Easter.
Easter Bunny note to go with the Easter issue of The Midnight Messenger

If you have decided to leave a copy of the Midnight Messenger (above) somewhere for your child to find before Easter, you might like to put this note from the Easter Bunny with it, so that they know what it is.

It also lets your child know how good he or she has been and that that makes the Easter Bunny very proud.

More About the Midnight Messenger:

For those of you after more information about our Fairyland newspaper, it was first put together in 2003 by L A Betts.  It was early days for our site and as we didn’t have many visitors back then, after a couple of years  we retired it.  However, it carried on being delivered every month to magical folk of course, and has often mentioned in our other creations, such as the Father Christmas letters.

The Midnight Messenger is normally in black and white, but special issues like the Easter one above, are in colour.  It regularly features news from well-known parts of the magical world, like Father Christmas’s house in the North Pole, and features many familiar characters such as Jack Frost, the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy.  But it also features new characters your child won’t have heard of, such as the Worrying Witch, the Fortune-Telling Toad and all sorts of goblins, fairies and elves.

It’s always hard to know what people want more of, but if we sense the Midnight Messenger is popular, we’ll consider adding further issues to our site.

 

This and That for Valentine’s

Hello!  We generally create printables for children but these days, Valentine’s day is for everyone.  Far from being just for couples, we’re seeing cards sending love to all sorts of family members and friends, not to mention the wider world.  Pink and red decorations appear in shops and homes alike and some people are even using it as an opportunity to spoil themselves.  And why not?  It’s good to love yourself, too.

So, with the aim of moving with the times, we’ve put the printables we thought you might find useful this Valentine’s Day here on one page.  Thinking that the kids might want to help out, we’ve focussed on printable four-fold cards and colouring in.  We hope you, your children, your family and whoever else is special to you enjoy them.  Oh, and from all of us here at Rooftop Post, have a happy and magical Valentine’s.

Oh, and if you like the colouring picture of the mermaid above, you’ll find more in the mermaid section of our site, not to mention a mermaid treasure hunt!  We’ve also got some other gorgeous resources featuring flamingoes, and if you’re looking for free flamingo cards to print from elsewhere on the web, we like these.

What to write in your Valentine’s Card:

It’s never easy to think what to write in your Valentine’s card, and of course, a lot depends on who you’re writing to.

From a Secret Admirer

For example, if you’re sending a card from a secret admirer, it’s best to stick to funny or lightly romantic – as a mystery sender you don’t want to sound too serious (because that can make some people nervous) and it’s attractive to have a sense of humour.   If you’re really stuck, here are a couple of ideas:

  • I’m sending you this Valentine’s card to let you know that whenever I see you, you make me smile.  Have a wonderful day!
  • Roses are red,
    Violets are blue,
    I’m incredibly lucky
    To be friends with you!
  • I like you.  Even more than chocolate/football/any other (light-hearted) favourite thing.  Have a very happy Valentine’s Day!
  • You’re that “nothing” when people ask me what I’m thinking about.
For a Partner

On the other hand, if you’re writing to a long-term partner, pretty much anything goes.  You know their likes and dislikes better than anyone, and even though you might feel as if you can’t think of anything, just take the plunge because most of your thoughts will be appreciated.  Remember, this person already likes or loves you.  If you’re really stuck, thanking them for all they do and is a good start, and should get you thinking about what those things are.  Name them, if you can.  After all, letting someone know you’ve noticed all those small ways they make your life nicer is always going to make them smile.

For Family and Friends

For friends or non-romantic family, think of the sorts of things you’d put in a normal greetings card and just edit those sentiments a bit to suit Valentine’s.  Here are some examples:

  • Happy Valentine’s Day!  I wanted to send you a card to say I hope your life is filled with love for the whole year ahead.
  • As it’s Valentine’s, I just wanted to let you know how much you are loved and appreciated by me (and all the family).   Have a great day.
  • Wishing you a very happy Valentine’s Day from a family who loves you.
  • To my best friend, I thought I’d use Valentine’s Day to send you lots of love and let you know how special you are.  My world is about a million times better for having you in it.

Dydd Gwyl Dewi – St David’s Day

Croeso i popeth ar gyfer Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant!  Welcome to all our St David’s Day printables!

It’s still early days for our St David’s Day resources and we’ll be adding more as the years go by.  However we’ve already created some great celebratory printables below and we hope you and your children enjoy them.  Have a very happy time on the 1st of March, as you remember the patron kindly, nature-loving patron saint of Wales.

Please note that parts of this page have been written in Welsh as well as English, in keeping with the spirit of celebrating Wales.

Want to know more about how Wales is celebrating St David’s Day this year? You can find a list of events, as well as a bit of history on the Visit Wales website.

If you’re a teacher or if you just fancy learning a bit of Welsh for fun, you might find these basic worksheets useful. They are designed to be easy enough for primary school children, but any learners can use them.

And here are a few more colouring pages, including a cute Welsh dragon drawn with thick lines that are easy to stay inside – ideal for younger children.

Decorations are next, so you can decorate your home. We think the Welsh dragon paper chains look especially lovely when they’re done. You just print them, cut out the strips and stick the ends together with a bit of glue or tape to form a chain.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus i chi a’ch blant! x

And here are some printable St David’s Day cards, because it’s always nice to send something to let your family and friends know you ae thinking of them on the 1st of March, especially if Wales occupies a special place in their heart.

Looking for a card to colour in?  Below is a lovely Red Dragon card which should be fun for children to colour in themselves.  It is suitable for younger and older children due to its strong, clear design with substantial lines and plenty of space for easy colouring, as well as some detailed parts.  All in all, a great chance for children to get creative on St David’s Day.

Dyma gerdyn hyfryd gyda dyluniad clir a chyfeillgar o’r Ddraig Goch, sy’n sicr o fod yn hwyl i’w lliwio gan blant. Mae’r gofod mawr, ardal lliwio eang a manylion y draig yn rhoi cyfle i blant fod yn greadigol gyda’u dewis lliwiau. Mae’r llinellau cryf a’r elfennau dylunio syml yn addas iawn ar gyfer ystod oedran eang, o blant ifanc i’r rhai ychydig yn hŷn.

 


P. S. If you love dragons, you can find more of our dragonish resources here.