In case any of you are looking for some last minute craft ideas or need ideas for other occasions I use this wonderful website called http://www.dltk-kids.com/. It has religious crafts, it has seasonal crafts, it has recipes, songs, poems, you name it I am sure they have it. One thing that is great about it is that you can go to the site and they have a list of all the "holiday's" or events that happen just about every day of the year. It lets you know when ice cream was invented and gives you a list of crafts you can make for that event. It is organized by the month but you can also search for things if you are looking for a particular type of craft, recipe, song, etc. Here are a few crafts my daycare kids did this year for Christmas. Now there are a lot of crafts on here and it tells you the age the craft is appropriate for. There are even coloring pages if you feel your child isn't ready to start an actual craft yet. Also when your child is ready to start writing letters and numbers there are pages that let them trace the letters and then write them by themselves. It even gives them a picture to color of an animal or object that starts with the letter to help with their recognition of what thing begin with.
This one is a hand print wreath. The instructions are here. It is real simple for a small child to do. You trace their hand on green and or red paper and cut it out for them. The instructions suggest 4 hands in each color but if you want to do just one color then do 8. You then glue the hands together to form a wreath. The instructions has templates you can use for things that the kids can glue to the wreath for decorations like you see in the picture, we glued a bow to ours. Other choices are stars, candy canes, and horns. Of course if you are creative enough on your own you could do other things as well!
This one is called a Handprint and footprint Reindeer. The instructions for this one is here. This one is also a good one for young kids. You trace one foot and their hands and after you cut them out you glue it together to make the reindeer. There are lots of possibilities for this one as well. We chose to put a red pom-pom ball as the nose and used wiggly eyes. I believe the instructions have you do it another way as well that has a bow on it's neck.
This one is a fun one for the messy kids. It is a handprint santa ornament made out of paint. The instructions are here. This one is for any age but I found it difficult with some of my kids that are quite ready to pay attention and listen a follow directions because you have to use different color paint on the hand before you make the print and for some of the kids it might be hard for them to sit still long enough for you to get the paint on their hand before they decide to close their hand and mix all the paint together. It turns out real cute but it is was hard for me to keep their hand still once on the paper so as you can see in this picture it looks a little smudged. After you do the hand print, which it is recommended that you do it on stiff paper like card stock or construction paper, you cut a circle, or any shape you would like, around the handprint and then punch a hole in the paper and tie some string/ribbon/yarn through the hole and it s ready to hang on the tree, after it is dry of course!.
This one is a fun one for the kids to "play" with when they are done. It is called movable santa. It is in their coloring book section. I copied the link where you can see both pages that you will need. All you have to do is click on page one and then hit print, then do the same for page two. As you can see it is black and white. You can either print it on colored paper or you could print it and have the child color it or you can do what I did which is time consuming if are looking for something quick and easy. I printed it on regular printer paper and cut out the pieces and then glued it to card stock so it would be firm. I then cut it out of the card stock. I then cut out pieces for the kids to glue on the santa for his hat, suit, boots, and belt. We also glued cotton balls on to give it texture. We used glitter glue to give his belt a gold buckle and green glitter glue to highlight his hat. We glued all the pieces on and then used brad paper fasteners to put him all together. We then glued the cotton balls on to "hide" the brads. They really enjoyed being able to play with it when it was finished drying.
The kids enjoyed these crafts as well as coloring reindeer, candy canes, and Christmas Trees. There are so many possibilities of things for the kids to learn.
2 comments:
Do they have any crafts for adults who can't even draw a stick man?
They are all so cute - I'm sure the children had fun doing these, and thanks for sharing them. You really do a lot with them. And Brian, I've already bought your Christmas gift this year, but maybe next year we can get you a "Crafting for Dummies" book.
Post a Comment