Each year, I find that sometime after Thanksgiving my homeschooling Mom brain turns off for a break, and I’m ready to spend the whole month of December doing Christmas crafts and Christmas related learning. The children are ready for more fun school then too, so each day in December I try to allow time for the children to make a Christmas craft or a new ornament for our tree. It just feels right add some Christmas fun into our regular routine. So, I wanted to take the time to share with you some of the fun ideas and crafts that we’ve done and that I’m planning on working on with the children this year.
My children often want to make Christmas Angels. They’re inspired by the emphasis on the Nativity at church and at our Community Bible Study class early in December. So, I have really embraced this with our crafts. One year we made these great Paper Plate Angels and decorated them with glittery shapes.
One of the cutest angel crafts I’ve seen for preschoolers is the fingerprint singing angels. I thinking about doing this one with the children to make some homemade wrapping paper. There’s also always the pipe cleaner angel ornaments. These would look beautiful on my tree! If you’re looking for a more upscale angel ornament craft for the bigger kids, I think these felt circle angels would look awesome!!
As an angel ornament for my little kids to make, I love these ease of these clothespin and coffee filter angels. And, of course, my preschoolers would love to make these handprint angels for me to hang up.
At some point during the Christmas season, Rose always decides that she wants to wear angel wings, and this tutorial on making paper plate angel wings is one that makes assembling them easy. The are the ones I made for Rose a couple of years ago, but now she wields a hot glue gun well enough to assemble her own set.
Another craft to make that is fun is a Christmas Wreath.
These can range from fancy wreaths to very simple toddler made wreaths, depending on your interest and the age of your children. I found a cute pom pom wreath that I want to make with my preschoolers this year. I can also see my eight year old wanting to do a much fancier wreath made out of Christmas ornaments.
I’m trying to teach Rose how to finger knit, so I think she’d love to make this finger-knitted wreath ornament if we could make a version with green yarn. If we could crochet, we’d make these crocheted wreath ornaments. Another easy wreath ornament for all the kids would be to make a wreath with beads and pipe cleaners.
Of course, one of my favorite wreath crafts is also one of the most classic ones. All you have to do is to trace several sets of your child’s hands. Then, you can cut them apart and glue the hands into a wreath shape. I like to put a little bow or stickers on the front and then write the child’s name and the year on the back of the wreath. I put them away with my other Christmas decorations and pull them back out over the years to share with the children so they can see how much they’ve grown.
Another type of craft the children love to make are Reindeer Crafts. We’ve made handprint and footprint reindeer and popsicle stick reindeer almost every year.
Another one of our favorites is a toilet paper roll reindeer. How we make it is to paint a toliet paper roll brown. Then, we trace around a set of our hands on brown paper and cut them out. We glue the hands inside the toilet paper roll to be antlers and add googly eyes and a pom pom nose. Sometimes, the kids draw on a mouth, but Firecracker preferred to leave this one plain.
My four year old loves to color printable crafts, so we might try this printable reindeer face and add his little handprints in! I also have a million random puzzle pieces I could use to make these cute puzzle piece Rudolph ornaments. I also have bought some clear ball ornaments that would be perfect for making this Reindeer ornament. Another great idea for a Rudolph ornament is to make your children into reindeer!
Sometimes we just enjoy making beautiful ornaments for our tree! Last year we made Strawberry Walnut Ornaments for our tree and they were so beautiful we made more for gifts too!
Some other ornaments I’m wanting to try to make this year include a yarn wrapped Christmas tree, snowflake ornaments, paper plate Christmas ball ornaments, and handprint snowman ornaments. I would also love to make these Olaf salt dough ornaments because I have a three year old who is in love with the movie Frozen.
This year I’m already finding that the children have two definite interests of their own for Christmas learning! Monkey has decided that he loves The Nutcracker. We’ve already made toilet paper roll Nutcracker soldiers. We painted a toilet paper roll red, and then I drew (and he cut out) all the body parts for the soldier. We added sequins, ribbon, jewels and a little bit of furry cloth to be his hair.
We’ve also already made cardstock soldiers from this template. I would love to make Snowflake ballerinas, sugar plum scented playdough, candy cane mice, Nutcracker soldiers with Pringles cans or these nutcracker clothespin crafts while they’re still into The Nutcracker.
My children also love How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and so they’re interested in doing lots of Grinch Crafts. We’ve already done the great printable ornaments and masks at Early Moments.
I love these easy Grinch ornaments! They would be so beautiful but easy enough for the kids to make themselves!
My preschoolers are still really into sensory play, so we might also make this fun looking Grinch Slime. I also love these cute ornaments of the Grinch getting stuck in a chimney. We could even make our own t oilet paper roll Grinch dolls if we really get into the Grinch spirit!
No matter which of these crafts we end up choosing to do this Christmas (and I’m sure the crafts will be many), these crafts will be fun additions to our celebration of Jesus’s birth and nothing something that we do to take our focus off of him. Instead, we look to our celebration of Jesus’s birth to be a fun a time to spend with family and friends, sharing our love of different themes of Christmas and celebrating the coming of the best gift of all.
Rebecca Ray is a child of the One True King, a wife and a homeschooling mother to four wild and crazy kids between the ages of 9 and 3. You can find her blogging about life, crafting and homeschooling at her blog Raventhreads, where she tries to blend all the threads of life into one story.