Our yard is home to a number of pine trees of several different varieties. My husband took advantage of this to get into the Christmas spirit with the kids. He let them pick a small branch to cut from the trees (he did the cutting). They each filled a ceramic mug with dirt, and then planted their tree cutting into the mug. Then they got decorating! L decided not to decorate hers, as she felt it was perfect just the way it is.
We have a big tub of Duplo that gets played with everyday. On Christmas Eve Big L and A were entertaining the boys with the Duplo, building cars and houses. I challenged them to construct a Christmas tree, and then left them to it. After a while A came and found me to show me what they had built.
One large Christmas tree complete with star on the top, a couple of presents and a Santa, all made from Duplo! Merry Christmas!
There were Christmas craft ideas in some of the email newsletters from Educational Experience in the lead up to Christmas. One of the ideas was to create fingerprint Christmas cards. We tried this out at home, making Christmas trees and candy canes with our fingers.
A liked to smudge her fingerprints together for her trees.
L carefully creating a tree.
We started with plain white cards. The kids used green paint to create a triangle for the tree, and then brown paint for the trunk. The candy canes were alternating red and white fingerprints in a cane shape.
A making a candy cane.
To finish the cards, we added sparkly star stickers to the top of the trees, and little Christmas stickers in the corners of the candy cane cards.
This was a quick activity with minimal mess. And the end result looked good. We gave these cards to teachers and staff at the kids’ school. The card’s recipients were very impressed. On the back of each card I wrote the name of the child that painted the card, along with the year and the class that the kids were in.
Pop-sticks are so versatile, and they can be used to make simple and fun Christmas decorations. We made stars and trees using the regular sized pop-sticks, and some small stars with mini pop-sticks.
Gluing the pop-sticks together.
Triangles ready to be glued together.
For the larger stars, we made two triangles with the pop-sticks by gluing the ends together. Then we placed one of the triangles on top of the other one, so that one triangle was point up, and the other one was point down. We glued the triangles together like this, and got our star. To finish them off we added glitter glue and once they were dry, I tied a loop of string to one of the points so it could be hung on the tree.
Christmas trees.
Adding glitter glue.
The Christmas trees were made with a triangle of green pop-sticks, and a natural coloured pop-stick glued behind the triangle to form the trunk. We had coloured pop-sticks, but natural pop-sticks could be easily painted green before construction. Glitter glue finished off the trees. Later, a loop of string was added so the tree could be hung up.
Gluing mini pop-sticks together.
The little stars were made by stacking the mini pop-sticks at different angles to produce eight points. A small dab of glue was all that was necessary to keep the pop-sticks together. Once dry, we tied some string around the stars to hang them from.
These decorations all look great hanging on our Christmas tree!
Today We Did 