Christmas crafts are all over the place. You can make elaborate ones that take long and are typical copycat ones, or you can stick with me and find ones that fit developmental criteria

What I like to do at times is look though the web through many of the traditional copycat websites and find crafts that I can modify to fit into the educational art framework.

I came up with three real easy, inexpensive crafts for Christmas that are actually ornaments.They can be made by the children and hung on the tree.

The first one as seen above are glue squigglies.

In short you take a bottle of glue and on a non sticky surface like wax paper or even aluminum foil, you make some designs with the glue.

You need to make sure that the glue bottle is not old and dried out and that the glue comes out in a nice clear stream. Otherwise it can be very frustrating.

Have the children make designs but make sure they are not too skinny as you will have a hard time working with them when dry.

After you have done a few of them you can leave them to dry for the next day.

Then you peel the glue squigglies off of their backing and make a tiny hole in the ends. Thread a few of them together through a piece of yarn or pretty ribbon and hang them on your tree.

If you’d like you can decorate them with glitter (if you don’t mind glitter in the kids hair and under their nails)or you can use glitter pens which have the same shine as glitter without the same problems that glitter has.

The second craft would be to find any old cd’s you have lying around your house or you can even buy a batch of new ones for this.

You then allow the children to decorate these in so many different ways. You can tissue paper them. color with markers, add sequins, paint ‘em, sew them all around with different colors of yarn, and have the children come up with different ways to decorate these.

After they are done and dry, string them and hang them they are really fun and add lots of opportunities for the kids to come up with ideas how to embellish these cd’s.

The last idea is for the children to color up plastic cups with permanent markers. (I know permanent markers are usually a no-no but with supervision and a smock its doable) the regular markers just wont work on plastic.

After they are completely covered, just bake them.

That’s right you heard(read) correctly. Put them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven on about 350 degrees (I don’t know how to type the degrees sign) Leave them in only a few minutes until they are melted about halfway down.

Remove from the oven and let cool. Don’t let the kids near these until they are cool as they get real hot.

Punch holes in the bottom of the cups, string some pretty ribbon through them and voila! You can’t find more homemade Christmas ornaments than these.

Happy Holidays
Re