Crafts for Christmas do not Have To Be Complicated: Try These Two Easy Crafts

Christmas is a holiday where all kinds of kids crafts are created at home and in the school environment.

Crafts for kids, however should be an activity that should bring fun and excitement to children’s activities aside from adding a bonding to the adults that are doing the projects with them.

Educational arts and crafts is a way of doing crafts with children where they are not blindly copying the adults model but are creating things that they are capable of creating at their own developmental level.

When children create at their own level a number of things occur.

It creates a great feeling about themselves, as who can feel good about crafts projects that are copycat models of someone else’s. Kids really know when a craft was done by them or not and when it was done by them, their self esteem soars.

An even more beneficial side to educational arts and crafts is its inherent allowance for creativity.
There is hardly anything more that cramps a child’s creativity than being expected to totally copy and adults rendition of a project.

There are a few varied kinds of art activites that are part of educational art.
There is the cafeteria style that allows children to choose materials to work with, there is process only art where the process is what counts along with a few more.

The point of it is that all of the crafts under educational arts and crafts should be age appropriate, and allow for freedom of creation and expression.

I am now going to give you directions to make two extremely straightforward and cheap Christmas craft ornaments for your tree.

The first one uses plastic throwaway cups:

Using permanent markers the children can make all kinds of designs all over the cups. Try to get the kids to cover up the cup with markers as much as they can.

When they are done, take a cookie sheet and put the cups upside down on it and put in the over at around 350 degrees. Leaving them in the oven between 2-3 minutes will allow them to go down to a good size. It’s important to make sure that they don’t completely burn down. Do not allow the kids to come anywhere near the hot, melted cups and tray they are on until they cool down.

When they are cool, make a hole in the center and use colorful ribbon to hang as an ornament for your tree.

The second project is a great excuse to write and color on your old cd’s.

Next thing: Add decorations and string them up.

There are loads of ways to decorate the cd’s.

You can color with permanent markers, glue and glitter them, collage over them, decoupage over them, and decorate them with whatever shiny, decorative materials you can find.
Once they are done, get some pretty ribbon and hang them from your tree.

If you want to see what a crafts acitivity done in the cafeteria style is like then check out this Hanukkah Crafts collage