Learning and Exploring Through Play: Toddler Christmas Crafts

With the big day on the horizon this is a perfect Christmas Craft for kids. Whether you have toddlers, 8 year olds or 12 years olds, this is a fun Christmas art project for kids of all ages!

Little N is two years old now and is really loving the build up to Christmas this year. We have been listening to lots of Christmas songs, reading stories about Santa and the North Pole and she (in particular) has became very fond of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. She sings along and dances to songs about him and loves spotting him - here, there and everywhere while we are out and about.

This is what inspired me to do this craft with her today:

Rudolf Hand Print Craft Gifts.

We purchased some brown paint from the Early Learning centre and we had fun exploring the paint with our hands and doing lots of hand prints on paper. Once we have several good hand prints, Little N went out to paint with both hands and a paintbrush, enjoying random movements and marks on the paper. We spoke about the colour brown and she has gone on to point 'brown' out several times since this activity.

Once the prints were dry I set about cutting them out.

We added googly eyes with PVA glue and added a pom pom for his nose. We took this opportunity to do some counting. As Little N stuck the items down she pressed down and we counted to 10 to make sure they were sticking well. (This was a little trick my teacher in infant school taught me - its amazing how little remarks during childhood stay with you!)

I stuck them onto red card to give the craft more stability. I selected red as its a great festive colour and would show up the red in Rudolf's nose too.

I then used gift ribbon which I stuck to the back using sticky tape to enable these delightful Rudolf crafts to be hung!

They looked really effective! We decided to give them out as homemade Christmas gift decorations to our family and friends.

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We have been busy crafting today for the 12 Days of Christmas blog hop, hosted by SillySparkles we have teamed up with 11 other bloggers to bring you an exciting set of crafts and activities linked to the Christmas song - The 12 Days of Christmas.

Today is day 3 - Three French Hens.

We visited a local farm where we had a close look at some Hens and Cockerels. Little N was unsure of the noises the Cockerels were making at first, but she enjoyed watching them walking around their pen, eating and disappearing into their hen house.

When we got back Little N fancied doing a bit of painting.
I clipped some pom poms onto pegs and squirted red, yellow and brown into a painting tray.
I gathered 3 paper plates to link to today's theme - Three French Hens.

Little N dipped the pom poms into the paint and enjoyed printing circles onto the plates. She enjoyed colour mixing and dragging the pom pom around, leaving long trails in the paint.

I also joined in and did a plate too. Little N was really happy to see me getting stuck in and kept looking over to see how I was getting on. She pointed out the colours as we selected them from the tray too.

Once all of the plates were painted we left them to dry.

When they were completely dry we set about making them look a little more like hens.

We began by using straws for their legs. We stuck them onto the back of the plates with lots of sticky tape, Little N loved pulling the tape from the tape dispenser.

We then added some feet to the bottom of the straws. . I sketched out a template which I used to draw around on the card. I only drew around it once and folded the card so when I cut around the template I would also be cutting out the additional feet that I needed.

We printed using sponges on sheets of A4 paper to create the wings. Again using a template, I folded the painted paper in half and cut out the wings so they would be the same shape either side, finishing by cutting them in the middle and sticking them to either side.

It was then time to get to work on the front of the hens. Using white paper circles we used finger tips in black paint to create the eyes, and yellow paper cut into a square, folded in half for a beak.

We used some of the left over painted paper, cut into strips to make the hens comb on the top of her head.

Here we have it: