As you know, we've been mad for Christmas-y "art pwojects" over here. With no movies or internet on Sunday's now, I've gotten into a great habit or preparing something Saturday night so we have a little project for Sunday afternoon. There's plenty of free form coloring, cutting, pasting and stamping throughout the week, but it's fun to throw in a more structured project every once in a while, too.
These are all very similar, simple, no-frills, construction paper projects. You can either work on the same project with your kids or use the time to just sit with them and work on your own holiday project--like maybe addressing those Christmas cards you were compelled to make or some last minute gift wrapping or baking.
Christmas Trees
Cut out Christmas trees from construction paper and provide "stuff" to decorate it with. I just tossed out cotton balls, more construction paper to cut, magazine cut outs, some little cut out circles of paper, and various crayons and let him pick his poison with only the instructions to "decorate the tree!"
Snowmen
We also did a similar project another day with cut out snowmen decorated with black and multi-colored hole punches. While he couldn't really squeeze the hole puncher hard enough to make it work, it didn't seem to dampen his enthusiasm for the tool. He thought it was way cool. I also cut out hats and scarves for this one and, because his stocking is a snowman on skis, he insisted I cut out skis as well. I found it interesting that while Huck is no where near drawing faces or intermediate forms, he was great at putting eyes and noses on without any direction about to where to put them.
The next morning...we watched Frosty the Snowman!
Here are 2 of ours...
The Gingerbread Baby
This Jan Brett book is a new gift. I just brought it out the other day and we read it for the first time and then did another construction paper project where we decorated the Gingerbread Baby with hole punched paper and cut-outs.
The Jan Brett website also has Gingerbread Baby and various other holiday projects we may try, even some simple coloring pages.
This would also be a fantastic book to do with a gingerbread house making project. We got one as a gift this year from my Aunt (Thanks again!). I think Huck asks to eat the snowman every single day. I always expect to find it missing but so far, he's shown amazing willpower.
The Snow Tree by Caroline Repchuk is a lovely book about forest animals who decorate a tree with items from nature using all the colors that have been covered up by the white snow. This project required a tad more prep. I cut out a bunch of white Christmas trees and then all the little decorations the animals used--orange leaves, green shoots, red berries, etc, etc. Loose representations, I assure you. It doesn't have to be brilliant. Then we sort of told the story again out loud as Huck picked the items, told the color and what animals brought it for the tree.
While I made multiples of all the other backgrounds (tree, snowman, gingerbread man) I only made one snow tree, since the decorations were so specific.
So those are some of our simple Christmas art projects. They each kept him happy and quiet for an hour to an hour and a half. There's nothing this boy loves like a glue stick.
The finished products make great holiday wall art but can also be used as cards for family members or glued onto presents wrapped in plain brown craft paper.
