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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 childrens 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 elses. Self esteem is greatly enhanced when kids do the projects on their own or at least by not copying the adults model.

Another wonderful advantage to educational arts and crafts over tradtional arts and crafts is the creativity it allows.
When a child is told to copy an adults craft project to the tee, there is almost nothing that stifles his creativity more than that.

Educational art is not limited to just one type of crafts, but it has a number of activities under it’s banner.
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:

Offer the kids permanent markers in many colors for them to decorate their cups. Encouraging the children to color all over the cup will make for a nicer ornament.

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. Watch them melt in the oven for a few minutes until they are the right size that you like. Make sure you keep a close eye on them so they don’t totally burn up. As the cookie trays and cups get very hot, do not allow the kids near them 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.

For our next craft you will use any unused or not needed dvd’s or cd’s.

And now: Pretty them up and hang ‘em up.

There so many methods of beautifying 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

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