I know that growing up; crafts were always a fun way to celebrate the holidays and also to get the creative juices flowing. There are so many different things you can create and share with your children. Here are a few ideas that I think would be fun for both kids and parents to create.
Pipe Cleaners: Buy various different colored pipe cleaners, which are relatively inexpensive. Yu and your children can make many different brilliant creations. You could buy the sticky eye-balls and make people or animals or you could create a pumpkin or different fruits or vegetables to go along with the holidays. You could make a dog, cat, turkey, birds, fish, pipe cleaner people and anything and everything you or your kids can think of. Your children’s imagination is the only limit. Get even more creative with small things like feathers, buttons, pom-poms, googly eyes, pennies and tacky glue.
What you can do with pipe cleaners:
1. Clip: Cut sections of pipe cleaner with dull fingernail clippers or scissors.
2. Twist: Tightly wrap two pipe cleaners ends around each other by twisting.
3. Insert: Tuck a section of one pipe cleaner into the coils of another.
4. Bundle: Wrap a pipe cleaner around a pencil, overlapping the coils to form a compact ball.
5. Connect: Attach two pipe cleaners end to end by twisting a short length of one around the other.
6. Coil: Wrap a pipe cleaner evenly around a pencil to form a spring-like shape.
Puppet-theater and puppets: Make a puppet theater out of a cardboard box. You’ll need a pair of scissors, a knife, a straightedge, tape, markers or paint, construction paper, an old curtain and tension rod. Cut out a large square in the front of the box and decorate with the construction paper, paint and markers on the front of the box. Stand it up and you have a puppet-theater. Next you’ll need to create some puppets. Puppets can easily be made from old socks or you could take a pair of gloves and cut out each finger of the glove. This will be the puppet’s body, now decorate to your hearts content a different character for each finger. You could use things like cardboard, buttons, colored tissue paper and felt to decorate your characters.
Table Decorations (Good for getting children involved in Thanksgiving & Christmas): This is a fun and easy way to get the kids to make something that they can use and will get them involved in the holidays that are soon approaching. Have them make a table setting/placemat for themselves. All you need for an Autumn/Thanksgiving type place mat is construction paper (brown is good for Autumn/Thanksgiving and of course red or green for Christmas), glue or glue stick, paint and brushes, scissors and leaves. You can also use crayons or pencil. Decorate the placemat with drawings or leaf prints. You could either lightly paint the back of a leaf or press it onto the construction paper or you could put the leaf under the construction paper and try to color its image onto the paper. Once you have let the paint dry, if you painted on the construction paper, laminate it with Con-Tact paper or take it and have it laminated at a copy shop. The children can add their own special touches, writing perhaps their name or drawing other things around the leaf imprints. Another idea is that you could also include a photo of the child or the family on the place mat, put it in the middle and then have the child decorate around it.
