Christmas Ornament 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.

Creativity is another great advantage educational arts and crafts has over other forms of arts and crafts.
When an adult does a project and wants a child to copy it, it's the perfect way to repress creativity.

Under the banner of educational art are between 4-6 types of activites.
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.

Explained below are two simple and inexpensive Christmas crafts activities that you can make from items around your home.

The first one uses plastic throwaway cups:

The children will now love to color their cups using only permanent markers that work on plastic. Cheering the kids on to fill in lots of empty space on the cups with the markers will make them prettier.

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. Allow them to stay in for a few minutes as they melt. If you don't watch carefully, there is a chance that they can burn all the way to the edges. 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.

Another item that is easy to find in the home will be the next activity and uses old or discarded cd's.

 

In anutshell: Have the children add all sorts of decorative touches and them hang them with string.

There are tons of ways of enhancing 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