Christmas Crafts

I'm preparing for my Christmas craft centers this Friday.  The last day before winter break is always crazy, so I have parent volunteers come in and run craft stations!  Students get to make different ornaments, a gift bag, and a card.  This way they have a gift to take home to parents for Christmas.  I also have a station where they make Reindeer Chow, which is just a snack mix that they will eat later in the day!

Here are a few of the crafts they will be completing:

 

 

I got the finger print ornament idea off of Pinterest, the original post was from Little Bit Funky.  I couldn't find teal bulbs, so I went with green!  I only had students do three thumb prints for the reindeer and wrote their name and year with Sharpie on the back.  I'll tie a bow with red ribbon on the top. 

 

I had students do their thumb prints, with brown acrylic paint, ahead of time so they'll be dry for the craft party.  Students will use a black Sharpie for the antlers, eyes, and two noses.  For the middle "Rudolph" nose I'm using a Sharpie oil paint pen.  My daughter made the sample shown!



 

 

The card idea is also stolen from Pinterest.  I used construction paper and the paper punches that I already had to make the different shapes.  Easy and cute!

 

This little Santa ornament is made with a red craft stick.  I used skin colored acrylic paint for the face.  I painted a strip ahead of time and students will use googily eyes, tiny white poms, cotton balls, and a sharpie to complete the rest! 

 

 

I will also have them make a bag similar to this.  I found shiny red scrapbook paper at Hobby Lobby and used an oval paper punch for the nose.  I'll be up tonight cutting ovals on my Cricket out of different brown scrapbook paper (whatever I have floating around at home!) for the mouth.  I used construction paper and the paper punches for the eyes.  I think they'll come out super cute!

 

 

 

:-)

Talking Elves

I started a new blog page for my students to post their work!  I'm using the iPad app Easy Blogger Jr., which sends the student's posts directly to my new blog page.  It automatically labels each post with the student's name, so that parents can click on the label and see only their child's work. 

Today we made our first post, which was so fun!  Students wrote a paragraph last week, "If I were an Elf..." and then drew a picture of themselves as elves.  I used the step-by-step drawing tutorial from Art Projects for Kids for the art project.  I used the iPad app Chatterpix to take a picture of their drawing and record them reading their paragraph.  Chatterpix allows you to put a mouth on the drawing and makes it look like the picture is talking - so cute!

The class page is pretty basic, but if you would like to see other examples of the Talking Elves click here.  :-)