Cheap & Cheerful Christmas Crafts!

Hello again lovely friends!  With Christmas fast approaching I wanted to stop by and share some easy and super cute craft projects that my kidlets worked on in their last few weeks of school.  Because we finished on the 2nd of December we got into the Christmas spirit really early to make sure the classroom was looking gorgeous and festive before the school year ended.

Let's start with some snowman fun!  I've seen this cute snowman catching snowflakes project all over Pinterest - you can even grab a few different templates from TpT (like this freebie) but because I always decide on the spur of the moment to get crafty I just winged it!  I used powerpoint to make a circle and trapezoid outline which I then printed to white paper.  Then I just sliced up some red, green and black construction paper along with some freehand orange triangles.

The kidlets used white oil pastel to draw some asterisk snowflakes on a large sheet of card which were then painted with blue wash (we used powder paint).  In our Summer heat the paint dried in about 5 minutes so we could move on with the snowman straight away.  I let them glue down the pieces of their snowman with a sample that I'd made as a guide.  We used brown oil pastel for the arms when everything was stuck down.  I just love how they turned out and when they were all hanging up it was just the cutest display ever. :)

Another super easy snowman project are these craft stick ornaments.  Simply paint the stick white and when it's dry glue on a black hat, orange nose, red or green scarf and some buttons.  Use Sharpie for the eyes and mouth and be sure to hot glue some ribbon at the top for hanging on the tree.  This year we used paper, but last year's felt option turned out a little nicer.

I work at a Christian school so we spend lots of time focusing on the Nativity story around Christmas time.  This year we worked through some crafts that matched each part of the story we were learning about.  First came a paper plate angel as we read that one visited Mary to tell her about the baby Jesus.  We pre-cut the plates just to save time.  The kidlets painted the edges yellow and added gold glitter.  The face is just a paper circle with eyes, nose and mouth drawn on in marker.  We chopped up some sparkly pipe cleaners to use for the halo.

To make this gorgeous Jesus in the manger craft I used this freebie from Doodle Bugs.  I just sliced up brown construction paper for the manger itself but used the templates in the pack for the swaddling and face - we just copied them onto blue and off-white paper.  The straw is crepe paper that the kidlets chopped up.

As we read about the shepherds hearing of Jesus' birth and travelling to Bethlehem to visit Him we made some super cute sheep to display with some clipart images of shepherds I got from Scrappin' Doodles.  I don't have a photo of the whole display though, just the cute sheep!  We used a wine cork to stamp the sheep's wool with white paint, and then did some directed drawing for the head.  The kidlets cut their drawing out and glued it on with some rectangle legs and googly eyes.

This year I ran out of time for a Three Wise Men art project, instead we wrote about what gift we would like to give Jesus.  Lots of kidlets wrote that they would give him their heart or all of their love.  :)

Hopefully I've shared an idea or two that you might be able to use in your classroom. I'll be back soon with some Christmas maths and literacy ideas!