by Trudy Brown

Created on: October 12, 2009

When you have kids, you know the importance of keeping them busy and entertained. This can be especially challenging during the holiday season when they have so much time off from school or for stay-at-home moms who want to keep their kids active and away from the T.V. I, personally, am the latter. When you're at the house all day with a preschooler and a toddler, it's hard to fight the draw of the television. So I began planning daily craft activities for my kids to teach them about the world around them and to keep them occupied. I have scoured the internet and kept careful records of all the best materials out there to share with my friends.

Out of all the crafting and holiday websites out there, I have gotten the most use out of www.Kaboose.com. They have pages and pages of free craft ideas, not only for Christmas, but for all kinds of other occasions. One of the unique features of this site is that each craft has a difficulty rating and a recommended age so that you can easily tell whether the craft is appropriate for your child. Some of the crafts even have user ratings, but to be honest, I've loved every craft we've tried from this website. We decorated our house for Halloween using craft ideas from this website and some of the decorations were so cute that I'm going to keep them for next year. The crafts from this website are high quality but at the same time easy to make even for someone like me who had very little experience with crafting until recently. The instructions are detailed and usually include a picture or two as well as a supply list so that you can make sure you have everything before you plunge in.

If that's not enough, this site also has printable coloring pages, homemade Christmas card ideas, instructions for making homemade gifts, recipes, gift wrapping ideas, and many ideas to help you make the most of the holiday season. I've been very impressed with the depth of this website and the amount of information available there.

Having said that I would like to bring up a few honorable mentions. These websites have free crafts for kids and were my main source of information before I found Kaboodle. They too have crafts for all seasons and holidays, as well as, educational crafts but the quality of the crafts is not as high and they can't match the sheer volume of crafts available at Kaboodle.

www.first-school.ws

www.freekidcrafts.com

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