by Debbie Todd

Created on: November 02, 2009

Christmas is a wonderful time of year to encourage children to make decorations for the home. Preschool children will be especially proud of any items they have made that are lovingly displayed in the family home.

Over the years | have kept all of the Christmas decorations my children have made (both at home and at school) and these items are brought out every year and considered the most precious decorations that I use in my home. I have a very small paper angel that is 25 years old that I carefully store each year when I take down the decorations. It reminds me of my grown-up daughter as a three-year old - a memory that is cherished and revisited every year when I get the decorations down from the attic and trim the tree!

A very easy project for preschoolers is to make paper chains. This is an activity that allows them to succeed in making an admirable Christmas decoration that can either be hung from the ceiling or twirled around the Christmas tree. You need to help them to cut strips of brightly-coloured paper (buy some, use recycled gift-wrap, let them paint used newspapers, or use bright magazine pages. The strips need to be of uniform size: 3cm x 15cm is a good size for ceiling decorations, while you may want the strips to be narrower to make a more delicate chain suitable for adorning a tree. If the child is old enough, let them help with the cutting (supervised, of course) as it will develop their fine motor skills and enhance their ability to concentrate.

Once you have a sizeable amount of paper strips, let the child use a glue stick to join the ends (overlapping) of the first strip to form a circle. Subsequent strips need to be threaded through the previous strip before gluing to make a chain.

This activity could be an ongoing project for a small child throughout December. You could set aside some time before bed time every evening for the child to work on this project until the chain is long enough (or have them make several chains). This will encourage a small child to take interest in an on-going job, will probably be a good activity to wind down at the end of the day (so encouraging sleep at bedtime) and, once finished, the child will feel a huge sense of achievement at making such a special decoration for the home. Making such a contribution to the family Christmas will help develop confidence and self-worth in a small child.

Another nice craft for pre-schoolers involves quite runny glue, powdered fake snow and pine cones. First of all, take a walk with the child and gather pine cones (this is a brilliant opportunity for teaching about nature and the outdoors). Give the child a pile of pine cones, a bowl of quite watery glue and a bowl of fake snow (the glitter type is best). Let the child roll the cones in the glue, then transfer it to the bowl of snow, rolling it around to coat the pine with a frosting and then set each cone aside on newspaper to dry. This is quite a messy activity, but messy activities are usually full of learning opportunities for children Let the cones dry for a couple of days and then attach a piece of ribbon to the bottom of the cone, tying in a little sprig of holly if you have it, then hang from the tree. These frosted cones also look brilliant when used to decorate Christmas wreaths - the frosty fake snow make them look as if they are covered in a delicate layer of snow.

These are both brilliant craft activities for pre-schoolers that enable them to make decorations that you can cherish for years to come.

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