With the kids out of school, you’ve probably found yourself at a loss for ideas to occupy their time at least once or twice.
Luckily, there are plenty of fun, easy DIY crafts that you can do with your children that will let you spend quality time together, while making your home more festive. Here are a few of our favorites.
Candy Cane Garland
If you’ve got old paint chips lying around that you’re not going to be using again, use them to create a candy cane garland.
Trace candy cane shapes on them and let kids cut them out. Then use a hole punch and twine to string them together.
Cookie Cutter Ornaments
These stylish cookie cutter ornaments are perfect crafts for older kids who are handy with scissors. With some inexpensive aluminum cookie cutters, festive paper, photographs, and glue, you can turn these out in a matter of minutes. They make lovely additions to gifts, too.
Tiny Wreaths
Making wreaths you can hang on the door may be a great craft for you, but it can be a little much for the kids.
Instead, help them make a kid-sized wreath by wrapping pipe cleaners around an embroidery hoop and providing decorations that they can add. Pompoms, glitter, felt leaves, and sequins all make perfect additions.
Salt Dough Ornaments
Salt dough ornaments are an old standby when it comes to holiday crafts – in fact, you probably made some when you were young.
With just a few dry ingredients and water, you can easily create keepsake ornaments that kids love to paint and decorate. Do these every year and you’ll have a whole collection of special memories to hang on your tree.
Wine Cork Reindeer Ornament
With all that holiday shopping, gift wrapping, and baking you’ve got going on, you’ve surely got some wine corks sitting around! Make good use of them with this cute reindeer ornament craft. All it takes are pipe cleaners, googly eyes, pompoms, and bits of pinecone.
Styrofoam Snowmen
Those styrofoam balls you can find at craft stores make adorable snowmen. Attach two or three together with toothpicks, punch out some black construction paper circles with a hole punch for eyes, and use pipe cleaners for a nose, arms, and scarf.
For some extra sparkle, lightly brush the styrofoam balls with glue and dust with glitter.
Popsicle Stick Ornaments
Popsicle stick ornaments are another tried-and-true craft beloved by elementary school teachers the world round. That’s probably because they’re first, easy, and second, they allow kids to get extra creative.
The link below has instructions for reindeer, star, and tree ornaments, but you can make almost anything – snowmen, Santas, sleds, you name it.
Don’t forget to snap a picture or two while you’re making these crafts with your family – and then put down your phone and enjoy the moment. The pictures will look great on your Nixplay Wifi Cloud digital frame’s holiday photo playlist.
Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.