Christmas Fun & Games

I have several fun Christmas activities to share with you today.

I bet you've already got lots of the supplies for them in your craft closets.

I had a lot of fun coordinating Olive preK Christmas party earlier this week.  I planned a craft and then came up with some games that I thought the kids would love.  We ended up only having time for the craft and snacks so we've been playing the games at home this week.  They were tons of fun and really easy to pull together.

PLAYDOH CHRISTMAS TREE

I made 4 batches of green  playdoh and divided each batch into fourths.  Each kid got a baseball sized ball of green playdoh for their tree.  You could definitely buy playdoh instead of make it, but I was going for a cheaper option since I had to have enough playdoh for a classroom of kids.

I used my mom's playdoh recipe.  I have good childhood memories of her making playdoh for us and letting us pick the color she'd make.

1 cup water
1 cup flour
1/2 c salt
green food coloring
2 t cream of tartar
1 T vegetable oil

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and heat up.  Stir until it's blended and then when it thickens up knead it together until smooth.  The dough will be hot so let it cool a bit before you start kneading.

These are the materials that each kid got:
The bags of decorations had sequins, pony beads, jewels, pipe cleaner & a plastic knife.
The brown bag was an oversized lunch bag that they could use to take home all of their supplies.

I had envisioned the kids making tall Christmas trees, but most of them wanted to design flat ones.  Both work great with the playdoh.

Another mom made these cute snowman popcorn cups for a snack

HELP RUDOLPH CATCH HIS NOSE
Give each kid a straw and a giant pom pom.
Let two kids race by blowing the pom pom nose down the table.

TRIM THE TREE
Grab a package of green streamer paper and take turns wrapping kids up like a Christmas tree.  You could add bows for decorations.

SANTA STACK
Build Santa a new hat out of red solo cups.  Try to get them as tall as possible and add a giant pom pom on top.  You could race, give a time limit or just build for fun.  My kids LOVE this one.  Knocking it down was just as much fun as building.

CHRISTMAS CRAFTS
Our local library hosted a fun Christmas craft night so I signed Olive up for it.  It was free and we had a great time trying out some new crafts.

Painted Tea Towel - use Christmas stickers to stick to the towel.  They had precut stickers from a cricut machine for us to pick from.  Add fabric paint around it making sure to coat all the edges.  Once you've done it, remove the sticker and let it dry.  Olive picked sparkly gold for her towel.

Christmas Wooden Spoon - Tape a line on the spoon so the kids know where to stop painting the handle.  Let them paint the handle on all sides with Christmas colors.  Some people taped off stripes.  Olive wanted to do her own design.

It really is the most wonderful time of the year!!