Kid Kraft Christmas Trees

Hey y'all.  I thought I'd share a really easy Christmas tree activity for kids that we made at the day care.  Supplies needed are cardboard, pencil, scissors, green paint, paint brush, masking tape and colored yarn.  I have included a printable for the Christmas trees that you can right click and paste or print.  I printed mine on cardstock then traced the tree onto cardboard and cut them out.  Next the kids painted the trees before naptime.  When they got up the trees were dry and they got to decorate them.  I cut pieces of yarn about a foot long each then taped one end to the back of the tree and let the kids wind and twist the yarn around their trees and ended each strand by taping it again to the back of the tree.  To make it stand on it's own I had to do some trimming on a couple of them and bent and taped the "stand" of the tree.  The kids loved it... for a few minutes it seemed and then the boys all played with their trees as airplanes and swords.  Oh well :)

 

 

 

 

I really liked doing this simple craft with the kids.  Not only did they get to use paint and fine tune a little bit of skill with the yarn twisting, we talked about Christmas trees, tradition and colors while they were crafting.



Gingerbread House Trees

This year, while preparing for my gingerbread house, I remembered once using ice cream cones for trees.  Since my theme this year was featured around chocolate, I decided to use chocolate candy melts and roll my cone "trees" in the chocolate. I then used snowflake sprinkles while the chocolate was still melty enough for them to stick. 

It then hit me (btw this was Thanksgiving morning while I was making three pies and two batches of sweet potatoes... so I had nothing else to do but make trees) why not make a few more using white chocolate melts and other kinds and colors of sprinkles.  So my cousin helped me make a few more for other gingerbread house decorators to use with their houses.

These were so easy and so much fun!  And any gingerbread house is gonna need some trees!

Evening

As promised, I did my best to capture the sounds that seep through our open windows in Spring.  There is no picture to watch, just the sound of frogs in the trees and around the pond to the side of our home.  I remember the frogs being so loud at the pond behind the day care that we could barely hear one another talking.  Not a complaint!  I love it.  I wait for it all Winter long. 

If you listen closely they really begin to get piped up about thirty seconds in.  I guess they saw me on the back porch.