Christmas
CraftsPreschoolers11 Comments
Maggy at Red Ted Art is sharing a Christmas Craft today!
These are cute holiday cards made to look like a real gingerbread house!
But one you can send in the mail to friends and family!
Hello! My name is Maggy and I am from Red Ted Art, where I regularly do Kids Crafts with my two preschoolers and share weekly “How Tos” to inspire adults and teens. So lovely to be here today and to be guest posting for Jamie on Hands on As We Grow.
I love Jamie’s blog and all her fabulous play and craft activities – she has certainly kept us busy in November with the Play Challenge! It is wonderful to be here to share one of our crafts with you today!
Today, we’re making “Gingerbread House Greeting Cards”
(or pictures, depending on whether you would like to keep them!!)
Depending on your child’s age, you can help “more or less”. My son is just under three in these photos, so I did all the cutting and he did all the sticking! But older children can help cut out shapes too. Or you could buy the pre-cut shapes with sticky backs.
Materials: Card stock (we made our cards A5 size), brown paper (I used some old packing paper), white paper & a red felt tip pen, some funky foam for the “smarties” (you can use coloured paper though), some corrugated card for the heart (again you can use coloured paper), blue paper for clouds (optional of course), scissors, glue, hole punch (optional).
- Icing: I made the white “icing border” with a hole punch – punching lots of holes in a row and then cutting it out in a wiggly line.
- Candy cane: windows, door and cane – I drew diagonal read stripes on a piece of white paper and then cut out what I needed – if I made these again, I would just cut out white candy canes and let my son do the stripes – he really is into do lines at the moment!!
- Smarties: circles cut from foam
- Heart: corrugated heart
- Clouds
My son “got” straight away that we were going to make a Gingerbread House. I think the candy cane gave it away. If you have a child that isn’t so sure, you can either show them this post, or you can lay out all the pieces like a puzzle and as a guide, so they have an idea of the finished item. I find that small children, don’t always know “what the final item” will look like, so they don’t know where to start.
Do let them be creative and stick things where they like, but also do “guide” them, by giving them idea what some could look like!
I showed him roughly were things “should go” but let him stick it down himself.
He decided the Smarties should go in the windows and door, but later took the ones on the door off and placed them around the house. As with the “edible” Gingerbread House, we were tempted to cut out more and more things and your imagination is the limit. But there is a part of me that says “less is more”.
Here is the “plain” house.
Here is the “finished” house.
We used one card as a thank you card to friends and kept the second one (I really wanted to send it to Granny and Grandpa, but my son really wanted to keep! So I let him)!
I do hope you like our little gingerbread houses and that they have inspired you to have a go! Do stop by at Red Ted Art sometime… or if you fancy check out my other site The Good Life Bloggers (all about good things in life!) too..
Thank you Jamie for having me!
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Maro's kindergarten says
This is so beautiful! I will definitely try it for christmas!
TheBoyandMe says
They’d look lovely on the front of a card, great idea!
Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas says
so very cute! :)
Deborah says
These are really cute!
Toddler Approved says
It turned out lovely!! And it is fun to see a pic of you too :) What cute kids!
RedTedArt says
Thank you both :-) it was nice having some "formal" pictures taken together with the children… and we loved our Gingerbread houses… Red Ted didn't want to post his!
Rashmie @ Mommy Labs says
I love this, Maggy! And that picture of the two of you – priceless!
Angelique Felix says
LOVE IT maggy, what a great job your little one did! And what a lovley picture of you both