Make a Christmas Gift with Your Students

Hi everybody!  This is Terry from Terry's Teaching Tidbits.  As we celebrate Thanksgiving in a few days and get ready to move on to Christmas, I wanted to share a fun holiday activity that you can make with your students.

At my school, we always have a holiday party on the last day before winter break.  In order to maintain some classroom management while celebrating, we usually like to have a craft or some type of activity for the kids to do to keep them occupied.

If you're looking for a fun, easy project to make with your students, I have the perfect one for you.  Years ago I found an adorable Christmas ornament project online and tried it with my class.  It worked out brilliantly!  You can have your students make these adorable ornaments and give them to their parents as a gift.

This makes a great gift because it's personal and it is a gift that their family can take out and see again each and every year.  My parents STILL have ornaments that I made in elementary school and I love looking back at them when I come home to visit all these years later.

Here's how to make them:

1.  Choose an ornament (it can be any color, but I liked blue because it made it look more like a snowman outside.

2.  Paint the palm of the child with white paint.  I used tempera paint.

3.  Have them hold the ornament in the palm of their hand, (not too tightly) with the bottom of the ornament in the middle of their palm.  The white area that is made by the palm of the hand will appear to be the snowy ground and each fingerprint represents an individual snowman.

4.  Once the paint has dried, provide Sharpies to decorate each fingerprint to resemble a snowman.  I added buttons, a scarf, eyes, nose, mouth, and top hat.

5.  Present the ornament as a gift and hang on the tree!  :)

I hope you like the idea!  I can't wait to see what other ideas people have to share for the holidays.  There are only a few more weeks left, so have a Happy Thanksgiving, a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy New Year, and Happy any other holiday that you may be celebrating this season.  :)

~ Terry