Dec. Holiday Crafts!

Each of these holiday arts and crafts projects incorporated connections to math and literacy as well as awesome fine motor skills. We made a ton of snowman crafts before, during, and after reading stories about winter and snow. One of the crafts pictured shows a painted snowman with a sentence under it. During a literacy center students cut out the words and then arranged them to make a complete sentence. I checked their sentences before they pasted it onto their snowman picture. Another craft pictured is a puzzle piece picture frame. Students pasted old puzzle pieces onto precut cardboard frames. I told the students to paste at least two layers of puzzle pieces onto their frames. After they dried, I took the puzzle piece frames home to spray paint silver. Then the students glued on buttons and bowes. I reinforced some of them with hot glue. I also took their picture and glued it on the back and then hot glued on a ribbon so their parents could hang their frame on their Christmas tree or on their fridge if they did not celebrate Christmas. My students also made beaded snowflakes, candy canes, and wreathes. They practiced counting and adding as they strung their beads onto their pipe cleaners. We practiced recalling the beginning, middle, and end of a story by writing the events down in a snowman graphic organizer. Students wrote about snowmen and made a snowy town from colorful shapes that they cut out. We made ice skates, boots, and mittens, and then they wrote about winter clothes. We had so much fun learning about math and literacy as we prepared for the holidays!