Holiday Craft/Gift

Every year, my class makes a craft/gift for their families around the holidays. I try to change it up each year because often I have siblings of previous students and I want the gifts to be a surprise to the families. My first year, we made photo calendars. Last year we made coasters. This year I decided to have the kids make winter-themed picture frames. I went to Michael's and purchased everything we would need, then I printed photos from their winter concert here at school. Once the kids got started, it took no time for them to create these adorable frames.

Materials Needed

• Picture frames from Michael's ($1 each)
• Snowman adhesive foam decals from Michael's (the entire bin was on sale for $4)
• Various wintry colors of paint (I let the kids choose what color they wanted to use for their winter sky, and whether or not they wanted black or white paint to tint it.)
• One Q-Tip per kid
• Photos of each kid (I could have easily printed these to our school color printer, but I paid a couple dollars to have Wal-Mart print them in the one-hour studio.)

Directions

1. Kids started by mixing their paint and painting it onto their frames.
2. Once it dried, they used a Q-Tip to dot on the snow with white paint.
3. Then they chose all the pieces they wanted for their particular snowman and stuck it onto the frame.
4. We added the pictures to the frames. Done!

I chose to buy winter-themed holiday sacks and tissue paper and each kid officially "wrapped" their gift. They also made cards to go along with them, but I don't have a picture of the wrapped gifts. The frames turned out great and actually took less time to make than the gifts we've made in previous years. Enjoy!