Book Review: After-School Kids’ Crafts

I know not all kids are going to in-person school right now, so despite the title of the book, these crafty activities would be great for doing when kids need a little break from the computer or after physical school is done.

After-School Kids’ Crafts by Rachel Nipper features a dozen easy crafts for kids to do alongside parents or alone for older kids. The projects include:

butterfly finger puppet
unicorn hoop art
paper plate mandala
paper plate flower
keychain made with wooden beads and embroidery floss
felt flower headband
button tree hoop art
purse made of a piece of a leg of jeans
craft foam turtle with a movable head
jellyfish finger puppet
craft stick photo frame
owl purse

These crafts are cute and they are all pretty easy and use supplies you might already have if your house (or classroom) is well stocked with craft supplies.

The projects could also be altered to suit the interests of the child, for instance, making a different animal for a finger puppet, for example, or even using the butterfly template to make a hoop art project or a butterfly headband.

About the book: 24 pages, paperback, 12 projects. Published by Leisure Arts, retail price $7.99 or $5.99 for the ebook.

Next Plan Idea:

Fun Activities to Learn about Butterflies

Giving math a holiday twist is fun for kids of any age, but little ones especially will have more fun learning math concepts when there’s a bit of Christmas involved. Check out more Christmas math activities for older kids here.

Teaching Mama has a great set of printable Christmas activities for preschoolers, most of with have some connection to math. There’s connect the dots, repeating patterns, counting, color by number, number puzzles and more. And it’s totally free!

Practice counting by making candy canes with pipe cleaners and beads. This is such an easy activity and a great idea, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Get all the details from Nurture Store. You could also turn these into little wreaths or other holiday shapes if you want.

Print out the counting mats from Living Life and Learning, grab some festive little pompoms or other counters (Christmas erasers, coins in red and green, whatever you have handy) and kids can practice counting numbers from 1 to 12 and working on one to one correspondence.

Preschool Play and Learn has a similar idea using Christmas tree shapes, but these don’t have spaces for you to add the decorations, just numbers for the number to add to each one. These are meant to be playdough mats, but you could also use pom poms, beads or even miniature Christmas ornaments to decorate your trees while you count to 20.

Or try these printable Christmas number puzzles from Math Kids and Chaos. The two-part puzzles feature a number on one side and the same number of some Christmas-themed thing on the other side. The edges of the pieces only match with the one that’s correct. You could combine this one with a counting activity to have kids count out the number of counters that the numeral shows, then match with the piece that shows that number of things and count them again. The set includes puzzles with numbers one to 10 and ten frames with numbers one to 20.

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

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