Make New Year’s Eve Fun for Your Kids

New Year’s Eve is one of the most grown-up holidays, because there aren’t a lot of young kids who can stay up until midnight, or whose parents would want them to.

But that doesn’t mean the turning over of a new year can’t be fun for kids, too. Here are some great ideas for activities related to new year’s that you can do with your kids, for a noon year’s eve celebration or at any time during the days around new years.

Glued to My Crafts has a great roundup of new year’s activities for kids, including making celebratory gak, coloring pages, a wishing wand, shakers, firework crafts and edible party hats.

If you want to include the kids in the grown ups’ party or throw a party just for kids, Sunny Day Family has some ideas for games, treats and a fake countdown to midnight (and Netflix will have streaming countdowns again this year, so “midnight” can be any time you like).

And Making Time for Mommy has tips and ideas for a noon year’s eve party, where you celebrate in the morning and have your countdown at noon instead of midnight. This is still lots of fun for the kids and everyone gets to bed on time. Win-win.

Do you do anything special for new year’s with your kids? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo by pippalou, via Morguefile.]

Lacing is a great fine motor activity, and most kids go through a phase where they enjoy working with lacing cards. It helps promote focus and is a great quiet activity for kids to do in the car or to fill time in the classroom. And of course knowing how to lace is the beginning of knowing how to sew, which is great for all kids to learn (more on teaching kids to sew here).

There are lots of ways to make your own lacing cards. This one is just a pin but it’s easy to make lacing cards with any shape a child is into using cardboard and a nail to poke the holes. This could be fun for letter and number recognition or spelling the child’s name. Or try this version from Hey Azka, which uses a hole punch to make bigger holes so you can lace with shoe laces.

You can also just do lacing cards with paper, but it’s a great idea to print them on card stock and/or laminate them to make them sturdier for little hands. Homeschool Share has a set of alphabet lacing cards, which are free with email signup. Deceptively Educational has a set of number lacing cards with numbers 0 to 10.

Picklebums has some basic shape lacing cards, too.

Living Life and Learning has a bunch of cute printable lacing cards, including back to school designs, shoes kids can lace and learn to tie and ocean themed lacing cards. She also has tips for making your own lacing cards.

A Rose Tinted World made their lacing cards with craft foam, which makes them a little more durable than paper and you can cut it more easily than cardboard. They used a die cutting machine but you can also cut shapes by hand.

I also love the cat and mouse cards from Seam Whisperer. They also have some spring themed designs. So cute!

If you want to make lacing cards that are more open ended, check out this tutorial form Pretty Life Girls to make lacing cards that are more like geo boards. Theirs are made with wood but you can also do this with cardboard, craft foam or card stock.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply