Make These Charming Gingerbread Houses from Paper Bags

December 16, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

One holiday tradition that I still do with my teenage daughter, even though we’ve never had a lot of holiday traditions, is decorating a gingerbread house. We use a kit rather than making gingerbread from scratch, and sometimes have a friend over to decorate with us. It’s always a lot of fun and then we keep the house on display for a few weeks as part of our holiday decor.

If you want to do gingerbread houses without the mess, or you’re looking for a holiday classroom craft that doesn’t involve food, these gingerbread houses made from paper bags are a great option.

This comes from The Best Ideas for Kids, and the post includes printables (free when you enter your email) that kids can color, cut out and add to the bag to make a gingerbread house all their own.

Of course you could also start kids off with basic shapes like circles, squares and rectangles and have them draw their own windows, doors and roofs if you want.

The printables also include things like giant lollipops and candy canes as well as smaller candies and Christmas trees that can be used to decorate the houses. There are three options for windows, doors and roof lines that you can mix up to make a bunch of different houses.

This would be a fun activity to do in the classroom and see how different kids decorate their gingerbread houses (and they’re a great decoration for the classroom, too). Or you can make them at home and use them for decoration on the holiday table or elsewhere.

Head to The Best Ideas for Kids to grab the printables and make this easy holiday craft for kids today.

Do you like to decorate gingerbread houses or is this paper version more your speed? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[Photo: The Best Ideas for Kids] Check out the kids craft section on Craftbits.com

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Learning about Sea Turtles and Turtle Printables

Sea turtles are a fun ocean creature that’s fun to learn about in summer, so let’s take a look at some learning activities related to sea turtles.

We love to start with the parts of an animal, and Homeschool Preschool has a parts of a sea turtle printable worksheet you can grad. There’s a cut and paste version and one where kids can write in the parts by hand.

Pair that with the sea turtle life cycle sequencing activity from The Keeper of the Memories, which has both a numbered version and one with the words first, next, then and last to get them thinking about the language used to tell stories in a sequence.

This video on sea turtles from All Things Animal TV will give you basic facts about sea turtles, and Growing Play has some turtle facts for kids as well as a printable maze, dot to dot and color by number activity sheet.

Real Life at Home has a sea turtle word search printable, and you can build a cute 3D turtle with this printable from The Artisan Life. Homeschool Preschool also has a cute pattern sequencing worksheet with turtles.

Homeschool of 1 has some really cute turtle activity sheets including a color by number, letter maze, finding the letter t, writing, tracing and counting activities.

There’s also a printable sea turtle activity pack from Hawaii Travel with Kids. This one includes turtles made from different shapes for kids to identify, parts of a turtle and life cycle, a word search, a page for doing a report on a specific species of turtle and a page for practicing writing the letter t. There’s also a mermaid puzzle. (This content is free for subscribers.)

Preschool Play and Learn also has a nice set of turtle themed worksheets, including a dot coloring page, a cut and color to learn how to spell turtle, practice writing and finding the letter t, an ocean animal I spy, counting to 10 and sorting colors of turtles.

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