Practice Cutting and Folding with the Christmas Tree Activity

When I first saw this paper Christmas tree craft from Krokotak, I thought it would be a great project for little ones learning to cut straight lines.

The tree is made by cutting strips, but not cutting all the way across, a piece of paper, then the strips are folded to make the loops. Instead of eyeballing where the lines go, you could physically draw lines for little kids so they would know where to cut and when to stop.

You can see the full DIY by clicking over (and there are lots of other great Christmas tree crafts over there you won’t want to miss, so go check it out).

Of course an adult could also do the cutting for younger kids and leave them with the fine-motor challenge of gluing and sticking the loops to make the tree shape. And for older kids it would just be a fun tree craft they can embellish with pom-poms, construction paper ornaments, stickers, little jingle bells and more.

[Photo via Krokotak.]

Looking for more Fine motor Activities? Check out these kits, games and Activity books.

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Weaving Projects to Make With Kids

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.

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