Printable Houses to Use as Christmas Decorations

I guess this isn’t exclusively a kid’s craft or learning activity (though cutting and folding are great for developing fine motor skills!) but I think kids would love having some of these printable holiday houses around the house or classroom to play with in the holiday season. Because they’re made of paper, they’re inexpensive to make, and while there is assembly involved the results are well worth the work.

If you have a cutting machine you can use the cut files from Delia Creates to make making your own paper village that much easier. She actually cut out all her buildings in different colors of card stock and used them to decorate a wreath, but you could also put them on the mantle or on a low table for kids to play with. Make a whole small world scene complete with fake snow, little characters and other elements, and kids are sure to start making their own stories to go with the setup.

This set of houses is printed and cut out using a craft knife. It’s meant to be an advent calendar, with each of the buildings numbered and you can stick a treat inside. But you could also just play with the buildings! You can get a free download of four buildings from Little House on the Corner, or head to the post to see where you can buy the whole set.

The Mavelo website isn’t in English, but their printable gingerbread house template is super cute to use as a gift box or to play with. If you need the instructions the website is in Polish but Google Translate seems to do a pretty good job.

Bora Illustrates has an adorable little house to print, cut and assemble featuring a cat, bird and gingerbread person. You could probably print it in black and white and have your kiddo color it, too.

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Weaving Projects to Make With Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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