🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🤸 Fine & Gross Motor Skills — The physical work of real projects — hammering, rolling, cutting, digging, sewing — builds both fine and gross motor development in an authentic, purposeful context that motivates full physical engagement.
- 🤝 Collaboration — Projects done with a parent, sibling, or group require negotiating roles, dividing tasks, and integrating different contributions — developing the collaborative skills that every complex adult endeavor requires.
- 💡 Design Thinking — Imagining what a project will look like before building it, adjusting the design when it doesn't work, and refining until satisfied introduces the iterative design thinking cycle that underlies engineering, art, and innovation.
- 💪 Persistence & Resilience — Multi-step projects that take real time and encounter real obstacles build the persistence and resilience that research consistently identifies as more predictive of success than intelligence or talent.
Enjoy making projects with your preschoolers over the holidays! Each project is a unique way to celebrate the holidays. Start holiday traditions with your preschoolers with these projects!
Nature Ornaments
Make inexpensive and personal Christmas ornaments with your preschoolers. These ornaments are quick and simple. They also add a childlike touch to the Christmas tree. Preschoolers love adding their special touch to Christmas decorations!
Wrap Scraps
Put your wrapping paper scraps to use! Recycle your wrapping paper by making Holiday cards or Holiday thank you notes with your preschooler. Preschoolers are encouraged to manipulate shapes and discover which shapes are used to make certain objects in this project!
Christmas Cobwebs
Make this simple project with your preschoolers! The cobwebs can be used as decorations, ornaments, or given as gifts. Based on the heart warming story, Christmas Cobwebs by Terry Widener, your preschooler is sure to enjoy making this project!
The Polar Express Hot Chocolate
Invite the magic feeling of the holidays into your home by making this simple, quick, and cozy recipe with your preschoolers. Enhance the magic by reading The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg, with your preschooler while you make the hot cocoa. Watch your preschoolers enjoy "hot cocoa as thick and rich as melted chocolate bars" just as the children do while riding The Polar Express. (quote from The Polar Express)
Popsicle Stick Ornaments
This preschool project is quick, simple, and beautiful. Parents help preschoolers glue popsicle sticks together creating a snowflake. Preschoolers sprinkle glitter on the ornament adding a unique sparkle to the Christmas tree!
Sugar Cone Christmas Trees
Make Christmas trees preschoolers can eat! These simple trees are fun and simple to decorate. The project is wonderful for exploring preschoolers creativity and makes for an extraordinary edible center piece on your table!
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Holiday Preschool Cabin Fever Activities
Perk up your winter holidays with holiday preschool cabin fever activities! These fun activities are great for entertaining kids while at holiday family gatherings or any time you need to beat the wintertime blahs.
Preschool Winter Activities
With the temperatures dipping, it’s time to look to preschool winter activities to cure the wintertime blues. If you live in a snowy climate, there are opportunities to do a variety of preschool winter activities that get little bodies moving.
Appropriate preschool projects share several characteristics: they have a clear, achievable goal the child can understand and care about; they involve multiple sessions of engaged work (not just one sitting); they produce something the child is proud to display or use; and they involve the child's active participation rather than adult execution with child watching. Great preschool project categories: construction (building something functional or decorative), growing (plants, crystals), cooking (multi-step recipes ending in something edible), and creative-arts (a book, a collection, a mural).
Both modes are valuable at different times. Side-by-side making (adult working on their own project while the child works on theirs) models adult creative engagement and normalizes making as a lifelong activity — not just a childhood activity. Collaborative projects (adult and child making one thing together) build shared memory, teach specific techniques, and produce a sense of joint accomplishment. Avoid adult take-over of child projects, where the adult makes most of the decisions and does most of the work with the child watching. The child's project should be primarily the child's work.
