I LOVE crafting with my toddler (he’s 2 years old and loves to craft, too!) but some things require a little tweaking so that it’s an enjoyable experience for everyone!
Here are some of our favorite Christmas crafts and tips for adapting Christmas crafts for toddlers!
Originally, I’d wanted G to cut the strips of paper to make a stacked paper tree. But… That turned out to be a little too tricky. Instead, I cut the paper and we talked about which order to glue them, from biggest to smallest. It turned out to be a great spacial reasoning task, topped off by him squeezing lots of glitter glue on top when done!
We love icing waffle cones and attaching candy “ornaments.” Since the actual icing part is tricky, mama does the icing and leaves the fine motor work up to G! He CLEARLY concentrates really hard and carefully sticks M&Ms and gumdrops on his tree!
Gingerbread houses are practically Christmas staples! What ISN’T fun is the meltdowns when icing drips off and candy crashes down. To remedy that, we don’t BUILD the house. G gets to decorate the house unassembled and it is SO much more fun! He calls them “giant house cookies” and having them vertical means that it is way more accessible for tiny hands!
And finally, we LOVE foam crafts over here… But for my six year old, and not my two year old! For him, we stick with flat sticker crafts. The Dollar Tree has some really fun scenes available now!
Written by Jill