Earlier this week, I blogged about the content packed fun Christmas economics activities we did, so today let’s chat about Christmas crafts to make for gifts for parents from kids! If you’re like me, you can never have enough ideas for Christmas gifts that kids can make for family!

reindeer handprint tile Christmas craft

I love these Christmas crafts to make for gifts that we do at my new school!  It’s my first year for these and they turned out adorably!  One of my teammates got the 6 inch tiles donated from a local tile store so they were very little cost too!

And since one of my sweeties’ moms is a first grade teacher at our school, he chose to do a different design to surprise her!

Didn’t these Christmas crafts to make for gifts wrap up so nicely? (One small group at a time…. *wink, wink*)

christmas cards for parents

We made Christmas cards to go with our Christmas crafts to make for gifts this year and I love how fun they turned out.  I’ve done the Christmas trees before, but I wanted to give my kids a few more options this year.  

To prep for this, I cut small strips of scrapbook paper.  I piled them by color on our back counter.  The kids grabbed the colors they needed and went to work.  I had my examples for them to copy, which most did….

But a few kids went off and created their own.  One made a candy cane (which I didn’t get a picture of) and another one made this adorable Christmas present!

christmas grinch doh gifts for kids

So here’s the teacher fail moment of the year….

I always get my kiddos the dollar book from Scholastic’s December magazine issue as their main Christmas gift.  This year….there was no dollar book to be found.  And let’s face it, my teacher salary can’t afford $2.00 books for 25 kiddos every year!

So, I had to get a little crafty.  Since we were finishing our Fables Unit and had been reading How The Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss, I decided to make some Grinch-Doh…you know, home-made green play-doh with a little glitter added in.

First of all, I’m in love with how they looked all wrapped up!  We played pass the present (on the word “Grinch”) while reading the story again, and the kids were super excited about their gift!

And before you tell me first, yes, I realize this is not a kid-made gift. It’s one I made FOR my kids! But, it’s still worth mentioning in this Christmas crafts post because the kids loved it that much! And you could easily make the play doh and add green glitter with your kids and then it would be a kid-made Christmas gift!

You can grab the Grinch Doh gift tags HERE.

Still waiting for the big teacher fail?

Besides the fact that I *failed* to get my kids a book for Christmas this year, my play-doh gift *failed* too.  Oh, it looked super cute.  But my kids begged to play with it.

And it was messy.

Like super bad messy.

Like the kind of messy where play doh sticks all over 25 kids’ hands and they can’t wash it off.

And the carpet.  OOOOHHHH, the carpet had play doh all in it!

So, yeah, it was pretty much a bust, but hopefully I can make it up to them at the end of the year! 🙂

And, actually, looking back on it, it was really a great gift idea…but maybe I’ll try buying the play-doh next time and adding the glitter into that to keep it from being so messy!