I always love Christmas! I love the red shiny decorations, beautiful Christmas tree and the Santa Claus with his large gift bag. It is also a festive of love. Family and friends get together for the special celebration. We should nurture our child’s family value on this special occasion that only takes place once a year. Just get our words into action by making Christmas cards to send to our loved ones such as grandpa, grandma, uncles and aunties, cousins and so on. If I am the grandma, I will be very happy to receive a greeting card from my grandchild..it’s so sweet and warm!
Objective of making Christmas greeting card
- Nurture our child’s family values
- Teach our child to express gratitude and love towards his family and friends
- Teach our child the meaning of Christmas
- Occupy our child’s time in a meaningful activity
- Reinforce our child’s fine motor control such as cutting with scissors, pasting etc.
Our Christmas card making session begins
Prepare the materials that we need for the card making session.
- Red colored A4 size cardboard paper
- Black colored paper
- green and silver shining wrapping paper
- glue
- scissors
- foam tape
- ice-cream stick
- Liquid paper/correction pen
When you select wrapping paper, do ensure that the paper quality is thicker. The thicker paper enable a child to have better control when he does cutting or pasting.
Fold the red A4 cardboard into half. Then take out the black paper and draw a big triangle shape (about 11cm height x 13cm width) to make a Christmas tree shape. Inside the triangle, use a pencil to draw few smaller triangles. If your child is able to handle scissors well, then get him to cut along the outline of the big triangle. He may reinforce his cutting skills on straight lines.
Take out the green and silver wrapping papers. Draw few small triangles (3.5cm height x 4cm width). Again, you may ask your child to cut it out along the straight lines. Paste the small triangles onto the black paper accordingly. The triangle boxes that you have drawn earlier is set to be a guideline for the child so that he knows that he need to paste inside each box. Let him choose the colors to put inside the boxes. I’m sure he has his own imagination of Christmas tree!
Paste some foam tapes at the back of the big triangle. Leave it one side first. Prepare an ice-cream stick. Put some glue on the stick and past it on the red folded cardboard. The ice-cream stick is to make the tree trunk for the colorful Christmas tree.
Ask your child to peal off the foam tape behind the triangle. Paste the big triangle on top of the ice-cream stick. Make sure you do not cover the whole stick!
Lets make some snow! Ask your child to make the snow effect using a correction pen or liquid paper. He just need to make some dots on the red card. It’s fun because I’ll be imagining myself in the snow with my beautiful Christmas tree! If you have a craft scissors, you may use it to cut the curvy shape at the side of the card. If you don’t, we can just leave it as it is.
Turn on the Christmas songs. Talk about what you going to plan for this coming Christmas - things to shop, things to decorate, places to visit, dinner for the family and so on. Allow your child to give his opinion of ideas too! It’s a best way to improve the communication and bonding between the adult and the child.
Let your child decide to whom he wants to send the Christmas card that he has just made. Write few lines inside the card. If your child still can’t write the letters, you may write with a pen, then get your child to use a colorful pen to trace the letters. Send out the card!
Enjoy the process of the card making session. While making a card, we also try to reinforce the child’s fine motor control, that’s why they are cutting, pasting and tracing involved. We also ensure that our activity can help nurture our child’s development.
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