Thanksgiving handprint crafts turn a painted palm into a turkey, tree, pumpkin, or wreath, and they work for any age from a six month old baby to a whole classroom. The trick is applying paint with a brush instead of dipping the hand, pressing the palm down first and rolling each finger flat afterwards, then … Read more

The easiest Halloween witch crafts for kids use a paper plate, a cardboard tube, or a paper bag as the base, plus green paper for the face, black cardstock for the pointy hat, and yarn for hair. Most take 10 to 20 minutes and cost under a dollar per child if you already own scissors, … Read more

Halloween egg carton crafts for kids work best when you treat the carton as the stand and the egg as the character: cut the pulp carton into single cups for bases, then paint or draw monster faces onto hard-boiled eggs, empty blown-out shells, or plastic eggs. Hard-boiled eggs give you the best painting surface but … Read more

It’s 8:40 on a Tuesday and there’s a note in the backpack. Bring one Halloween decoration tomorrow. You have a drawer of pipe cleaners, a paper plate, and a kid who is mostly asleep but very clear on one point: the spider cannot be scary. That’s the real use case for most Halloween spider crafts … Read more

Halloween toilet paper roll crafts are cardboard tube projects you finish in about 10 to 20 minutes each using paint or paper, glue, scissors, and whatever is already in your craft bin. The easiest for young kids are bats, pumpkins, and mummies, because they only need a wrapped tube and two paper shapes, and the … Read more

Last July we ran out of yellow. Not low on yellow. Out. Three kids at the table, a stack of paper plates, and one bottle of Crayola washable tempera that a very determined four year old had used mostly on her own forearms. So we finished in orange. The orange ones looked more like real … Read more

Last December a four year old at our craft table pulled the felt baby Jesus out of his popsicle stick manger and held him in his fist for the rest of the morning. He would not glue him down. He would not put him in the take home bag. He just carried him around like … Read more