Crafting Christmas Trees and Eating Glue

This week the younger two (Prince Charming and Monkey Girl) made some Big to Little Christmas trees. I’ve seen these done in other places but I got my inspiration from The Ramblings of a Crafty Woman when I did a google search for Christmas Tree crafts.

Before I brought the kiddos to the table, I cut 8 different sized strips of paper for Prince Charming and 5 different sized strips of paper for Monkey Girl. I simply went across a piece of green construction paper, making the strips shorter each time.

I laid them out in the shape of a tree and wrote numbers on them, starting with 1 on the biggest piece and going up from there. Next, I cut a long vertical strip of brown construction paper for each child. I also cut out a large star for the top of their trees and some smaller ones for the decorations, as well as some circles.

Once the kiddos were seated at the table, I gave each a red piece of construction paper and asked them to build their tree by counting up with the numbers.

I then had them slip the numbered peices off the page, so that they stayed in the right order. They each used a glue stick to glue the brown strip vertically in the middle of the red piece. Though looking at the picture below, I don’t think Prince Charming listened to that word of advice!

They put glue on the numbered side of the green strips, sticking them in order from bottom to top, so that the numbers would no longer be visible once they were glued down. Prince Charming would always put his piece where it belonged on the tree, then add glue and flip it over. He was very meticulous!
 

Next, they both used the white school glue to make dots on their tree and stick the star and ornaments down. This was easier for little hands than covering the small pieces of paper with a glue stick.
 

They both enjoyed the craft quite a bit – although I kept having to remind Monkey Girl NOT to eat the glue. She’s never really done this before, but I guess Crayola school glue is just too tasty to resist. I even caught her in the act with the camera!