Quick and easy holiday gifts for families are as easy as taking a picture and decorating some cute picture frames! It was super simple for my students to decorate their one-of-a-kind picture frames with some paint, glitter, foam snowflakes, and love! We decided to include a Personalized Snowman Christmas Card as the gift tag so we could spread holiday cheer to all the families of the children in our classroom. We spent some time on one of our recent field trips posing for a cute picture. I decided to use this class photo for our gift, uploading it to the Oriental Trading website and was done making our holiday card under 2 minutes!
Each year I struggle to come up with some cute gifts ideas that my students can create for their families. This year, I came across these DIY Unfinished Wood Picture Frames and knew they would be the perfect gift that parents could use throughout the winter season. Using Violet and Blue Acrylic Paint and the Jumbo Colorful Chubby Brushes, my students set to work painting their frames.
Each of my students was very particular about which color they wanted to make their frames as well as where they wanted to paint each color. Some of my students painted their frames one color, while other students wanted the short sides to be a different color from the longer sides. There were students who also painted two connecting sides the same color and the other two sides a different color. We stuck with blue and violet paint to give them a more wintery feel and to coordinate with our foam snowflakes and glitter colors.
While the paint was still wet, I walked around with the blue, silver, and purple glitter and sprinkled it wherever the students asked me to. Again, my students asked me to sprinkle specific colors of glitter in certain spots. It was fun to see how much thought they were putting into color placement as they worked.
We waited about an hour for the paint to dry and then it was time to decorate! We used two kinds of foam snowflakes, the Fabulous Foam Self-Adhesive Snowflakes and the Snowflake Craft Shapes. The self-adhesive snowflakes were a big hit because of all the glitter on them, but my students used just as many of the Snowflake Craft Shapes to add dimension to their frames.
After the frames had time to dry overnight, my students set to work wrapping their frames up using White Tissue Paper Sheets, blue and magenta colored yarn, and these adorable Personalized Snowman Christmas Cards! It took me about 5 minutes to upload and personalize our Christmas Cards and submit the order. The hard part was waiting a few days for them to arrive! My students were so excited to see themselves in a picture and were even more excited to take them home to their families! When they arrived, I was pleasantly surprised at the weight and thickness of the paper the cards are printed on.
We learned how to carefully fold the tissue paper sheets, wind the magenta yarn around 4 times and then ask for help tying it. Students also used a hole punch to punch a hole in the top corner of our Snowman Cards. We used some blue yarn to practice tying a bow to attach our Snowman Card to the front of our wrapped picture frames.
I love that the picture on the Personalized Snowman Christmas Cards showed the individual personalities of each of my students and that their families will get a lasting picture of their child in Kindergarten. We cannot wait to present these cute frames and Christmas cards to our families!
