In this guest post Sarah talks about ideas for Christmas stained glass crafts with a large group of children. These fun activities will work just as well with a smaller group or as a solo activity, too.
Stained Glass Craft Ideas
By Sarah
I will start this post with an apology to my local Tesco, who very kindly let me use their community room for one of our home education groups - I am very, very sorry about the glitter! The mess we made at this session truly was mindboggling. I tried, I really did, but containing glitter is impossible, and there was a lot of glitter to try to contain!
The group is approximately 15 children aged 2ish - 9. I set up 3 or 4 craft activities and they work their way through them with help from me and their parents. The theme of this month's session was stained glass with a Christmassy feel.
Stained glass windows with glitter
The main activity came straight from the Activity Village. Knowing how much my boys had loved this one when they were younger I knew it would be a hit. Here it is: Stained Glass Windows. We cut frames from black paper and stuck clear sticky-back plastic to the back of the frame. They chose one out of various simple colouring pages as their template which we slipped under the frame. We then 'traced' the outlines with black wool. The majority of children needed lots of help with this one, so in general they held the plastic down while the adults stuck on the wool. Then came the glitter sprinkled on to cover the sticky plastic. Masses and masses of glitter.
3 pretty stained glass window pictures, ready to put on display
Stained glass gingerbread man displayed in a window
A very glittery tree!
Some of the pages we used:
- Candy cane colouring page
- Christmas holly colouring page
- Christmas pudding colouring page 2
- Christmas stocking colouring page 2
- Christmas tree colouring page 2
- Christmas tree colouring page 3
- Gingerbread man colouring page
Stained glass windows with permanent markers
For the second activity, the kids chose from some of our doodly style pictures. We placed them under acetate and then traced with black permanent markers and coloured in with coloured permanent markers to get some lovely results.
Acetate stained glass pictures
The pages we used:
- Santa colouring page
- Reindeer colouring page 3
- Gingerbread house colouring page
- Christmas tree colouring page 4
- Christmas stocking colouring page 3
- Christmas reindeer colouring page
- Christmas present colouring page 3
- Christmas decoration colouring page
Stained glass candle holders with tissue paper - and anything else!
Our final activity was a lot more free rein. The kids had jars, glue, tissue paper, sequins and, when they noticed there was plenty left from craft 1, glitter! They made some lovely, sticky. sparkly candle holders.
Pretty decorated jars for Christmas candles
It was definitely a session to awaken the Christmas spirit. It is hard not to feel festive when you are covered from head to toe in glitter!
This is a guest post from Sarah. Sarah has been helping with Activity Village for over 10 years, providing most of our lovely craft ideas as well as many of our printable resources. She home educates her son, blogs at Life, Love and Literature and organises regular Group events and workshops.
You can find more guest posts by Sarah, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
